Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has entered the debate over the European Union’s digital sovereignty, suggesting that the region should abandon attempts to catch up with market leaders by creating commercial analogues of American Big Tech or Chinese platforms.
In his view, the only viable solution for Brussels is a total bet on open-source software.
This is the only way to compete with the network effect of technological superpowers if you are not such a superpower yourself, Buterin said, emphasizing that open digital infrastructure as a public good would allow the EU to bring the rest of the world to its side.
Blueprint for European digital independence
The discussion unfolded amid attempts by the European Commission to reduce dependence on foreign IT giants. Experts criticize Brussels for the fact that strict regulation and fines do not help create “European champions” in AI and cloud computing.
Buterin proposes changing the rules of the game and investing not in closed corporate ecosystems, but in public decentralized protocols. Earlier this year, the programmer himself made a demonstrative move to an independent software stack and introduced the concept of private AI.
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As proof that open source is ready for state-level tasks, Buterin highlighted a recent privacy update in the Interfold project, where developers implemented his long-standing concept of anti-collusion, MACI, by creating a protocol for protected voting and secret auctions that solves key security problems without intermediaries.
The main conclusion of this discussion is simple – Europe will no longer be able to catch up with the U.S. and China on their own field. Brussels’ only chance not to lose this race is to completely change the rules of the game by betting on open architecture, as Buterin proposes, while the cryptographic breakthroughs of 2026 show that the technical base for this asymmetric response is already ready.
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