Vitalik's speech at Hong Kong Web3 Festival: Ethereum will not compete in the TPS performance arms race; safety comes first, and it will continue to execute autonomously for a decade even without developers.

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In 2026, as the L1 performance race heats up, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival with a contrarian answer: Ethereum does not pursue being the fastest, prioritizing security first, decentralization second, and performance last—while introducing the "walk-away test" framework, requiring protocols to execute autonomously for decades without any developer intervention. (Previous coverage: Vitalik: Rejecting the Crypto Doomsday Scenario, Serving as the Last Line of Defense Against AI Totalitarianism) (Background: Vitalik calls on ZK and FHE developers to "show the crypto ratio directly": optimize only after the difference is visible at a glance) On April 20, 2026, at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, all eyes were on Vitalik Buterin as he took the main stage at the opening ceremony. Outside, L1s like Solana, Sui, Aptos, MegaETH, and Monad were battling it out with spec sheets boasting tens of thousands of transactions per second; on stage, the founder of Ethereum chose to state clearly: "Ethereum does not seek to be the fastest chain." This statement was not an admission of defeat, but a manifesto. In his speech, Vitalik clearly and unambiguously prioritized Ethereum's core values: security first, decentralization second, and performance last. This is not a "trilemma balance," nor is it a "case-by-case trade-off"—the order itself is the design philosophy. His logic is that performance optimization can be continuously layered onto a foundation of security and decentralization, but the reverse is not true. A chain that sacrifices security for high TPS is essentially trading the hardest-to-recover component for the easiest-to-replicate metric. Ethereum has fundamentally solved the scalability ceiling through the implementation of data availability sampling (DAS) and ZK-EVM; what needs to be consolidated next is whether the protocol can survive for decades without collapsing. The core concept of this Hong Kong speech, the "walk-away test," is not a debut. Vitalik systematically proposed this framework at EthCC Cannes in July 2025, and this time he brought it to the Asian stage, elevating it to a declaration of Ethereum's overall priorities. The walk-away test asks only one question: If the development team behind this protocol disappeared tomorrow, could users still retain their assets? Could they still use the chain? Accompanying this is the "insider attack test"—even if the core team wants to act maliciously, are user assets still protected? Together, the two frameworks point to the same proposition: decentralization cannot just be wording in a whitepaper; it must be quantifiable, verifiable user protection, rather than just counting "how many nodes we have." Vitalik calls this vision "ossify by choice"—the protocol actively moves toward "ossification," reaching a state where it can execute autonomously for decades even without any developer intervention. This is the endgame goal he has set for Ethereum, not a transitional phase. "Ethereum does not pursue being the fastest"—saying this in 2026 comes against the backdrop of an escalating L1 performance arms race. Solana is capturing massive retail traffic with low fees and high throughput; Sui and Aptos are challenging EVM with parallel execution architectures; MegaETH and Monad are poaching EVM developers under the banner of being "EVM-compatible but 100x faster." The market narrative is currently rewarding "faster." Vitalik’s stance is a public pivot to the other side: if a Layer 1 is to carry the trust and assets of users for decades, its core competitiveness should not be TPS, but the reliability of "you can still use it when I'm gone." Viewed over a long timeline, the walk-away test framework is a yardstick for the entire industry—many protocols that claim to be decentralized but actually rely on continuous team maintenance may look quite poor when subjected to this test. For ETH holders, this is a public reinforcement of Vitalik's long-termist path. In the short term, TVL and trading volume narratives may continue to flow toward faster, cheaper chains; but the infrastructure positioning of "usable without trusting developers" is a moat that most competitors currently find difficult to replicate at the design level. For dApp developers, the walk-away test framework is worth incorporating directly into their chain-selection decision model: can the protocol you deploy survive after the main contributors stop maintaining it? The answer to this question is becoming one of the prerequisites for institutional capital entry. For the entire industry, if the walk-away test becomes a universal standard, the decentralization rankings of existing L1 ecosystems will be forced to reset. Vitalik chose to say these words on the main stage of the Hong Kong Web3 Festival, and the audience was not just the Ethereum community—this is a declaration of priorities

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