When Web3 meets d/acc: What can Crypto do in the era of technological acceleration?

If you have been following the recent Devconnect conference held in Argentina, you may have noticed an intriguing signal:

Among the many technical agendas concerning Rollup, EIP, and account abstraction, perhaps the most striking was not a protocol upgrade, but a topic specifically set aside for an entire day—d/acc day.

d/acc, which looks like an abbreviation of a code symbol, is actually a new concept that Vitalik Buterin has strongly advocated since 2023. This article will delve into the thought process behind d/acc and how Ethereum is accelerating the reshaping of its underlying narrative based on this.

1. Starting from e/acc, what is d/acc?

To understand d/acc, we must first grasp the historical context it reflects: the frenzy of e/acc (Effective Accelerationism).

If you have been tracking the ideologies in Silicon Valley's tech circle, you may have heard of e/acc and perhaps have a deep impression of the wave of "e/acc" suffixes that surged in 2023:

At that time, many tech entrepreneurs and investment moguls, including a16z founder Marc Andreessen and YC incubator CEO Garry Tan, adopted this as the suffix for their social media accounts.

As an abbreviation for "Effective Accelerationism," by standard definition, e/acc is a philosophical thought that integrates biological, physical, economic, and social theories, emphasizing adaptability, evolution, intelligence, and acceleration as universally present principles in the universe.

In simpler terms, "e/acc" emphasizes technological supremacy, extreme admiration for technological innovation's role in societal advancement and transformation, and can even be seen as a creed of a group of tech enthusiasts—advocating for the acceleration of technology at all costs, believing that the market and technology itself will solve all problems.

Thus, it was once regarded as a utopian vision of technology until the AI wave ignited by ChatGPT at the end of 2022 gave many e/acc proponents tangible hope, which is why the concept gained such significant traction in 2023.

However, this one-sided rush towards technological supremacy has made many people uneasy, especially as AI approaches the singularity, biotechnological risks increase, and centralized power expands.

It is against this backdrop that Vitalik proposed a path that leans towards "reformism" in a certain sense: d/acc, which advocates for a defense-first approach to technological development.

On November 27, 2023, he published an article titled "My techno-optimism," offering a cautious reflection on technological acceleration.

Here, the "d" not only stands for Defense but also represents Decentralization and Democracy. It does not aim to hit the brakes but to change direction in acceleration—accelerating technologies that make us safer, more autonomous, and better able to withstand systemic risks.

Interestingly, a year after publishing this article, in January 2025, he released another piece titled "d/acc: one year later," further deepening his thoughts on d/acc and proposing a core worldview model: Defense-Dominant vs. Offense-Dominant.

The core logic is that "the darkest moments in human history often occur when offensive advantages significantly outweigh defensive advantages":

• When creating viruses is easier than developing vaccines;
• When launching cyberattacks is cheaper than patching vulnerabilities;
• When centralized AI can easily generate massive amounts of Deepfake that ordinary people cannot distinguish from reality.

During these moments, human society is in a state of systemic fragility.

Currently, the technological landscape is leaning towards "offensive advantages"—large tech giants monopolize AI computing power, and centralized institutions hold data hegemony. Therefore, based on the logic of d/acc, if we continue to accelerate blindly, we may create an extremely efficient yet extremely fragile, or even extremely centralized, dystopian world.

Thus, the core proposition of d/acc is that we must consciously intervene through technology to reverse this situation, allowing the "defensive" attributes of technological development to once again outweigh the "offensive" attributes.

2. Why does d/acc appear in Web3?

It can be said without hesitation that although e/acc (Effective Accelerationism) is highly regarded in Silicon Valley, it is essentially a form of alienation of technological capitalism, imbued with a strong elitist color: it does not care who gets left behind in the process, only the overall efficiency improvement.

In Vitalik's view, although the global tech narrative over the past decade has largely revolved around "acceleration," in the context of AI, crypto, energy, and national competition all reaching a peak, simple "accelerationism" can no longer answer a fundamental question:

What exactly are we accelerating towards? For whom are we accelerating? What is the cost?

The emergence of d/acc provides a calibration of direction, shifting the focus from elitism to a broader sense of "democracy"—it cares about inclusivity, pursuing selective acceleration, especially in explosive innovations involving risk stacking, power concentration, and regulatory gaps, which should not be accelerated blindly.

This also makes d/acc naturally deeply intertwined with the future of Web3. After all, the core value of Web3 has never been as simple as "a faster global computer," but rather gradually extracting power, wealth, identity, and control from centralized systems back into the hands of users.

In fact, taking several major development lines of Ethereum as an example, we can clearly see its deep resonance with d/acc:

• Decentralization must be accelerated: ensuring the number of L1/L2 nodes and resistance to censorship;
• User sovereignty must be accelerated: promoting account abstraction (AA), making defensive features like social recovery and Gas payment more widespread;
• System resilience must be accelerated: deploying technologies like ZK-SNARKs to defend against privacy leaks and surveillance;

This is why d/acc has become the core narrative of the Ethereum community, because blockchain technology is essentially one of the most powerful defensive technologies invented by humanity.

In simple terms, a future dominated by technological supremacy is not about being fast for the sake of speed, but about continuously accelerating on the right and safe track: accelerating decentralization, accelerating individual defenses, accelerating system resilience—this is the new mission that d/acc imparts to Web3 and the crypto world.

3. AI and Web3: Building Defensive Accelerationism for Future Civilization

I have always believed that AI and Web3/Crypto are a set of mirrored comparisons of "productive forces and production relations" in the new era.

If we view AI as a powerful "spear" (enhancing productivity but potentially used for evil), then Crypto is the sturdy "shield," and from the perspective of d/acc, this shield primarily defends against three dimensions of threats.

First, it defends against "abuse of power."

In the Web2 world, your digital identity and assets do not belong to you but are "rented" from tech giants; platforms can ban your account at any time, and banks can freeze your funds. Blockchain constructs a mathematical defensive wall through cryptography; with your private key, no centralized power can deprive you of your assets.

This is an ultimate defensive mechanism that protects individuals' right to exist in the digital age.

Second, it defends against "manipulation of truth."

With the explosion of AIGC, the internet is flooded with false information. In the future, we may not be able to distinguish whether the person on the other side of the screen is human or AI, or whether a video is a real recording or algorithmically generated.

From this perspective, community verification on-chain and public key signature systems provide a "trust anchor" for information; we can fully verify the source of information through cryptographic signatures and defend against the flood of false information through decentralized consensus.

Finally, it defends against "privacy invasion."

In the era of big data, since data itself needs to be verified before it can be used, we are forced to be exposed, while the ZK-SNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs) highly advocated by d/acc represent the pinnacle of defensive technology.

It allows us to prove facts without revealing privacy (for example: proving I have enough money to pay without disclosing my balance), which not only protects privacy but also mathematically dissolves the necessity of "Big Brother" existence.

Ultimately, d/acc is not a form of passive conservatism; on the contrary, it requires a high intensity of technological innovation:

• We need faster public chain service networks to support a global defensive financial network;
• We need more user-friendly account abstractions so that defensive tools are no longer limited to geeks;
• We need more powerful post-quantum cryptography to defend against future brute-force cracking.

Thus, events like the d/acc day at this Devconnect are not just technical discussions; they remind us that technology itself is neither good nor evil, but the direction of technological development is.

In this era of uncertainty and accelerated rush, "safer" is itself the highest form of "more advanced."