Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin urges open source adoption to prevent monopolies, protect privacy, and ensure equitable access across critical sectors.
Vitalik Buterin has issued a stark warning against closed technological systems, arguing that proprietary infrastructure in health, civic technology, hardware, and biological systems fosters “abuse and monopolies” while concentrating power in the hands of a few.
In a September 24 blog post, Buterin outlined his vision for full-stack openness and verifiability spanning software, hardware, and biological monitoring. “Civilisations that produce open technology rather than merely consume it will dominate the 21st century,” he wrote.
Buterin highlighted the risks posed by proprietary systems in critical sectors. In health technology, COVID vaccine distribution exposed disparities due to closed manufacturing processes, while personal health tracking devices concentrate sensitive data in few hands, raising risks of blackmail, insurance exploitation, and surveillance. In civic technology, proprietary electronic voting systems prevent public verification, with real-world implications such as Massachusetts courts invalidating breathalyser evidence due to opaque calibration practices.
The Ethereum co-founder advocates for stronger copyleft licensing, requiring developers to share improvements on open-source code. His call extends to hardware and biological monitoring, proposing personal medical devices, air quality sensors, and universal airborne disease detection systems that communities can independently verify.
Buterin also emphasised the importance of supporting open source developers legally and financially, citing recent $500,000 contributions from the Ethereum Foundation and the Solana Policy Institute to defend privacy tool developer Roman Storm.
Open source solutions, he argues, can enable transparent, verifiable systems in civic governance, security, and technology, from encrypted messaging and blockchain-based finance to open satellite internet infrastructure. He acknowledged that designing for verifiability imposes costs and challenges business models but maintains that these trade-offs are manageable for high-security and socially critical applications.
“Open source civic systems would enable local experimentation with governance innovations, such as quadratic voting, citizens’ assemblies, and sortition-based decision-making,” Buterin added, framing open-source adoption as a technological and civilizational imperative for the 21st century.
