‘Defi as a form of savings is finally viable’: Vitalik Buterin talks Ethereum scaling, financial freedom and protocol security

Vitalik Buterin said he's encouraged by recent advancements in decentralized finance on Ethereum, most notably the sector’s improving security, maturity, and optionality.

"We'll be seeing, I think, a growth in more and more cases of people, institutions, all kinds of users around the world actually using this as their primary bank account," Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, said in a pre-recorded closing statement at a Dromos Labs event on Wednesday. "Defi as a form of savings is finally viable."

Echoing a recent blog post where he argued for lower-risk decentralized finance, Buterin noted that, as the sector has matured, there has been a shift away from high-risk speculation. DeFi, he argued, could become an outlet for users worldwide trying to escape the fiat money system "where your money can be taken away from you" through political shifts and other risks.

Despite Buterin's optimistic outlook, he is aware of the history of protocol failures and smart contract risks that have long plagued DeFi, including, most recently, the multi-million dollar hack of Balancer, a thoroughly vetted and highly-trusted protocol.

"It's a night and day difference in the kind of security that you can expect in 2025 versus if you compare it to something like 2020 or 2019," Buterin said. While the total amount lost in crypto exploits in 2025 “ dwarfs ” last year's total, Elliptic notes this was primarily driven by the historic Bybit hack in February.

One element of security Buterin advocated for is the so-called "walkaway test," which ensures that users are always able to recover their funds.

“It's really important for Ethereum and DeFi to really maintain and build and improve upon the core properties that have made Ethereum the Ethereum from the beginning," Buterin said. "This includes things like open source, following open standards, building for interoperability — rather than a walled garden — and censorship resistance."

Buterin also encouraged developers to “experiment with building” for the Ethereum mainnet and wider Layer 2 "in mind," using the L1 base layer as a hub for liquidity and L2s for scalability. He added that scalability is "happening on both the L1 and L2s as the gas limit is going up" and as products like Lighter — which has hit over 10,000 transactions per second — go live.

"With the right kind of engineering, that level of scaling is open to anyone to build today," Buterin said. There's "a lot of really valuable things to work on … that bring real financial freedom."