TechFlow reports that on February 25, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, published a detailed post on social media outlining the Ethereum Foundation’s (EF) vision for and support of DeFi. Vitalik emphasized that DeFi is a core component of the value Ethereum provides, and financial empowerment is a critical part of sovereignty and freedom in today’s world.
The EF’s vision is to build a global financial system that is permissionless, open-source, private, and security-first—maximizing users’ control over their own assets, minimizing centralized bottlenecks and trusted third parties, and democratizing risk management and wealth creation. Vitalik proposed that DeFi protocols should pass an “exit test”: even if the original team were to vanish suddenly, the protocol must continue operating seamlessly.
Key focus areas for the Ethereum Foundation include: enhancing DeFi security through both traditional and novel methods; securing oracles and decentralizing them; protecting privacy; and improving open-source practices and forkability within DeFi. Vitalik noted that although Ethereum itself is a permissionless protocol, the EF remains open to collaborating with like-minded individuals and organizations to foster a robust DeFi ecosystem.
