Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a new security framework for crypto platforms that focuses on redundancy and human-centred design rather than the pursuit of perfect protection.
Buterin argues that security should minimise the gap between user intent and system behaviour, particularly in tail-risk scenarios where adversarial actions can cause catastrophic losses.
“Perfect security is impossible—not because machines are flawed, or because humans designing them are flawed, but because the user’s intent is fundamentally an extremely complex object,”
Buterin wrote.
He explained that even simple actions such as sending 1 ETH rely on assumptions about identity, blockchain forks and contextual knowledge that cannot be fully encoded, while more complex goals like privacy preservation introduce metadata and behavioural risks that blur the line between trivial and catastrophic loss.
To address these limits, Buterin advocates redundancy and multi-angle verification, requiring systems to act only when multiple overlapping expressions of intent align, including transaction simulations, post-assertions, formal verification and distributed controls such as multisignature wallets and social recovery mechanisms.
He also suggested large language models could serve as one supplementary layer, describing them as “a simulation of intent” while cautioning:
“LLMs should under no circumstances be relied on as a sole determiner of intent. But they are one ‘angle’ from which a user’s intent can be approximated.”
Buterin concluded that security must be calibrated so low-risk actions remain simple while high-risk transfers trigger additional safeguards, arguing that a layered approach blending redundancy and AI-assisted checks can strengthen trust in decentralised systems even if perfect security remains unattainable.
At the time of reporting, Ethereum price was $1,951.59.