Summary:

• Vitalik Buterin is openly pushing the ecosystem to stop copying the same chain designs and start building real technical breakthroughs.
• One of the areas he highlights as truly valuable and underbuilt is privacy.
• Ethereum's transparency is powerful, but it creates real limits for financial, enterprise, and user-level activity.
• COTI is focused on programmable privacy, confidential computation, and scalable private execution.
• With performance claims measured in microseconds and compatibility with existing developer environments, COTI is building infrastructure Ethereum itself does not natively provide.
• The direction Vitalik describes - meaningful innovation, real use cases, and substance over branding - closely matches what COTI has been shipping.

Ethereum won because it was open, transparent, and verifiable. Anyone can see what happens onchain, and that property built trust in decentralized systems. But the same design that made Ethereum powerful also created a ceiling. When every transaction, position, trade, and contract interaction is public by default, certain types of activity become difficult or even unsafe. Businesses cannot expose financial flows, traders cannot reveal strategy details and institutions cannot process sensitive data. Even regular users face risks when balances, history, and behavior are permanently visible. A year ago, Vitalik acknowledged this tension directly. As he explained:

That sentence captures a long-standing issue. Ethereum delivers transparency extremely well. But transparency alone is not enough to support the full range of economic and social activity people want onchain. For years, the ecosystem responded by doing what it was comfortable with, scaling variations, new rollups, new chains, similar designs with small tweaks. That's useful, but not fundamentally different. That's exactly the pattern Vitalik recently pushed back against.

Vitalik's Message Was Clear: Stop Copying, Start Inventing

In his recent post, Vitalik didn't hold back. He argued and criticized that the industry has leaned too heavily on repeating the same infrastructure patterns instead of exploring what blockchains still lack. His core challenge was simple:

And when he gave examples of what "new" could mean, privacy was right there alongside ultra-low latency and app-specific efficiency. That matters because privacy is not just a feature - it changes what kinds of applications are possible. Well, Vitalik's broader point wasn't that more blockspace is useless. It was that we already know how to do that. What's missing are systems that expand what blockchains can actually handle.

COTI's public response to his statement summarized the alignment well:

Source

The areas Vitalik calls out are the same areas COTI has been focusing on at the infrastructure level.

What COTI Brings That Typical Chains Don't

Most chains compete on speed, fees, or token incentives. They adjust parameters, change consensus styles, or optimize throughput. COTI's direction is different. It centers on confidential computation inside smart contract logic. That means contracts can process sensitive inputs like financial values, strategies, user data without exposing them publicly, while still enforcing rules correctly. This isn't about hiding the whole chain. It's about selective privacy at the execution level. 

This is where COTI's Garbled Circuits approach comes in. Instead of redesigning everything from scratch or isolating privacy into separate systems, it focuses on making private logic compatible with existing developer environments. Performance is the other key difference. According to COTI's own benchmarking:

Speed matters here because privacy systems often struggle with cost and latency. If confidential computation is slow or expensive, developers avoid it. Making privacy practical requires it to behave like normal infrastructure. Selective privacy, developer compatibility, and performance is what makes COTI different from simply launching another EVM environment.

Why This Matters for Real Use Cases

Vitalik's frustration with "copypasta chains" is really frustration with limited imagination. If chains only scale transactions, they mostly enable more of the same activity. Privacy changes the scope of what's possible. Like, Confidential DeFi means trading strategies aren't exposed mid-execution, Institutional RWAs can be handled without public disclosure of sensitive financial data and Enterprises can run logic tied to payroll, supply chains, or internal systems without leaking operational information.

These types of use cases that bring larger economic actors onchain - the exact kind of adoption the industry talks about but struggles to support under full transparency. COTI's approach treats privacy not as an optional add-on, but as part of the base execution model. Developers can design apps assuming certain data can remain confidential while still verifiable. That is much closer to Vitalik's idea of "bringing something new" than simply offering cheaper blockspace.

Another part of Vitalik's message was about honesty in positioning. He emphasized that the "vibes" a project presents should match its actual technical connection and substance. COTI's direction fits this idea. It does not present itself as replacing Ethereum or isolating itself from the ecosystem. Instead, it positions its privacy layer as infrastructure that can integrate with broader multichain environments while solving a gap Ethereum itself openly acknowledges. So the role is complementary. Ethereum provides a highly secure, transparent base. COTI focuses on the missing piece: scalable, programmable confidentiality.

That's exactly the type of differentiated contribution Vitalik has been encouraging.

Final Thoughts

Vitalik's challenge was aimed at the entire ecosystem that stops repeating comfortable designs and starts pushing boundaries that actually change what blockchains can do. Privacy is one of those important areas. Ethereum's transparency built the foundation. But as Vitalik himself noted, it also creates limits. The next phase requires infrastructure that can support confidentiality without sacrificing verifiability.

COTI's work on programmable privacy, confidential smart contract execution, and high-performance private computation lands directly in that space. Its infrastructure built around a capability Ethereum does not natively provide at scale. In that sense, Vitalik called for something new and COTI is building exactly in that direction - not by copying what already works, but by expanding what blockchains are capable of supporting.

READ MORE: NIGHT Is Now Live on COTI : Here's Why That Matters for Its Ecosystem