PANews reported on August 25 that Vitalik said on the X platform: We should all agree that finance alone is not "enough" and there are too many rapidly growing centralization points and threats in the world's technology today:

  • Political attacks on encrypted messaging continue

  • Centralized identity systems and credit scoring

  • Vulnerabilities/backdoors in insecure/proprietary operating systems

  • Social media — government censorship of platforms and the opacity/centralization of the algorithms of the platforms themselves

  • A few powerful countries are gaining more and more power, which can deprive half of the world's Internet users of their rights.

  • Centralized AI brings risks of surveillance, deplatforming, and economic domination

  • Similar concerns about upcoming mind-reading technology (BCI)

Even if we could make finance perfect, if we get these other issues wrong, the world would still be a mess, along all the philosophical axes we care about that got us into crypto in the first place. At the same time, finance is a critical part of any strategy to drive these trends. Your VPN isn’t anonymous unless the way you pay for it is privacy-preserving, so I’m grateful that the RAILGUN project gives me a way to do that. 0xbowio is committed to expanding privacy while minimizing the ability of bad actors to benefit from such protocols, all without backdoors. Polymarket is part finance, but not just finance. Farcaster is social, but uses a financial component to fight spam, and I suspect a sustainable monetization strategy for decentralized social will involve decentralized finance (ads are inherently more limited when anyone can build a client, so you have to try other approaches).

As such, I think the crossover between DeFi and other decentralized technologies is going to be very important. And “other decentralized technologies” is a sector that’s not naturally going to get $100 million in VC funding, so I think it needs a high level of explicit support right now, although my ideal scenario is that we can find a steady feedback loop to allow it to grow.