Vitalik Buterin Pushes Ethereum Builders to Move Beyond Clone Chains

Vitalik Buterin has warned Ethereum developers against building “copy-paste” EVM chains and superficial layer-2 connections, arguing that the ecosystem risks stagnation if it continues prioritising convenience over genuine innovation.

In a post on X, Buterin said recent reactions to his comments on layer-2 scaling highlighted a deeper structural issue: too many projects are defaulting to familiar technical patterns rather than exploring new design space.

Copy-Paste EVM Chains Are a Dead End

Buterin criticised the widespread approach of launching new EVM-compatible chains and connecting them to Ethereum via optimistic bridges with week-long withdrawal delays.

He likens the practice to forking early DeFi protocols like Compound for governance — a strategy that once felt productive but ultimately limited creativity.

“If you make an EVM chain without an optimistic bridge to Ethereum, that’s even worse,” Buterin wrote, adding that the ecosystem does not need more “copypasta” EVM chains or additional layer-1 networks.

Ethereum’s base layer, he argued, is already scaling and will deliver significantly more EVM blockspace over time. While that blockspace will not be infinite — particularly as AI-driven applications demand lower latency and higher throughput — Buterin said Ethereum can still accommodate a wide range of use cases without fragmenting into countless L1s.

Build Something Genuinely New

Instead of cloning existing architectures, Buterin urged builders to focus on systems that introduce fundamentally new capabilities. He pointed to privacy-preserving designs, app-specific execution environments, and ultra-low-latency systems as examples of innovation that meaningfully expand what blockchains can do.

His comments reflect a broader concern that infrastructure development has become incremental rather than imaginative, with teams optimising for familiarity and fast deployment instead of long-term breakthroughs.

Deep Ethereum Integration, Not Cosmetic Bridges

A second major theme of Buterin’s post was the gap between how projects market their connection to Ethereum and how tightly they are actually integrated at a technical level.

He said he is supportive of “app chain” architectures when the connection to Ethereum is first-class rather than an afterthought.

As an example, Buterin described a potential architecture for prediction markets in which issuance, resolution and user accounts live on Ethereum L1, while high-frequency trading occurs on a rollup or L2 that directly reads L1 state.

By contrast, he criticised projects that operate largely as independent chains but add minimal Ethereum integration for optics — such as deploying a basic bridge purely to meet ecosystem expectations.

Institutional Chains and Transparency

Buterin also outlined a different category of app chains aimed at institutions such as government registries or social platforms. These systems could post cryptographic proofs, including STARK-verified Merkle roots, to a blockchain to provide algorithmic transparency, even if they are not trustless or credibly neutral in the Ethereum sense.

While such chains “are not Ethereum,” Buterin said they still advance a similar vision by enabling verifiable systems and could remain synergistic with Ethereum.

Matching Vibes With Substance

Buterin distilled his message into two principles: build something that truly adds new value, and ensure that a project’s public positioning accurately reflects its real technical relationship with Ethereum.

For developers, he said, credibility comes not from branding as “Ethereum-aligned,” but from architectures that genuinely earn that label.