Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin backs a controversial shift from Casper FFG to Minimmit, betting that making censorship harder matters more than preserving textbook fault‑tolerance as ETH trades near $2,000.

Vitalik Buterin has put his weight behind one of the most sensitive changes to Ethereum’s (ETH) core: ripping out the Casper FFG finality gadget and replacing it with Minimmit, a one‑round Byzantine fault‑tolerant scheme that deliberately relaxes some purity‑theory guarantees in exchange for what he frames as more “real world” safety.

Casper today requires validators to attest twice — once to justify a block, again to finalize it — and can tolerate up to 33% of stake behaving maliciously before the system’s guarantees break. Minimmit cuts that to a single round: faster and simpler, but with formal fault tolerance falling to 17% in the current proposed parameters.

On paper, that looks like a downgrade. But Buterin’s thread makes a blunt argument: the worst real‑world attack is not finality reversion, it is censorship. Finality reversion creates undeniable cryptographic evidence and leads to massive slashing — millions of ETH, or billions of $, vaporized on‑chain — which makes such attacks economically absurd for any rational actor with that kind of capital. Censorship, by contrast, is messy: it forces users and developers into social coordination, soft forks, and political fights. In both the “ideal” three‑slot‑finality (3SF) model and Minimmit, an attacker needs 50% of stake to censor, but Minimmit shifts the thresholds at which an attacker can unilaterally finalize bad history, raising that bar from 67% to 83%. That, Buterin argues, maximizes scenarios where the network defaults to “two chains dueling” instead of “the wrong thing finalized” — an outcome that is chaotic but fixable.

The backdrop is a market that is no longer paying for narratives alone. ETH trades around $2,000, down from prior cycle highs near $4,900, with volatility elevated and macro headwinds still in play. Traders have already seen the outline of Ethereum’s “fast L1” strawmap, which aims to cut slot times from 12 seconds to as low as 2 seconds and drive finality down to single‑digit seconds using Minimmit. If this redesign sticks, Ethereum stops competing only on rollup ecosystem and DeFi liquidity and starts competing on something brutally simple: how quickly and credibly your transaction becomes irreversible. In a market where ETH is still repricing its role versus L2s and rival L1s, Minimmit is not just a consensus tweak; it is an attempt to re‑anchor the asset’s value in raw, observable user experience: click, confirm, done.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the more outspoken voices in Congress often connecting cryptocurrencies to illicit activities, slammed the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s settlement with Tron founder Justin Sun.

In a Thursday notice, Warren accused the SEC of “giving a free pass” to Sun after he “poured $90 million” in crypto investments tied to US President Donald Trump and his family.

Sun has invested millions of dollars through token purchases in the Trump family’s crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, and the SEC settled an unrelated case against the Tron founder and his companies for $10 million.

“Justin Sun poured $90 million into Trump’s crypto ventures, and today the SEC agreed to drop its case against him,” said Warren. “The SEC should not be a lap dog for Trump’s billionaire buddies, and any crypto legislation moving through Congress must stop the President’s crypto corruption.”

Warren did not specifically refer to the digital asset market structure bill moving through the Senate, but the legislation has been a focus of the White House and many pro-crypto lawmakers for months after it passed the House of Representatives as the CLARITY Act. The bill, which advanced from the Senate Agriculture Committee in January, is being considered by the Senate Banking Committee, where Warren is the ranking Democrat. 

Related: Binance slams US Senate probe over Iran as based on defamatory reports

Crypto observers await markup for market structure bill

Among the issues at stake in the market structure bill include provisions on tokenized equities, ethics and stablecoin rewards. The White House has hosted three meetings between officials and representatives of the crypto and banking industries, but it was unclear as of Friday whether the discussions had made any impact on the legislation.

Both Trump and his son, Eric, posted to social media this week to criticize banks over their position on the market structure bill. Some banking organizations have argued that including provisions on stablecoin rewards in the legislation could undermine credit and lead to deposit flight risk.

In January, the Senate Banking Committee indefinitely postponed a markup on the market structure bill after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the exchange could not support the legislation “as written.” As of Friday, the body had not rescheduled the event, which would be necessary to address securities law concerns before a potential vote in the full Senate.

Magazine: Clarity Act risks repeat of Europe’s mistakes, crypto lawyer warns