Vitalik: DeFi on Ethereum is to low risk as search is to Google

On September 21st, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, published a post indicating that the Ethereum community has been facing a long struggle in balancing between "economic sustainability" and "idealistic goals." In the past, high-yield opportunities were mainly in NFTs, meme coins, or high-risk DeFi projects. Meanwhile, applications that truly conformed to the Ethereum vision lacked sufficient economic support. Today, as various protocols mature and security improves, low-risk DeFi is emerging as a core growth driver for Ethereum. It focuses on payments, savings, synthetic assets, and fully collateralized lending. It makes significant contributions to transaction fees and provides inclusive value, capable of offering transparent, stable, and permissionless financial services to global users. This can be compared to "searching for Google": Search and advertising support Google's business model. Similarly, low-risk DeFi is expected to provide long-term and sustainable economic support for Ethereum. It also avoids speculation and cultural misalignment issues and is in line with the spirit of decentralization of Ethereum. In the future, low-risk DeFi can not only provide more people with fair savings and payment channels but may also evolve into more innovative applications such as reputation-based loans, prediction market hedging tools, CPI-linked stablecoins, and new types of value carriers. Its stability and scalability make it the most promising "foundational application" in the Ethereum ecosystem.