If you followed the recent Devconnect conference in Argentina, you may have noticed an interesting sign:
Amid all the technical tracks on rollups, EIPs, and account abstraction, the most notable item wasn’t a specific protocol upgrade, but a dedicated full day — d/acc day.
d/acc looks like a code-style abbreviation, but it’s actually a concept Vitalik Buterin has been strongly advocating since 2023. In this article, we’ll walk through the d/acc way of thinking and how Ethereum is using it to accelerate and reshape its underlying narrative.
1. From e/acc to d/acc: What Does It Actually Mean?
To understand d/acc, we first need to look at the era it’s reacting to: the headlong rush of e/acc (Effective Accelerationism).
If you’ve been following tech-thought trends in Silicon Valley, you’ve probably heard of e/acc — and may remember the wave of e/acc social handles that took over in 2023.
At the time, a number of big names in tech and venture — including a16z founder Marc Andreessen and YC CEO Garry Tan — added “e/acc” to their social profiles.
In its formal definition, Effective Accelerationism is a philosophy that integrates biological, physical, economic, and social theories, and treats adaptation, evolution, intelligence, and acceleration as universal principles.
Put simply, e/acc is about technology-first acceleration. It puts technology above everything else, treating innovation as a kind of creed for techno true believers: push technology forward at any cost and trust markets and technology itself to solve everything else.
For a while, it was seen as a kind of techno-utopian vision — until the AI wave sparked by ChatGPT at the end of 2022 gave many e/acc supporters real hope, helping the idea spread widely in 2023.
However, this one-way, tech-above-all sprint is increasingly unsettling, especially now that AI is edging toward “singularity-like” capabilities, biotechnology risks are rising, and centralized power over data and infrastructure keeps expanding.
Against this backdrop, Vitalik proposed a more “reformist” path: d/acc, a defense-first view of technological progress.
On November 27, 2023, he published “My techno-optimism”, offering a more cautious take on what kind of technological acceleration we actually want.
Here, the “d” in d/acc stands not only for Defense, but also Decentralization and Democracy. It’s not about hitting the brakes, but about accelerating in a different direction — toward technologies that make us safer, more autonomous, and more resilient to systemic risk.
One year later, in January 2025, he published “d/acc: one year later”, deepening his thinking and introducing a core worldview model: defense-dominant vs. offense-dominant worlds.
The core idea is that the darkest moments in human history tend to occur when offense has a clear advantage over defense:
- When it’s easier to create a virus than to develop a vaccine
- When launching a cyberattack is cheaper than patching vulnerabilities
- When centralized AI can generate massive amounts of deepfakes that ordinary people can’t tell from reality
In those moments, human society becomes systematically fragile.
Today, our “technology tree” is tilted toward offense: large tech companies control AI compute, and centralized institutions hold data monopolies. From a d/acc perspective, if we keep accelerating blindly, we may end up with a world that is extremely efficient but also extremely fragile — even highly authoritarian.
So the core claim of d/acc is that we should deliberately steer technology so that its defensive properties outweigh its offensive ones again.
2. Why Does d/acc Show Up in Web3?
It’s no exaggeration to say that while e/acc is widely celebrated in Silicon Valley, it’s essentially a radicalized form of technological capitalism with a strong elitist streak: it cares about aggregate efficiency, not about who gets left behind.
In Vitalik’s view, the global tech story over the past decade has mostly been about “going faster”. But as AI, crypto, energy, and interstate competition all get pushed to the limit, simple “accelerationism” can’t answer a basic set of questions:
Where are we accelerating to? For whom are we accelerating? And at what cost?
This is where d/acc offers a directional correction. It shifts the lens from elitism to a broader sense of democracy: it cares about broad accessibility, advocates selective acceleration, and explicitly warns against blindly accelerating explosive innovations that stack risks, concentrate power, and grow inside regulatory blind spots.
This makes d/acc and the future of Web3 a natural fit. After all, Web3’s core value has never just been “a faster world computer”, but gradually pulling power, wealth, identity, and control out of centralized systems and returning them to users.
Take Ethereum’s main development directions as an example — they clearly resonate with d/acc:
- Decentralization should accelerate: increase L1/L2 node counts and strengthen censorship resistance.
- User sovereignty should accelerate: push account abstraction (AA) so defensive features like social recovery and gas sponsorship become mainstream.
- System resilience should accelerate: deploy technologies like ZK-SNARKs to defend against surveillance and privacy leaks.
That’s why d/acc has become a core narrative in the Ethereum community — blockchain, at its core, is one of the strongest defensive technologies humanity has invented.
Put simply, a technology-first future isn’t about being fast at any cost. It’s about accelerating on a safe, right track — accelerating decentralization, strengthening individual defenses, building systemic resilience.
That’s the new mission d/acc gives to Web3 and the broader crypto ecosystem.
3. AI and Web3: Building a Defense-First Accelerated Future
I’ve long felt that AI and Web3/Crypto are mirrored reflections of “productive forces” and “production relations” in this new era.
If AI is a powerful spear — dramatically boosting productivity but also easy to misuse — then Crypto is the shield. From a d/acc perspective, this shield mainly defends against three types of risk.
3.1 Defending Against the Abuse of Power
In the Web2 world, your digital identity and assets don’t really belong to you — you’re renting them from tech giants, where platforms can ban your account at any time and banks can freeze your funds without notice.
Blockchains, by contrast, use cryptography to build a mathematical defense wall: with your private key, no centralized actor can unilaterally seize your assets.
This is an ultimate defense mechanism that protects an individual’s right to exist and participate in the digital age.
3.2 Defending Against the Distortion of Truth
With the rise of AIGC, the internet is filling up with fake and synthetic content. In the future, we may not be able to tell whether we’re talking to a human or an AI, or whether a video is real footage or algorithmically generated.
From this perspective, on-chain community verification and public-key signature systems provide a trust anchor for information: we can use cryptographic signatures to verify where information comes from, and decentralized consensus to push back against waves of fake content.
3.3 Defending Against Privacy Invasion
In the age of big data, data often has to be exposed before it can be used — which means we’re effectively “running naked” online.
The ZK-SNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs) that d/acc promotes are a pinnacle defensive technology: they let us prove facts without revealing the underlying data — for example, proving “I have enough funds to pay” without disclosing your full balance. This not only protects privacy, but also makes a centralized “Big Brother” mathematically unnecessary.
At the end of the day, d/acc is not a passive, conservative stance. On the contrary, it calls for intense technological innovation:
- We need faster public-chain infrastructure to support global-scale defensive financial networks.
- We need more user-friendly account abstraction so defensive tools are no longer limited to geeks and developers.
- We need stronger post-quantum cryptography to defend against future brute-force attacks from advanced compute.
From this perspective, d/acc day at Devconnect is more than just a technical track. It reminds us that technology itself is neutral — but the direction of its development is not.
In an uncertain age of runaway acceleration, “safer” is itself the highest form of “advanced.”