Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed on social media in December 2025 that in scenarios where "absolute correctness" is required, "almost bug-free code" is expected to be achieved in the 2030s. This judgment stands in stark contrast to on-chain security data from this year—according to BeInCrypto statistics, losses due to smart contract vulnerabilities have exceeded $320 million in 2025. In the current context where high-value financial contracts and infrastructure code frequently encounter issues, the "bug-free prophecy" is not just a technical fantasy, but a response to a rigid demand driven by real financial losses.
Core of the Event
On December 24, 2025, Beijing time, Vitalik Buterin publicly stated that in scenarios requiring absolute correctness, there is a chance to see "almost bug-free code" in the 2030s, specifically naming blockchain and other high-value fields as the first to benefit. This indicates that he is attempting to rewrite the industry's long-standing experience of "bugs being inevitable" and is focusing on breakthroughs in capital-intensive systems such as smart contracts.
Simultaneously, the market has already begun to "vote with its feet." On one hand, for the entire year of 2025, losses caused by smart contract vulnerabilities have exceeded $320 million (BeInCrypto data), a significant portion of which comes from key logic contracts in DeFi lending, DEX, and cross-chain bridges. On the other hand, the trend towards institutionalization is raising security thresholds, with Gate CEO Dr. Han stating that "the trend towards institutionalization will drive demand for highly reliable systems," pushing security from a technical issue to a hard metric at the financial infrastructure level.
Dissecting the Perspective
To interpret this prophecy, it is essential to clarify what Vitalik means by "almost bug-free." According to public statements, he emphasizes "scenarios requiring absolute correctness," typically including high-value modules such as public chain consensus, asset custody contracts, and system-level clearing and settlement logic, rather than all code at the application layer. A more accurate understanding is that in these critical modules, exploitable flaws have the opportunity to be compressed to a very low level, rather than completely disappearing.
Supporters of this judgment often come from the security engineering and research side. They believe that as languages, toolchains, and formal methods penetrate production environments, the past empirical approach of "trying to write correctly and testing multiple rounds" is giving way to an engineering paradigm of "modeling first, then proving, and finally implementing." In contrast, those who are cautious or even opposed emphasize that the risks of real-world systems far exceed the code itself, and the prophecy can easily be misinterpreted as "all risks can be eliminated," thereby obscuring the significant uncertainties at the non-code level, such as oracle mechanisms, governance structures, and human operations.
From the perspective of interest structures, supporters mainly come from public chains, auditing institutions, and tool providers that focus on security as a core selling point, giving them a first-mover advantage under higher security standards; while project teams that are progress-oriented and pursue rapid iteration will naturally keep their distance from high-threshold security engineering, fearing increased costs and slowed launch rhythms. The divergence surrounding the "bug-free prophecy" essentially represents a concentrated manifestation of the trade-off conflict between security depth and iteration speed in the crypto industry.
Interwoven Narratives
To understand why this prophecy has emerged at this time, it is necessary to consider the technical narrative, market capital, and regulatory expectations on the same canvas.
Technically, formal methods, strongly typed languages, secure compilers, and automated analysis tools have gradually been implemented on-chain in recent years, transforming from academic papers into parts of mainnet operating systems. Some public chains (such as Cardano) have adopted formal methods in consensus protocol design and key contract layers, while some DeFi protocols have begun to introduce formal modeling and proof in clearing logic and asset custody modules. The technical narrative is quietly shifting from "performance competition" to "performance + security resonance," where security is no longer just a one-time audit before launch, but a foundational capability that spans the entire design, implementation, and verification cycle.
On the market side, since the beginning of this year, RWA (Real World Assets), institutional custody, and on-chain structured products have been heating up, with more traditional financial assets attempting to go on-chain in tokenized form. Unlike the early DeFi boom led by retail investors, this new round of funding is more focused on compliance audits, risk budgeting, and responsibility allocation, where code errors are no longer just "an accident in the geek world," but financial events that could trigger legal disputes and regulatory accountability.
Regulatory expectations represent a third invisible narrative line. As a significant amount of RWA assets gradually enter the chain, regulatory agencies are more inclined to see evidence of "verifiable technical compliance," rather than just empirical judgments in audit reports. Formal proofs, verifiable construction processes, and tool-based audit results serve as both technical materials and potential compliance credentials. Vitalik's time-scale prophecy is, in fact, a preemptive marking of the intersection of these three narrative lines.
When technical means, capital preferences, and regulatory expectations converge on "more provable security," the industry's tolerance for "bugs being inevitable" will begin to systematically decline.
Deep Game
In this game surrounding "almost bug-free code," the core conflict is not about "whether the technology is feasible," but rather who will pay for security and at what point in time.
For public chains and underlying protocol providers, security missteps mean a systemic blow to reputation and ecosystem; even if a single bug leads to direct losses in the tens of millions, the changes it triggers in valuation, community trust, and regulatory relationships are often harder to measure. Thus, investing heavily in security engineering upfront is an economically justifiable decision. However, for entrepreneurial teams building applications on top of these protocols, short-term KPIs are more driven by user growth and TVL, leading to a natural reluctance to allocate limited resources to "high-intensity security engineering."
Institutional funds and RWA assets stand from a third perspective. They seek a risk profile similar to that of traditional financial markets with "qualified custodians + compliant IT systems": low probability of security incidents, clear responsibilities after incidents occur, and mechanisms for insurance and reinsurance. This demand directly drives the restructuring of the game among security audits, insurance, and regulation:
Auditing institutions need to move from traditional "static code reviews + penetration testing" to "tool-driven + formal documentation + full-process tracking"; insurers will price premiums and liability clauses based on the depth of a project's security engineering, proof materials, and historical records; regulators do not need to understand every line of code but will tend to require "the use of industry-recognized methods and the retention of verifiable evidence."
In this new game structure, those chains and protocols that can provide stronger "provable correctness" will gain structural premiums in the competition for institutional funds and RWA, rather than merely being "more responsible" on a moral level.
Outlook: From Bug Tolerance to Bug Compression
Looking towards the 2030s, for "almost bug-free code" to transition from prophecy to reality, the path is not a sudden leap but rather a gradual process of security upgrades from core modules to the periphery.
The first layer is the "near bug-free" state of protocol foundations. This mainly refers to components such as consensus protocols, asset custody contracts, and cross-chain bridges, which can trigger systemic risks if issues arise. The industry is gradually adopting formal modeling, standardized specifications, and multiple rounds of independent verification for these modules, combining time-accumulated operational experience to suppress exploitable flaws to a lower level. Once the reliability of this part of the code is significantly improved, the "fundamental seismic" risk of the entire ecosystem will be greatly reduced.
The second layer is the standardization of development processes and infrastructure. Engineering practices may evolve in such a direction: embedding mandatory testing, model checking, static analysis, and symbolic execution into frameworks and DevOps pipelines, making security a "default behavior" rather than a temporary action before launch. As tools mature and usage thresholds decrease, the learning and maintenance costs borne by individual teams will be diluted, and higher security standards will gradually transform into a common baseline for the industry.
The third layer is the market pricing mechanism's discounting of "unsafe code." After experiencing multiple rounds of high losses, capital and users often incorporate "whether to adopt strict security engineering" into their valuation and risk assessment models. Major protocols lacking systematic security investment and verifiable proof materials may need to pay higher liquidity costs or offer higher returns to attract funds, thus placing them at a disadvantage in competition. In the long run, security depth is expected to become one of the core indicators alongside TVL, revenue, and user numbers.
Of course, this process carries multiple uncertainties. Technically, any formal method is proven under specific models and assumptions, making it difficult to fully cover off-chain oracles, governance voting, human errors, and other real-world risks; the toolchain itself may also have implementation flaws. From an organizational and talent perspective, developers proficient in formal methods, secure languages, and complex toolchains remain scarce, and projects will continue to face tension between "launch speed" and "security depth." In the external environment, new attack paradigms, protocol combination risks, and regulatory new rules may disrupt the industry's expectations for the return on security investments in the short term.
A more robust interpretation is that Vitalik's prophecy is not a precise prediction for a specific year, but rather a declaration of a paradigm shift—high-value on-chain systems are transitioning from a world that "accepts the existence of bugs and fixes them afterward" to a world that "compresses the bug space as much as possible within a modelable range."
For developers, this means that the long-term premium for security engineering, formal modeling, and tool-based verification capabilities is becoming evident, representing one of the most certain skill dividends for the next decade; for institutions and investors, incorporating "security depth" and "provability" into the decision-making framework when evaluating projects will gradually shift from being a bonus to a necessary condition—especially in tracks involving RWA and large institutional funds.
In this era of transitioning from "bug tolerance" to "bug compression," those who can maintain sufficient product iteration speed while ensuring security are more likely to occupy a dominant position in the next round of crypto and financial infrastructure reconstruction.
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