When Web3 meets d/acc: What can Crypto do in the era of technological acceleration?

Author: imToken

If you have been following the recent Devconnect conference held in Argentina, you may have noticed an intriguing signal:

Among the many technical agendas regarding Rollup, EIP, and account abstraction, perhaps the most striking is not a specific protocol upgrade, but rather the topic set aside as an independent day - d/acc day.

d/acc, which looks like an abbreviation of code symbols, is actually a new concept highly advocated by Vitalik Buterin back in 2023. This article will also take you deep into the thought process of d/acc and how Ethereum is accelerating the reshaping of its underlying narrative based on this.

1. Starting from e/acc, what is d/acc?

To understand d/acc, we must first understand the historical context it reflects: the frenzy of e/acc (effective accelerationism).

If you have been following the thoughts in the Silicon Valley tech circle, you may have heard of e/acc, and perhaps you have a deep impression of the wave of “e/acc” suffixes that flooded in 2023.

At that time, a group of tech entrepreneurs and investment bigwigs, including a16z founder Marc Andreessen and YC incubator CEO Garry Tan, all used this as a suffix for their social media accounts.

As an abbreviation for “Effective Accelerationism” (, by standard definition, e/acc is considered a philosophical idea that integrates biological, physical, economic, and social theories, emphasizing adaptability, evolution, intelligence, and acceleration as universal principles present in the universe.

In simple terms, “e/acc” actually emphasizes technological supremacy, advocating extreme admiration for the role of technological innovation in driving and transforming society. It can even be viewed as a creed for a group of tech enthusiasts—advocating for the acceleration of technological development at all costs, believing that the market and technology itself will solve all problems.

So it was once regarded as a technological utopian vision, until the wave of AI sparked by ChatGPT at the end of 2022 brought tangible hope to many e/acc proponents, which is why the concept gained such significant traction in 2023.

However, this one-sided rush for technology supremacy makes many people feel uneasy in the current context where AI is gradually approaching the singularity, the risks of biotechnology are increasing, and centralized power is expanding.

It is in this context that Vitalik proposed a path that leans towards “reformism” in a certain sense: d/acc, which advocates a defense-first approach to technological development.

On November 27, 2023, he specifically published an article titled “My techno-optimism,” offering a prudent reflection on technological acceleration.

![12752-1764320064929.png])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-c5034814a46d4dd5152f9a807eece087.webp(

Here, “d” represents not only Defense but also Decentralization and Democracy. It is not about hitting the brakes, but rather about accelerating in a different direction—accelerating those technologies that can make us safer, more autonomous, and better able to withstand systemic risks.

Interestingly, a year after publishing this article, he published another piece titled “d/acc: one year later” in January 2025, further deepening his thoughts on d/acc and proposing a core worldview model: Defense-Dominant vs Offense-Dominant.

Its core logic lies in “The darkest moments in human history often occur during periods when the offensive advantage significantly outweighs the defensive advantage.”

• When manufacturing viruses is easier than developing vaccines;
• When it is cheaper to launch a network attack than to patch a vulnerability;
• When centralized AI can easily generate massive amounts of Deepfakes and ordinary people cannot distinguish between true and false.

In these moments, human society is in a state of systemic vulnerability.

Currently, the technology tree is precisely leaning towards “offensive advantage”—large tech giants monopolize AI computing power, and centralized institutions hold data hegemony. Therefore, from the perspective of d/acc's thinking logic, if we continue to blindly accelerate, we may create an extremely efficient yet extremely fragile, even extremely centralized dystopian world.

Therefore, the core assertion of d/acc is that we must consciously intervene through technology to reverse this situation, allowing the “defensive” attributes of technological development to once again outweigh the “offensive” attributes.

2. Why does d/acc appear in Web3?

It can be said without hesitation that, although e/acc (effective accelerationism) is highly esteemed in Silicon Valley, it is essentially a form of alienation of technological capitalism, characterized by an extremely strong elitist tint: because it does not care who gets left behind in the process, only the improvement of overall efficiency.

In Vitalik's view, although the global tech narrative over the past decade has largely revolved around “acceleration,” in the context of AI, crypto, energy, and national competition all being fully maximized, simple “accelerationism” can no longer answer a fundamental question:

Where exactly are we accelerating towards? For whom are we accelerating? What is the cost?

The emergence of d/acc provides a calibration in one direction, shifting the perspective from elitism towards a broader notion of “democracy”—it focuses on inclusiveness and seeks to accelerate selectively, especially concerning explosive innovations involving risk stacking, power concentration, and the amplification of regulatory gaps, and should not blindly accelerate.

This also naturally binds d/acc to the future of Web3. After all, the core value of Web3 has never been as simple as “a faster global computer”; rather, it is about gradually taking power, wealth, identity, and control away from centralized systems and returning it to the users.

In fact, taking several major development lines of Ethereum as an example, we can clearly see its deep resonance with d/acc:

• Decentralization needs to accelerate: ensure the number of nodes and censorship resistance of L1/L2;
• User sovereignty needs to accelerate: promote account abstraction (AA), allowing the popularization of defensive features such as social recovery and Gas payment.
• System resilience must be accelerated: deploy technologies such as ZK-SNARKs to defend against privacy leaks and surveillance;

This is also why d/acc will become the core narrative of the Ethereum community, because blockchain technology is fundamentally one of the most powerful defensive technologies invented by humanity.

In simple terms, the future of technology supremacy is not just about speed, but about continuously accelerating on the right and safe track: accelerating decentralization, accelerating individual defenses, accelerating system resilience - this is also the new mission that d/acc imparts to Web3 and the crypto world.

3. AI and Web3: Building the Defense Acceleration of Future Civilization

The author has always believed that AI and Web3/Crypto are a set of mirror comparisons of “productivity and production relations” in the new era.

If AI is viewed as a powerful “spear” (enhancing productivity but potentially used for evil), then Crypto is the solid “shield”. From the perspective of d/acc, this shield primarily defends against threats in three dimensions.

First, it is to prevent “abuse of power.”

In the Web2 world, your digital identity and assets do not belong to you, but are “rented” from tech giants. Platforms can ban your account at any time, and banks can freeze your funds. Blockchain builds a mathematical defense wall through cryptography; with the private key in hand, no centralized power can take away your assets.

This is an ultimate defense mechanism that protects individuals' right to exist in the digital age.

Secondly, defend against “truth being tampered with.”

With the explosion of AIGC, the internet is flooded with false information. In the future, we may not be able to distinguish whether the person on the other side of the screen is human or AI, nor can we discern whether a video is a real recording or algorithmically generated.

From this perspective, community verification based on the blockchain and the public key signature system provides a “trust anchor” for information. We can completely verify the source of information through cryptographic signatures and defend against the flood of false information through decentralized consensus.

Finally, defend against “privacy invasion.”

After all, in the era of big data, we are forced to run naked because the data itself needs to be verified before it can be used, while ZK-SNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs), which are highly advocated by d/acc, represent the pinnacle of defensive technology.

It allows us to prove facts without revealing privacy (for example: proving that I have enough money to pay, but without disclosing the balance), which not only protects privacy but also mathematically eliminates the necessity of the existence of “Big Brother”.

Ultimately, d/acc is not a form of passive conservatism; on the contrary, it requires a high intensity of technological innovation:

• We need a faster public chain service network to support a global defensive financial network;
• We need more user-friendly account abstraction so that defensive tools are no longer limited to geeks.
• We need stronger post-quantum cryptography to defend against brute force attacks from future computing power.

So, events like the d/acc day at this Devconnect are not just about technical discussions; they also remind us that technology itself is neither good nor evil, but the direction of its development is.

In this era full of uncertainty and rapid acceleration, “safer” itself is the highest form of “more advanced.”