Vitalik Buterin took the stage at EthCC 2025 in Cannes on July 2 and delivered a message that was equal parts celebration and warning. Ethereum turns 10 this month, having launched its mainnet in July 2015, but Buterin wasn’t in a birthday-cake mood.
Instead, he told the audience that the network is at a critical “inflection point” and urged the broader crypto ecosystem to reject the centralized trajectory that has defined companies like OpenAI. “We don’t need to be like OpenAI,” Buterin said, a line that landed as both a philosophical statement and a practical directive.
The three tests Buterin wants every project to pass
The core of Buterin’s keynote wasn’t abstract hand-wraving about decentralization. He proposed three specific evaluations that any crypto project should be able to survive.
First, the “walk-away test.” If the company behind a project disappears tomorrow, can users still access their assets? If the answer is no, the project isn’t decentralized in any meaningful sense.
