Vitalik: Low-risk DeFi to Ethereum is like search to Google

Original link: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/09/21/low_risk_defi.html
Original author: Vitalik
Original translation: CryptoLeo, Odaily Planet Daily

For a long time, the Ethereum community has faced an important contradiction: the conflict between "applications that can generate enough economic activity to sustain the entire ecosystem, whether by maintaining the value of ETH or supporting the value of individual projects" and "applications that can fulfill people's original intentions for joining Ethereum."

Historically, these two categories have been very disconnected: the former includes a combination of NFTs, Memecoins, and a type of DeFi supported by temporary or recursive forces: people obtain incentives provided by the protocol through lending, or form a circular argument: "ETH is valuable because people use the Ethereum chain to buy, sell, and leverage trade ETH." Meanwhile, there are also non-financial and semi-financial applications (such as Lens, Farcaster, ENS, Polymarket, Seer, privacy protocols) that are attractive but have extremely low usage rates, or the funds (or other forms of economic activity) spent by users are too little to support the $500 billion economy of ETH.

This disconnect has sparked numerous conflicts within the community, and much of the momentum in the community stems from a theoretical hope that an application can emerge that satisfies both conditions. In this article, I will argue that as of this year, Ethereum has such an application, which is as significant to Ethereum as search is to Google: low-risk DeFi aims to democratize access to valuable asset classes (such as major currencies with competitive interest rates, stocks, and bonds) for payments and savings on a global scale.

Image source: Aave

The analogy between low-risk DeFi on Ethereum and Google Search is as follows. Google has made many interesting and valuable contributions to the world: the Chromium series of browsers, Pixel phones, AI work including the open-source Gemini model, the Go language, and so on. However, from a revenue perspective, they are not very profitable and may even be losing money. In contrast, Google's largest source of income is search and advertising. Low-risk DeFi can play a similar role for Ethereum. Other applications (including non-financial and more experimental applications) are crucial to Ethereum's role in the world and its culture, but they do not need to be viewed as revenue sources.

In fact, I hope Ethereum can do better than Google. Google often loses its way due to criticism, becoming like the anti-social profit-maximizing companies it seeks to replace. The decentralized philosophy of Ethereum is deeply rooted in its technical and social aspects, and I believe that low-risk DeFi use cases establish a strong consistency between "doing good" and "doing well," a consistency that is absent in the advertising field.

Why Low-Risk DeFi?

What I mean by "low-risk DeFi" includes both the basic functions of payments and savings, as well as easily understandable tools like synthetic assets and fully collateralized lending, along with the ability to exchange these assets.

There are two reasons to focus on these applications:

• These applications provide irreplaceable value to Ethereum and its users;
• These applications culturally align with the goals of the Ethereum community, both at the application level and in the technical characteristics of L1.

Why Does DeFi Have Value Now?

Historically, I have been skeptical of DeFi because it seemed to offer no substantial services; rather, its main "selling point" appeared to be making money by trading highly speculative tokens (the highest single-day fee revenue for Ethereum came from a poorly designed BAYC otherdeeds auction) or earning 10% to 30% returns through liquidity mining incentives.

One reason for this is regulatory barriers. People like Gary Gensler should be severely criticized for creating a regulatory environment where the less useful your application is, the safer you are; the more transparent your actions are, and the clearer the assurances you provide to investors, the more likely you are to be considered a "security."

Another reason is that in the early stages, the risks (protocol code vulnerabilities, oracle risks, general unknown risks) were too high, making it difficult to achieve more sustainable use cases. If the risks are high, then the only applications worth adopting must be those with higher returns, which can only come from unsustainable subsidies or speculation.

However, over time, the security of protocols has gradually improved, and risks have decreased accordingly.

(The decline of Ethereum DeFi)

Attacks and loss events in DeFi continue to emerge. However, these events are gradually being pushed to the more peripheral areas of the ecosystem—a place where users are more experimental and speculative. More robust core applications are currently forming, and while tail risks that cannot be ruled out still exist, TradFi also has such tail risks—given the increasing global political instability, for many people worldwide, the tail risks of TradFi now exceed those of DeFi. In the long run, the transparency and automated execution of a mature DeFi ecosystem are expected to make it more stable than traditional finance.

Which "tail-end" users does all this matter to? Essentially, it is those individuals and businesses that want to enter the global market to buy, hold, and trade mainstream assets, but for whom there are no reliable traditional financial channels to achieve these goals. Cryptocurrency cannot sustainably create higher returns, but it does have the magical ability to allow existing economic opportunities worldwide to be accessed without permission.

Why Does Low-Risk DeFi Culturally Align with the Goals of the Ethereum Community?

Low-risk DeFi possesses several excellent characteristics that make it an ideal choice:

• By using ETH as collateral and paying high Gas fees, it economically contributes to the Ethereum ecosystem and its tokens;
• It has a clear, valuable, and noble purpose: enabling people to engage in economic interactions and wealth accumulation globally without permission;
• It does not create improper incentives for Ethereum L1 (for example, becoming overly centralized in pursuit of high-frequency trading efficiency, which is more suitable for L2).

These are some very good attributes.

Returning to the analogy with Google, a major flaw in its incentive alignment mechanism is that advertising revenue encourages the company to collect as much data as possible from users and retain ownership of that data. This contradicts the open-source and win-win spirit that historically motivated its more idealistic pursuits. For Ethereum, the cost of this inconsistency is even higher because Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem, so any activity on Ethereum cannot be a behind-the-scenes decision made by a few; it must be viable as a cultural focal point.

Revenue-generating projects may not be the most innovative or exciting applications on Ethereum, but at least they do not appear unethical or embarrassing. If the largest application in the Ethereum ecosystem is a political meme coin, then you cannot seriously claim to be interested in this ecosystem. Low-risk DeFi aims to achieve global permissionless payments and optimal savings opportunities, representing a form of finance that is actively changing the world, as many people in impoverished regions can attest.

What Can Low-Risk DeFi Evolve Into?

Another important characteristic of low-risk DeFi is its ability to naturally collaborate with many more interesting applications in the future or evolve into these applications. Here are a few examples:

Once we build a mature ecosystem of financial and non-financial activities on-chain (see: Balaji's concept of a ledger), exploring reputation-based, low-collateral lending becomes meaningful, which could become a stronger driving force for financial inclusion. The low-risk DeFi and non-financial technologies (such as ZK proofs) we build today contribute to this goal.

If prediction markets become more mature, we may start to see them used for hedging. If you hold stocks and believe that a global event may, on average, cause stock prices to rise, and the prediction market for that event is liquid and efficient, then betting on that event becomes a reasonable statistical hedging strategy. Running prediction markets and traditional DeFi on the same platform will make participating in such strategies easier.

Low-risk DeFi is often designed to make it easier for people to access dollars. However, most people enter the cryptocurrency space not to promote the adoption of dollars. Over time, we can begin to shift the ecosystem toward other stable forms of value: a basket of currencies, "stablecoin-like" assets directly based on the consumer price index, "personal tokens," etc. The low-risk DeFi we build today, along with more experimental projects like Circles and various "stablecoin" projects, aims to make this outcome more likely.

For all the above reasons, I believe that focusing more on low-risk DeFi compared to Google's search and advertising business can help us better sustain the ecosystem economically while maintaining consistency in culture and values. Low-risk DeFi is already supporting the Ethereum economy and collaborating with many more experimental applications being built on Ethereum, which is a project we can all be proud of.

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