From $4600 to Today: Why Vitalik Finally Stopped Obsessing Over ETH Price Rallies

When Ethereum briefly smashed through $4600 earlier this year—just 5.14% away from its all-time high of $4868—you’d think the Ethereum founder would be everywhere celebrating. Instead, Vitalik Buterin did something surprising: he stayed quiet.

Once known for his high-frequency commentary and passionate defenses of the Ethereum ecosystem, the 1994-born developer has undergone a subtle but significant shift. While ETH has been making headlines and communities have been obsessing over every price movement, Vitalik has stepped back from the spotlight, trading constant discourse for measured, occasional interventions. His attention has clearly diversified far beyond just cryptocurrency and the Ethereum roadmap.

What’s Actually Consuming Vitalik’s Time Right Now?

Cultural Observations and Global Patterns

Randomly, Vitalik started discussing everything from Swiss coffee prices to century-long demarcation periods in history. In May, he posted about spending 6.2 Swiss francs on a large hot green tea at Starbucks—seemingly trivial until you realize it’s a data point about inflation trends. He’s been charting historical turning points (1643-1648, 1789, 1911-1917, 2020-2023) and openly discussing how cultural differences between nations are still roughly four times greater than generational divides, but that gap is closing. As technological advancement accelerates and global connectivity deepens, he predicts generational boundaries will eventually transcend national borders. These aren’t random musings—they’re the observations of someone thinking at civilization scale.

AI Is Actually a Bigger Deal Than You Think

Many assume Vitalik views AI as competitor to crypto. Actually, the opposite. He’s been unusually bullish on AI’s potential while remaining vigilant about its risks. His recent take: instead of racing toward maximum AI autonomy, we should create more pathways for human input. He’s particularly interested in open-source AI models with strong editing capabilities and envisions brain-computer interfaces that can display generation processes in real-time. Here’s the thing—Vitalik is more optimistic about AI-generated ideas than most people realize.

The Real Focus: Ethereum’s Next Act

Despite the diversions, Vitalik hasn’t abandoned Ethereum. He’s just redirected his energy.

L2 Strategy and L1 Purity

His core position remains: L2 solutions should lean harder on L1 capabilities, not build redundant systems. He’s pushing for L2 to simplify their infrastructure (focusing on sorters and provers), minimize trust assumptions, and eventually enable rapid withdrawals through zero-knowledge systems. Vitalik is fundamentally an L1 purist dressed in L2 clothing—he sees layer two not as a replacement for layer one, but as its natural extension.

Performance and Economics

On the L1 side, he’s supported raising the gas limit to 45 million and co-authored the EIP proposal for a unified multi-dimensional fee market. The idea is elegant: let users set a single maximum fee cap across all resources (gas, blobs, storage, etc.) rather than managing multiple fee markets. It’s the kind of technical optimization that doesn’t make headlines but fundamentally improves user experience.

Privacy and Open Source as Philosophical Commitments

Vitalik’s backing of Tornado Cash’s legal defense and his emphasis on privacy tools aren’t just technical stances—they’re philosophical. Similarly, he’s evolved his position on open-source licensing. Previously favoring permissive licenses to maximize adoption, he’s now leaning toward Copyleft models that require derivative works to remain open-source. The shift reflects a reality: as mega-tech companies and crypto projects embrace open-source strategically, relying on permissiveness alone isn’t enough to preserve the commons.

On ETH Reserves: Practical Support with Real Warnings

During a recent podcast interview, Vitalik offered surprisingly nuanced takes on companies holding ETH as corporate reserves. He acknowledged the value: “Providing more options is beneficial.” But he issued a critical caveat: “If in three years you tell me sovereign debt caused ETH’s collapse, my guess is they turned it into an over-leveraged game.”

Some community members dug up his old criticism of a certain Bitcoin reserve advocate, claiming Vitalik contradicted himself. But context matters. His earlier concerns focused on whether large corporate holdings could undermine the ecosystem’s decentralization. A year later, with spot ETFs approved and ETH recovering strongly, that concern has shifted from theoretical to managed—the industry adapted, and reserves became a factual driver of the rally rather than a destabilization risk.

The Bigger Picture: Vitalik’s New Balance

In March, Vitalik changed his Twitter avatar to a bear form character and updated his bio with a reference to “Balance.” After surviving Ethereum’s early chaos, weathering market cycles, and watching his creation operate flawlessly for a full decade, the 30-something developer seems to have found philosophical equilibrium.

He’s still deeply committed to decentralization, privacy, and open-source principles—but he’s learned to hold those commitments alongside pragmatism. He cares about Ethereum’s technical roadmap, but he’s also watching broader patterns in history, technology, and culture. He remains bullish on the ecosystem’s potential while acknowledging that history doesn’t bend to individual will.

The ETH price breaking $4600 mattered. But Vitalik’s real work—rethinking fee markets, scaling L2s responsibly, defending privacy, and charting civilization-scale trends—matters more. And that’s probably why the market finally stopped needing him to pump the price.