Vitalik Buterin Slams New Copy-Paste Ethereum Chains

Vitalik Buterin just delivered a brutal reality check to the crypto world: stop flooding the market with near-identical Ethereum clones. The Ethereum co-founder warned that endlessly launching new EVM chains with the same old optimistic bridges is killing real innovation and wasting everyone’s time.

Buterin dropped his sharp critique on his personal blog and on X late Thursday night. He directly compared today’s rush of new EVM-compatible Layer-1 chains to the 2020 DeFi summer when teams forked Compound and Uniswap hundreds of times.

“We are again stuck in a massive local maximum: people are so used to the ‘rollup + some standard bridge’ model that they are forgetting how to think bigger,” he wrote.

The timing raises eyebrows. Ethereum’s price has slid more than 25% since the start of 2025, and on-chain data shows Buterin moved another 300 ETH (worth roughly $750,000 at press time) to exchanges over the past week. Many see his words as frustration with projects that keep splitting liquidity instead of building on Ethereum itself.

What Exactly Bothers Vitalik

The core problem, according to Buterin, lies in lazy duplication. New chains copy the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) code almost line-for-line, slap on an optimistic bridge, and call it a fresh network.

He laid out three big issues:

• They fragment liquidity across dozens of almost identical ecosystems
• They force users to trust yet another bridge that can get hacked
• They add almost zero new technology or real use cases

“The ecosystem does not need another standalone EVM chain,” Buterin stated plainly.

Ethereum Keeps Getting Faster and Cheaper

Buterin reminded everyone that Ethereum itself is solving the scaling puzzle. The Dencun upgrade in March 2024 cut Layer-2 fees by more than 90%, and upcoming changes like Verkle trees and more data blobs will push costs even lower.

Ethereum now settles over $12 billion in Layer-2 transactions every single day. Rollups such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and zkSync already offer near-instant confirmations for pennies.

Here are the latest average fees on major Ethereum Layer-2 networks right now:

Data tracked by L2Beat and Dune Analytics, updated October 2025.

Where Real Innovation Should Go

Instead of building the 50th EVM copy, Buterin urged teams to focus on ideas that actually move the needle:

• Privacy-focused chains that hide transaction details by default
• Chains built for specific industries like gaming or AI agents
• New virtual machines that run faster than the EVM
• Better cross-chain tools that do not rely on fragile bridges

He praised projects exploring account abstraction, zero-knowledge proofs for the base layer, and restaking protocols that add real value instead of just copying code.

The Bigger Picture for Everyday Users

For regular people holding ETH or using DeFi, this matters a lot. Every new chain that steals liquidity makes swaps more expensive and apps harder to use. When money spreads across twenty similar networks, you pay higher slippage and wait longer for trades.

Buterin’s message is simple: build on what works, stop starting from scratch just to chase token hype.

His words already sparked heated debate across crypto Twitter. Developers of newer EVM chains rushed to defend their work, while Ethereum loyalists cheered the blunt honesty.

Vitalik Buterin just drew a line in the sand. The era of easy money from copy-paste chains looks over. True builders now face a clear choice: add something genuinely new or step aside while Ethereum keeps scaling. The next few months will show who listens and who keeps chasing the same tired playbook.