Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech at EthCC on Wednesday, asking blockchain developers to focus on freeing humanity through their inventions rather than building more technically advanced tools.

Buterin compared the individual liberty ethos of the early internet in the 1990s to the current ethos in blockchain, noting that the free and open internet championed by early digital rights advocate John Perry Barlow was lost in the Web2 era.

The Ethereum co-founder characterized Web2 as a collection of “walled gardens,” warning the audience that many of the Web2 founders, who have since become known for censorship policies, framed themselves as freedom advocates in the early days. Buterin cautioned Web3 founders not to fall into the same trap:

"People who are working on cryptography really need to more actively think of cryptography as something that has social and moral implications and something where you actually have to actively think about what the social and moral implications of the thing that you're building are."

He continued by telling the audience, “If you are building something, the first question to ask is: Are you making your users free?”

Freedom and individual liberty are hallmarks of the cypherpunk movement that underpinned crypto in its earliest days, but as the industry matures and courts state officials, international corporations and banks, many fear that the early cypherpunk ethos is giving way to institutional inertia.

“Suitcoiners” vs anti-establishment software developers

The cypherpunk movement, which is composed of software developers who believe in protecting privacy and individual liberty through end-to-end encryption, began in the 1980s.

Early cypherpunks were instrumental in popularizing digital encryption at a time when the US National Security Agency (NSA) wanted to introduce restrictions on the use and export of encryption technologies in the 1990s.

During the early days of crypto, from 2009 until around 2021, Cypherpunk ideals like privacy, censorship resistance, parallel systems building and libertarian political theory were synonymous with the industry.

However, the growth of the crypto sector and the rapid price appreciation of digital assets at its foundation continue to attract institutional interest from businesses and the government.

These institutional actors, dubbed “suitcoiners” by many Bitcoin and crypto advocates, have become a bifurcating line that has split the crypto community into those focused on growth and those who want to preserve the early anti-establishment ethos that started it all.