Vitalik Buterin urges a hard reset of Ethereum governance, pushing a two-layer model that fuses prediction markets with anonymous, non-token voting.
Summary
- Vitalik outlines a two-layer governance stack: market-driven execution plus a separate, anonymous preference-setting system that cannot be token-based.
- He argues prediction market-style mechanisms and zk-powered anonymous voting are needed to make Ethereum governance accountable and capture-resistant.
- The post lands amid choppy BTC, ETH, and SOL price action and an Ethereum roadmap focused on rollups, data availability, and privacy tools for scalable onchain governance.
Vitalik Buterin thinks Ethereum (ETH) governance needs a hard reset, and he is done pretending it is complicated. In a new post on X, the Ethereum co-founder argues that “the future of onchain mechanism design is mostly going to fit into one pattern: [something that looks like a prediction market] -> [something that looks like a capture-resistant, non-financialized preference-setting gadget].”
Two-layer governance, not vibes
Buterin sketches a strict split between execution and preference-setting. One layer, he writes, should be “maximally open and maximizes accountability (it’s a market, anyone can buy and sell, if you make good decisions you win money if you make bad decisions you lose money),” calling this market layer “the correct way to do a ‘decentralized executive’” in a permissionless system.
On top of that, he insists on a second, non-financial layer that is “decentralized and pluralistic, and that maximizes space for intrinsic motivation.” This tier “cannot be token-based, because token owners are not pluralistic, and anyone can buy in and get 51% of them,” and “votes here should be anonymous, ideally MACI’d to reduce risk of collusion,” Buterin adds. The key, in his words, is to think explicitly in two layers: “(i) what is doing your execution, (ii) what is doing your preference-setting and is judging the executor(s).”
Prediction markets move on-chain
The post immediately drew responses from builders already trying to fit that template. Pseudonymous on-chain analyst Turtle summarized Buterin’s pattern as “[something that looks like a prediction market] -> [something that looks like a capture-resistant, non-financialized preference-setting gadget] = $REPPO.” Reppo, replying directly, said “Yeah that’s @reppo. Live on @base since Nov 21st 2025 with over 200M votes on-chain and thousands of users earning from monetizing their preferences,” pointing to its documentation as evidence that it already runs a two-layer, preference-monetization system.
This governance debate lands as Ethereum’s broader roadmap keeps emphasizing scalability, rollup-centric design, and privacy tooling that make such experiments viable at scale. Recent and upcoming upgrades around data availability and danksharding-style architectures are aimed at lowering costs for complex on-chain applications, including prediction markets and privacy-preserving voting systems that could implement Buterin’s “capture-resistant” layer in practice.
Market backdrop: choppy, not broken
Buterin’s intervention is not happening in a bull-market fever dream but in a choppy, data-heavy tape. Bitcoin (BTC) trades around $78,275.74, on roughly $82.25 billion of 24-hour volume, while a separate daily series shows BTC at $78,767.66, up 2.38% from $76,937.06 the prior day but still 19.27% below $97,568.32 a year earlier. Ethereum (ETH) sits near $2,278.39, with about $34.94 billion in volume over the past 24 hours, as traders digest both macro uncertainty and Ethereum’s evolving roadmap. Solana (SOL), meanwhile, trades around $103.91, up roughly 2.4% on the day on $7.72 billion in volume, underscoring that capital is still willing to rotate across high-beta smart-contract platforms even as governance questions sharpen.
In that context, Buterin’s message is blunt: if on-chain systems want real accountability, they must stop treating governance as vibes and start wiring markets and anonymous, non-token voting into the core of their design.
