Vitalik Slams Web3’s Web2 Dependence

A simple technical incident was enough to paralyze a large part of the crypto ecosystem. In November 2025, an outage at Cloudflare took offline Coinbase, BitMEX, Blockchain.com, Ledger, and many others. Within hours, the promise of Web3 resilience clashed with a brutal reality. Behind the smart contracts, the infrastructure remains vulnerable. Dependent on centralized Web2 services, many so-called decentralized projects expose a critical flaw. Vitalik Buterin sees this as a warning sign and a call to action.

Vitalik Buterin warns about decentralization in jeopardy

In a message posted on X (formerly Twitter) following the major Cloudflare outage last November, Vitalik Buterin warns against a dependence incompatible with the principles of Web3.

According to the Ethereum co-founder, the incident highlights a fundamental problem : the excessive dependence of decentralized applications on centralized infrastructures. He calls to build dApps capable of functioning even in the event of a complete failure of providers like Cloudflare.

“Applications where, if you are a user, you do not even notice if Cloudflare goes down, or even if the entire Cloudflare infrastructure is hacked by North Korea”, he writes. His message aims to reposition Ethereum in its founding mission : “building the world computer” as the basis of a “freer and more open” internet. For that, dApps must be “usable at scale on the blockchain,” without “fraud, censorship, or third-party interference”.

The severity of the outage justifies this stance. According to the Cloudflare report, an anomaly related to attack management caused the interruption of about 20 % of sites using their service. Major platforms in the crypto ecosystem were temporarily inaccessible.

This is not an isolated case, as Amazon Web Services experienced an outage in October. Buterin, in a manifesto co-written with Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner for the Ethereum Foundation, published November 11, states : “decentralization erodes not by capture, but by convenience. It drifts, automatically, continuously, towards trust dependence”. This quote summarizes a technical and political observation that Vitalik develops through a series of principles :

• Decentralization must be an active goal, not a passive consequence ;

• Dependence on centralized actors is a systemic risk to Web3 resilience ;

• Designing dApps independent of Web2 infrastructure is imperative, even for basic services like content delivery (CDN) ;

• Resistance to censorship, privacy protection, and technical robustness must be standards, not options.

This warning comes at a critical time where, despite its ambitions, Ethereum sees its ecosystem relying on technical pillars beyond its control.

Rethinking infrastructure to overcome Cloudflare limits

Beyond the observation, Vitalik Buterin calls for structural change. He envisions a future where Ethereum can support civilizational infrastructures beyond finance: digital identity, governance, privacy.

Areas where failure of a service like Cloudflare or AWS cannot be tolerated. In his vision, there must be dApps whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies, and political parties. These words reflect a desire to move beyond short-term technical concerns to build an ecosystem capable of lasting regardless of geopolitical or economic contingencies.

In this perspective, Vitalik has proposed another technical advance : creating an on-chain futures market for gas. The goal is to offer users better visibility on often volatile transaction fees and thus prevent projects from turning to centralized solutions under the pretext of simplicity or cost optimization.

This idea, formulated in early December, fits into a long-term logic: strengthening users’ autonomy against network uncertainties and limiting compromises made in the name of performance.

This incident reignites a fundamental debate on the foundations of Web3. For Vitalik Buterin, ensuring its resilience involves decentralization applied to all layers, not just consensus.