Vitalik Buterin calls time on ‘vibes’ governance for Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin urges a hard reset of Ethereum governance, pushing a two-layer model that fuses prediction markets with anonymous, non-token voting.

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.