My Recommended Blockchain Reading
A curated collection of essays and articles that have shaped my thinking about Ethereum, crypto, and decentralization.
2014
Markets, Institutions and Currencies – A New Method of Social Incentivization
Vitalik Buterin • January 11, 2014
Ethereum: A Next-Generation Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Application Platform
Vitalik Buterin • January 24, 2014
DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 1: Self-Enforcing Contracts And Factum Law
Vitalik Buterin • February 25, 2014
On Silos
Vitalik Buterin • December 31, 2014
2015
Superrationality and DAOs
Vitalik Buterin • January 23, 2015
Visions, Part 1: The Value of Blockchain Technology
Vitalik Buterin • April 13, 2015
2016
2017
The Meaning of Decentralization
Vitalik Buterin • February 6, 2017
Notes on Blockchain Governance
Vitalik Buterin • December 17, 2017
2018
2019
Ethereum is game-changing technology, literally.
Virgil Griffith • March 29, 2019
On Collusion
Vitalik Buterin • April 3, 2019
On Free Speech
Vitalik Buterin • April 16, 2019
Control as Liability
Vitalik Buterin • May 9, 2019
Yes, You May Need a Blockchain
Balaji Srinivasan • May 14, 2019
Ether: The Triple Point Asset
David Hoffman • October 4, 2019
The Cypherpunks
Haseeb Qureshi • December 28, 2019
Satoshi Nakamoto
Haseeb Qureshi • December 29, 2019
2020
What will happen to cryptocurrency in the 2020s?
Brian Armstrong • January 4, 2020
Bitcoin becomes the Flag of Technology
Balaji Srinivasan • January 2, 2020
What are the Key Properties of Bitcoin?
Jameson Lopp • January 2, 2020
Credible Neutrality As A Guiding Principle
Vitalik Buterin • January 3, 2020
Trust Models
Vitalik Buterin • August 20, 2020
Coordination, Good and Bad
Vitalik Buterin • September 11, 2020
2021
Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election
Vitalik Buterin • February 18, 2021
The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy
Vitalik Buterin • March 23, 2021
Voluntary Governments
John Palmer • July 9, 2021
The Billion User Table
Jon Stokes • July 23, 2021
Against overuse of the Gini coefficient
Vitalik Buterin • July 29, 2021
A Billion Here, a Billion There: Crypto Remittances Are Suddenly Real Money
Murtaza Hussain • August 3, 2021
Moving beyond coin voting governance
Vitalik Buterin • August 16, 2021
Crypto Sci-Hub and the Decentralization of Science
Balaji Srinivasan • June 17, 2021
The Network Union
Balaji Srinivasan • May 11, 2021
Crypto Cities
Vitalik Buterin • October 31, 2021
2022
Soulbound
Vitalik Buterin • January 26, 2022
Freedom to Transact
punk6529 • February 17, 2022
The roads not taken
Vitalik Buterin • March 29, 2022
In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism
Vitalik Buterin • April 1, 2022
Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains
Josh Stark • April 13, 2022
The Sustainability Checklist
polynya • May 13, 2022
Resolving Vitalik's contradictions
polynya • May 17, 2022
Ethereum's Dark Forest is worth cultivating
Trent Van Epps • May 18, 2022
Games and blockchain
polynya • May 21, 2022
Where to use a blockchain in non-financial applications?
Vitalik Buterin • June 12, 2022
What do I think about network states?
Vitalik Buterin • July 13, 2022
The Anon Game
polynya • August 18, 2022
TPS is a terrible metric, stop using it to compare systems
Kelvin Fichter • September 1, 2022
DAOs are not corporations: where decentralization in autonomous organizations matters
Vitalik Buterin • September 20, 2022
Blockchain apps
polynya • September 25, 2022
Why rollups can offer higher throughput than L1 execution
polynya • October 3, 2022
The Revenue-Evil Curve: a different way to think about prioritizing public goods funding
Vitalik Buterin • October 28, 2022
Rollup minimum viable decentralisation aka 'Stage 1'
polynya • November 6, 2022
Sustainability
polynya • November 22, 2022
What in the Ethereum application ecosystem excites me
Vitalik Buterin • December 5, 2022
Premium execution layers
polynya • December 12, 2022
TAM for 'decentralized blockspace'?
polynya • December 12, 2022
What even is an institution?
Vitalik Buterin • December 30, 2022
2023
Some personal user experiences
Vitalik Buterin • February 28, 2023
Blockchain apps - take two
polynya • March 1, 2023
Governance and DAOs
polynya • March 9, 2023
Assessing demand drivers for ETH
polynya • March 16, 2023
Exploring the scalability needs for blockchain apps
polynya • March 27, 2023
The efficiencies of validity proofs
polynya • May 18, 2023
Games and blockchain: 2023 update
polynya • May 23, 2023
Single-player games and blockchain
polynya • May 27, 2023
Evolution of the application layer feat. Uniswap
polynya • June 14, 2023
Welcoming good intermediaries to crypto
polynya • June 23, 2023
The Curious Case of Tron (feat. USDT)
polynya • July 15, 2023
The inevitable crypto secular bear market
polynya • July 17, 2023
Decentralization from first principles
polynya • July 18, 2023
Governance & DAOs Pt. II: User rights
polynya • July 29, 2023
Governance & DAOs III: Cooperative models
polynya • August 9, 2023
Demand drivers & valuations: examining BTC, ETH & TRON/TRX
polynya • August 11, 2023
Application-centrism
polynya • August 15, 2023
What do I think about Community Notes?
Vitalik Buterin • August 16, 2023
Hybrid applications, and infra providers as development studios
polynya • September 21, 2023
How to compete with Tron/USDT?
polynya • September 25, 2023
Understanding crypto's limitations and focusing on its unique strengths
polynya • September 28, 2023
Blockchains are fundamentally unfair, and that's OK
polynya • October 19, 2023
The Governance Spectrum
polynya • October 21, 2023
A governance trilemma - neutrality, fairness, inclusivity
polynya • October 23, 2023
State of the application layer
polynya • October 29, 2023
Explaining my perspective on the application layer
polynya • November 2, 2023
Making Sense of Tether on Tron
Liam Horne • November 2023
"Crypto values" like "decentralization" are only useful if they improve consumer choice and experience sustainably
polynya • November 3, 2023
Crypto Twitter Found SBF's Fraud
Balaji Srinivasan • November 5, 2023
A hopium & delusion malaise is crippling the crypto industry
polynya • November 9, 2023
Transaction reversibility
polynya • November 11, 2023
The horrific inefficiencies of monolithic blockchains
polynya • November 17, 2023
So, what should we do?
polynya • November 19, 2023
Blockchains are a centralising force, but that's OK
polynya • November 22, 2023
My techno-optimism
Vitalik Buterin • November 27, 2023
Examining crypto's product-market fit
polynya • December 9, 2023
The fragility of stablecoins' PMF
polynya • December 11, 2023
A brief history of crypto
polynya • December 19, 2023
More like dumb contracts
polynya • December 20, 2023
Public blockchains' superpower: strict global consensus
polynya • December 25, 2023
Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again
Vitalik Buterin • December 28, 2023
Democratising tokenholder DAOs
polynya • December 28, 2023
2024
Does your application need strict global consensus?
polynya • January 6, 2024
Capital and enclosure in software commons: Linux & Ethereum
Trent Van Epps • January 8, 2024
Why increasing the gas limit is difficult
Marius Van Der Wijden • January 11, 2024
Custodial solutions are essential
polynya • January 12, 2024
Cash → Chain
Nalin Bhardwaj • January 15, 2024
Naturalisation councils
polynya • January 20, 2024
Why most crypto assets are grotesquely overvalued
polynya • January 21, 2024
The promise and challenges of crypto + AI applications
Vitalik Buterin • January 30, 2024
Are "chains just servers w/ superpowers"?
polynya • January 30, 2024
The end of my childhood
Vitalik Buterin • January 31, 2024
How does strict global consensus work?
polynya • January 31, 2024
The drawbacks of strict global consensus
polynya • February 1, 2024
Transaction quality trilemma - blockchain killers
polynya • February 2, 2024
Does Vitalik's "decentralized stack" need strict global consensus?
polynya • February 3, 2024
Making sense of Trust Experience (TX)
Josh Stark • February 5, 2024
Objectivity & subjectivity
polynya • February 8, 2024
Ask security questions
Vitalik Buterin • February 9, 2024
Stateless infra - where most decentralized compute will be (not blockchains)
polynya • February 10, 2024
Crypto's broken moral compass
polynya • March 24, 2024
New launches (part 1) - private capture, phantom pricing
Cobie • May 19, 2024
How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding?
Vitalik Buterin • May 23, 2024
Layer 2s as cultural extensions of Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin • May 29, 2024
Some reflections on the Bitcoin block size war
Vitalik Buterin • May 31, 2024
Making Ethereum alignment legible
Vitalik Buterin • September 28, 2024
Protocol Guild: a funding framework for the Ethereum commons
Trent Van Epps • October 9, 2024
Ethereum's distinctive property is hardness
Josh Stark • November 4, 2024
From prediction markets to info finance
Vitalik Buterin • November 9, 2024
What I would love to see in a wallet
Vitalik Buterin • December 3, 2024
2025
The Cypherpunk Endgame
Daniel Posch (DCposch) • January 6, 2025
Reasons to have higher L1 gas limits even in an L2-heavy Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin • February 14, 2025
We should talk less about public goods funding and more about open source funding
Vitalik Buterin • March 29, 2025
Why I support privacy
Vitalik Buterin • April 14, 2025
The Last Word on Stablecoins and Free Banking
Nic Carter • July 30, 2025
lean Ethereum
Justin Drake • July 31, 2025
'I support it only if it's open source' should be a more common viewpoint
Vitalik Buterin • August 12, 2025
Situating Stablecoins in the Payments Landscape
Nic Carter • September 2, 2025
Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google
Vitalik Buterin • September 21, 2025
Corporate Blockchains for Payments Are Unlikely to Work
Omid Malekan • October 6, 2025
Everyone Is Wrong About Tokenized Bank Deposits
Omid Malekan • October 31, 2025
Banks Don't Need Blockchain to Do Better Banking. At All.
Omid Malekan • November 13, 2025
Stop Being A Simp to the Suits
Omid Malekan • November 20, 2025