Vitalik Buterin: Low‑Risk DeFi Could Be Ethereum’s “Search” Moment

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued in a blog post Sept. 21, 2025, that “low‑risk” decentralized finance (DeFi) could become for Ethereum what search was for Google, providing the primary, sustainable revenue engine while preserving the platform’s broader cultural and technical goals.

Buterin defines low‑risk DeFi as payment and savings primitives, fully collateralized lending, and synthetic assets that offer global, permissionless access to mainstream assets with lower protocol and oracle risk than earlier DeFi iterations. He says improved protocol security, growing stable-core applications, and integrations such as predictable stablecoin yields make the case for institutional and retail adoption, and that DeFi’s transparency could ultimately be more stable than traditional finance. Buterin also notes low‑risk DeFi’s alignment with Ethereum’s values, its potential to drive ETH economic utility through fees and collateral, and its role as a foundation for future innovations like reputation‑based credit and tokenized basket currencies.