Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the blockchain ecosystem must build applications that remain functional even if major internet infrastructure like Cloudflare collapses.
Key Takeaways
- Vitalik Buterin emphasized the need for dApps that continue operating during major outages, citing the 2025 Cloudflare failure as a wake-up call.
- He introduced the “walkaway test,” a standard for decentralized apps that function even if their creators vanish.
- Ethereum’s recent performance improvements are not enough without long-term resistance to centralization and censorship.
- Buterin urged the community to avoid trends and focus on Ethereum’s original mission of building a freer, more open internet.
What Happened?
After Cloudflare’s significant outage in November 2025, which knocked out roughly 20 percent of its serviced websites including major crypto platforms, Vitalik Buterin reignited the call for decentralized resilience. In a series of posts, Buterin emphasized that the Ethereum ecosystem must prioritize applications that can survive infrastructure failures, censorship, or even the disappearance of their developers.
Welcome to 2026! Milady is back.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 1, 2026
Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally…
Cloudflare Outage Highlights Centralized Fragility
The Cloudflare outage stemmed from a software issue related to a bot management “feature file” growing beyond expected limits. This failure impacted several major crypto websites such as Coinbase, Blockchain.com, BitMEX and Ledger. It followed a separate outage caused by Amazon Web Services in October, raising serious concerns about the crypto industry’s dependence on centralized internet providers.
Buterin responded by calling for apps that function independently of centralized providers. He envisioned “applications where if you’re a user, you don’t even notice if Cloudflare goes down – or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea.”
These apps, he stressed, should remain immune to corporate failure, ideological shifts or political interference. He also highlighted that these values must extend beyond finance to areas like digital identity, governance, and civil infrastructure.
The “Walkaway Test”: A New Benchmark for dApps
In his manifesto and follow-up commentary, Buterin introduced the idea of the “walkaway test”, a high bar for decentralization. A dApp passes this test if it “keeps running even if the original developers disappear.” The goal is to eliminate reliance on any single party or ongoing developer intervention.
He criticized the current Web2-style model where users become dependent on centralized services, comparing it to subscription platforms that lock people into permanent reliance. For Ethereum to succeed, he argued, it must offer services that are both usable at scale and censorship-resistant.
Scaling Achievements Are Not Enough
While Ethereum saw major progress in 2025, such as increased blob counts and maturity of zkEVMs, Buterin warned developers not to become complacent. He said that the mission should not revolve around chasing trends like tokenized dollars or political memecoins.
Instead, he urged the Ethereum community to recommit to its foundational vision to build the “world computer” that supports a freer and more open internet. This includes ensuring decentralization not just at the blockchain level, but also in the applications built on top of it.
CoinLaw’s Takeaway
In my experience watching crypto evolve, this is a timely and necessary reality check from Vitalik. It is easy for the community to get caught up in hype cycles or scalability metrics and forget why Ethereum was built in the first place. When a single infrastructure provider like Cloudflare can disrupt a huge part of the decentralized ecosystem, it shows that we’re still leaning too much on Web2 foundations. I found the “walkaway test” concept especially powerful. It puts decentralization into practical, testable terms. It is a call not just to build for now, but to build for failure-proof futures.
