On January 11, 2026, at 8:00 AM UTC, Vitalik Buterin stated in a recent public discussion that Ethereum's future must be able to pass what is known as the "deprecation/abandonment test": even if core developers and the foundation completely withdraw, the protocol must still operate securely in the long term. This statement sharply contrasts with reality—currently, Ethereum, whether in terms of maintaining the execution layer, consensus layer clients, or protocol upgrades, security patches, and research directions, still heavily relies on the ongoing contributions of a few core developers and the Ethereum Foundation. The question has been pushed onto a longer timeline: if one day no one operates Ethereum, can a truly decentralized network still provide users with the same secure and predictable infrastructure in an unattended state?
The Real Challenge of the Deprecation Test
Vitalik proposed that Ethereum should be more like a tool rather than a service, meaning it should be closer to objects like "wrenches, hammers, and screwdrivers" that do not become immediately ineffective if the manufacturer goes out of business, rather than relying on cloud services or SaaS subscriptions that depend on the vendor's continuous online maintenance. The "deprecation test" points to whether the chain itself can still provide a reliable settlement layer for ordinary users and applications when all developers leave, the foundation stops funding, and research meetings come to a halt. If the answer is negative, then the so-called decentralization only remains on the surface of the distribution of consensus layer nodes. In comparison, traditional internet services, once the provider fails, may see domain names expire, servers stop being renewed, and code left unpatched, leading to user data and assets either being locked or exposed to significant security risks. The ideal state of Ethereum is that the protocol has "solidified" into a set of public rules and code implementations, allowing the network to continue operating with the support of validator and client diversity, even without new features, and continuously providing settlement guarantees for past and future transactions and contracts. However, the reality is harsh: from the continuous updates of the execution layer and consensus layer clients to the coordination and implementation of major upgrades, and to vulnerability fixes and security research, the entire ecosystem still heavily relies on the expert judgment of a very small number of teams and individuals. It is within this tension of "short-term reliance on centralized maintenance while long-term pursuit of autonomy" that the deprecation test becomes particularly sharp, questioning whether Ethereum is ultimately a public facility that can be "abandoned" by anyone, or a complex service that will always require an operator's backing.
From Quantum Resistance to the Long Slope of ZK-EVM
Regarding long-term resilience, Ethereum's official roadmap has proposed seven key directions, including quantum resistance and ZK-EVM support. These are not single-point functions but attempt to lay the foundation for "autonomy on a scale of decades." The quantum resistance route aims to ensure that even in the future, when large-scale practical quantum computing emerges, historical transactions, contract states, and asset ownership on Ethereum can still be verified and protected under a new cryptographic system; the ZK-EVM direction hopes to deeply integrate zero-knowledge proofs with the EVM environment, ensuring that on-chain states can still be independently verified and not arbitrarily tampered with in more complex and multi-layered scaling and privacy scenarios. Viewing these technological blueprints alongside the deprecation test can be understood as: only by reserving redundancy in performance, cryptographic security, and verifiability for a future "without continuous maintenance" can Ethereum potentially possess true autonomous potential. However, the engineering path to this goal is far from clear. From PeerDAS to ZK-EVM, there is currently a lack of credible timelines and clear cost data, and the community has both expectations and anxieties about the feasibility and resource consumption of these directions. When the roadmap itself is filled with uncertainty, developers and researchers must constantly make trade-offs between the ideal end-state of autonomy and the engineering feasibility of the stages: which must be implemented on the mainnet early, and which can remain in the research phase; whether to continue adopting "radical upgrades" to maintain competitiveness or to freeze the protocol in a "good enough" state earlier to prepare for future deprecation. The deprecation test plays a role here as a long-term constraint—every optimization step must answer a question: if this is the last upgrade, can we still accept it?
The Contrast of Compliance and On-Chain Freezing
Simultaneously occurring with Ethereum's long-term vision of autonomy is the rapid expansion of compliance power in on-chain reality. According to public data, Tether recently froze $182 million USDT on the Tron chain, directly marking assets held in a batch of addresses as non-transferable, which has become a focal point of market discussion. Tether's freezing policy is directly related to compliance with U.S. OFAC sanctions, and its operational logic is: when certain addresses or entities are placed on a sanctions or suspicious list by regulators, the issuer is obligated to use the freezing function at the contract level to block the continued circulation of related assets on the chain. Technically, this is a "one-click" capability; from a legal and business perspective, it reduces the compliance risks for the issuer and custodian. However, when such operations are juxtaposed with Ethereum's deprecation test, the contrast is striking. On one side is the decentralized ideal that "no one can unilaterally confiscate or freeze assets," and on the other is the issuer's immediate freezing instructions on-chain using contract permissions. The power boundaries of centralized issuers in the asset ecosystem thus become an unavoidable issue. As long as mainstream pricing and liquidity remain concentrated on tokens controlled by a single company, Ethereum, even with high degrees of autonomy in consensus and execution, may still be constrained at the asset level by external decisions. The deprecation test imagines that when developers and the foundation withdraw, the protocol remains neutral, and the rules are applied equally to everyone; yet in reality, compliance and regulatory forces unfold another form of "centralized maintenance" through the issuer on-chain. This does not necessarily negate the necessity of compliance itself, but it does raise the question: to what extent can an ecosystem dominated by centralized assets discuss autonomy?
Whales, Yen, and the Displacement of Time Dimensions
On a shorter time scale, financial behaviors and macro events constitute another layer of background noise. Public data indicates that currently, two major whale wallets hold approximately $7.9 million H tokens, which is just a slice of funds choosing a particular narrative track but is often interpreted by the market as a sign of a new round of speculation. Meanwhile, traditional financial markets are focusing on Japan: some analysts point out that political changes in Japan may lead the central bank to be more cautious about the pace of interest rate hikes, thereby putting continued pressure on the yen. Metzler analysts believe that political uncertainty makes the tightening path more ambiguous, forcing investors to reprice risks associated with the yen. These seemingly unrelated macro clues collectively form the current environment's background noise—funds shifting between different assets, popular tokens, interest rate expectations, and exchange rate fluctuations appearing in succession, contrasting sharply with the foundational infrastructure narratives like "quantum resistance" and "ZK-EVM," which often span decades. Amid the fluctuations of short-term markets and macro games, the autonomy of the foundational layer is often pushed to the edge of visibility. Even the development path itself inevitably has to consider the constraints of funding sentiment and ecological heat. From the perspective of the deprecation test, what can truly cut through this noise are those protocol characteristics that do not rely on a single entity and do not fluctuate with interest rate cycles—client diversity, state verifiability, and rule predictability, which determine whether Ethereum can serve as a "foundational puzzle piece that does not require frequent attention and will not easily encounter problems" in the next round, or even in the next few rounds of macro changes.
The Shift from Tool Experience to Service Mindset
Bringing the perspective back to individual users, one can more intuitively feel the difference between "tools" and "services." In centralized financial services, users are accustomed to relying on operators: account recovery, risk control interception, technical support, product iteration—none of these are completed without the platform's unified backend. What users enjoy is a relatively smooth experience and a clear point of responsibility; what they need to pay is trust in the counterparty's credit and ongoing operational capability. In the ideally functioning on-chain world, wallet private keys, contract calls, and on-chain transactions constitute a "trustless" but highly self-responsible tool experience: there is no customer service to help you recover your keys, nor is there a backend that can help you reverse a confirmed transfer. The problem is that when Tether can freeze on-chain assets based on the OFAC list, and when Ethereum core developers can impose significant influence on protocol behavior through upgrades, users are actually still facing multiple single points of trust—trust in how the issuer will use the freezing authority, trust in how the core team will design and promote upgrades. If one day the core team chooses to collectively withdraw, for Ethereum to avoid a sudden "deprecation test" failure, it must prepare in several areas in advance: client implementations need to be sufficiently diverse and well-documented so that any new team can maintain the network without relying on the memories of a few old members; governance processes need to rely more on public protocols and programmatic processes rather than on the reputation or judgment of a few key individuals; and the community's mindset towards "no upgrades as a choice" must gradually shift from resistance to acceptance. It is foreseeable that Ethereum may need to slowly evolve from its current "upgrade-driven" narrative to a "default static, minimal intervention" infrastructure mindset—upgrades are no longer the norm that proves vitality but are viewed as exceptional events that must undergo rigorous justification and assume that no one can easily change them in the future.
The Unattended Outline of Ethereum
Returning to the starting point, the fundamental question posed by the deprecation test is not complex: when developers no longer maintain it, is Ethereum still safe and usable for ordinary users, or will it quietly rot in vulnerabilities and technical debt like a closed internet company? In the coming years, if technological paths like quantum resistance and ZK-EVM can gradually take shape, they will push Ethereum closer to being "abandonable infrastructure"—more resilient cryptography, more easily verifiable states, and more standardized and diverse client implementations mean that even if the original team disappears, the network can continue to move forward under existing rules with the help of new participants. Of course, before that, debates around interest rate hikes and exchange rates, as well as the pursuit of popular tokens and narratives, will continue to play out, easily diverting attention from these weighty but slow-paced foundational tasks. For all participants, perhaps it is more worthwhile to repeatedly ask themselves about the survival capability of the underlying protocol in the worst-case scenario: if funds suddenly withdraw, if the regulatory environment continues to tighten, if core developers go their separate ways, which parts can still operate without relying on anyone's will? In the reality of ongoing expansion of regulatory, compliance, and centralized power, how much of Ethereum can ultimately retain the part that "does not require anyone to back it"? This question will not be answered in a single upgrade or a single market cycle but will be quietly written into the code and consensus through one technical choice, governance decision, and ecological trade-off after another.
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