Open Source Isn't Optional | Vitalik Buterin and Demian Brener at Convergence 2025

Hi Jamian. How are you?

Mhm.

Yes.

Mhm.

Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things over the last few years is definitely how quickly this space has been getting mainstream, both in terms of user adoption and also institutional adoption. There have been institutions doing blockchain things 10 years ago, but at that time realistically it was at best experiments and proof of concepts, and at worst it was companies and governments virtue signaling to show that they're not completely behind the times. Blockchain was the cool new thing, they had to be cool and new. Since then we've seen the space mature, and people's understanding of the space mature. Now we're seeing a lot of stablecoin projects launching, people using and talking about prediction markets in a very mainstream way. The number of people using crypto for payments and savings continues increasing. These trends are good because they bring adoption and put capital in the hands of people building the infrastructure. But at the same time, there's a dilution of principles that's really important to guard against. It's a process that happens slowly. You start off by adding one extra server in the middle for convenience, then you add a multisig for security, and then you never actually decide to take the multisig out, and years later the multisig gets hacked. You switch over to a proprietary license to protect against some competitor you get scared of in the short term, and two years later that competitor completely disappears, but now your project, instead of being part of the public commons, is something that's tightly bound to one particular group's interests, and no one else is empowered to take it and move it forward themselves. These things happen in stages, and it's important to notice it. I think it's really important to grow and nurture this core of the ecosystem that really believes in censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security, all the core values of the ecosystem, and not just by talking about them as abstract things, but by really making sure that those are the concrete bedrock that everything else is built on top of. Our ability to have an ecosystem that is open, where people are free to build on top of each other, where people are actually able to verify the software that they are running and depending on, continues to be a reality where it is, and becomes a reality once again in those areas where it stopped.

I think often the biggest players in an ecosystem have this incentive to become closed walled gardens and try to keep the growth internalized to themselves, and be able to use that to extract more over time. But realistically, if you're not in the top two or three in any particular space, then openness is actually the most pragmatic strategy, even from a profit maximizing perspective. The reason is because openness enables you to gain the economies of scale that you need to compete with the big guys. If you are not a big guy yourself, there is no other solution. If you go at it alone, you have a team that is less powerful, with a smaller number of developers, less able to get top quality talent for every individual layer of what you're doing, and the people who are bigger are going to do it better. If you and the other smaller players can cooperate, work together on shared libraries, work together on open standards so that you can interoperate with each other and build as part of one shared ecosystem, that is the way you actually gain access to that same level of scale and those economies of scale, and you're able to be successful. So I think one of the most important tasks for us is to help more of the smaller companies and participants in every space work together through openness to be able to build a playing field where they can all be successful.