Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly walked back a position he held for nearly a decade, showing Ethereum’s renewed stance about self-sovereignty, verification, and the future role of cryptography.
In a recent post on X, Buterin said he no longer agrees with a 2017 statement in which he dismissed the idea of users fully validating blockchains themselves as a “weird mountain man fantasy,” arguing that both technology and real-world experience have reshaped his view.
The comment revisits a long-running debate in blockchain design that dates back to Ethereum’s early years.
What Changed Since 2017? ZK Proofs Rewrite a Classic Blockchain Argument
In 2017, Buterin sparred publicly with blockchain theorist Ian Grigg over whether blockchains should store full state, such as account balances and smart contract data, directly on-chain.
Grigg argued that chains only needed to record transaction ordering, with state reconstructed locally and discarded.
Buterin was a vehement opponent of such a design at the time, citing that such a design would require users to constantly rerun the whole transaction history or utilize third-party RPC services to get the current state.
At the time, Buterin claimed that Ethereum was better compromised with the design where state roots are pegged to block headers.
Using Merkle proofs and an honest majority assumption for proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, users would be able to check a certain value without going through a single intermediary.
Making the entire chain completely self-validating, he said, was in theory attractive but computationally impractical to ordinary users, unless the network grossly constrained its capacity.
The difference, as explained by Buterin, is the maturation of zero-knowledge cryptography, specifically zk-SNARKs.
These cryptographic evidences enable a user to prove that a group of calculations has been done right without re-running all the processes or showing the data behind the scenes.
Why Vitalik Buterin Now Sees ZK-SNARKs as Ethereum’s Safety Net
To him, it is like finding an inexpensive, one-size-fits-all solution after years of trade-off disputes. He claimed that with zk-SNARKs, Ethereum could obtain the security of full verification without necessarily subjecting users to prohibitive costs.
Buterin said this advance allows Ethereum to revisit trade-offs that were once accepted reluctantly, especially around scalability, decentralization, and verification. He also acknowledged that his earlier thinking relied too heavily on idealized assumptions.
In practice, he noted, networks experience outages, latency spikes, service shutdowns, and regulatory or social pressure that can push intermediaries to censor applications or users. In those moments, reliance on third parties or developer intervention can become a single point of failure.
That perspective underpins his renewed support for what he described metaphorically as the “mountain man’s cabin,” a fallback option that allows users to directly interact with the chain when everything else breaks.
Inside Ethereum’s Growing Push Toward ZK-Based Scaling
There has been a growing focus on Zk-SNARKs in the roadmap of Ethereum, especially in the form of zero-knowledge rollups.
These layer-2 networks reduce fees significantly by offloading thousands of transactions and making a single cryptographic proof to Ethereum.
Even projects like zkSync, StarkNet, Scroll, and others are already based on these methods, but with various trade-offs in the size of the proof, transparency, and the cost of calculation.
Mid-2025 community proposals stated that off-chain personal data and using cryptographic proofs might be a solution to align Ethereum with European rules on data protection.
ZK-SNARKs were mentioned as a method of enabling validators to verify that data is correct without access to it, minimizing on-chain access.
On the protocol layer, Buterin has additionally admitted that there are certain remnants of legacy design that now pose a bottleneck to Ethereum’s ambitions to go zero-knowledge.
In late 2025, he proposed removing the modular exponentiation precompile, a feature he originally introduced, after it proved to be a major bottleneck for generating zk proofs.
The post Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Reverses Stance: Why ZK-SNARKs Are Now Ethereum’s ‘Magic Pill’ appeared first on Cryptonews.
