Being defined by DeFi is better than being defined by nothing,” he laid out in one slide. “But it needs to go further.”

expensive gas fees as one particularly egregious example. “The degens can pay for it, the apes can pay for it, the orangutans can pay for it,” Buterin said, using niche DeFi jargon that refers to wealthy traders and DeFi obsessives. But a holistic Ethereum ecosystem won't work, he said, if gas frees cripple the average user.