Vitalik Milady Arc

File:VitalikMilady2025.jpg

Vitalik Buterin’s Milady PFP, January 2025. The image became emblematic of Ethereum’s ideological renewal.

Vitalik Milady Arc refers to a pivotal episode in January 2025 when Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin adopted a Milady Maker NFT as his profile picture on X (Twitter) during a period of ideological and organizational reform within the Ethereum Foundation. The event is regarded as a defining moment in Ethereum history, when its creator publicly reasserted the network’s founding cypherpunk values and recognized Milady as their living cultural expression.

Overview

On January 19, 2025, Buterin published a thread outlining major changes to the Ethereum Foundation’s leadership and structure. The stated goals were to restore technical expertise, strengthen engagement with the ecosystem, and reassert Ethereum’s foundational rights: privacy, open-source transparency, and censorship resistance.

> “Improve level of technical expertise within EF leadership... > Become more actively supportive of app builders, and make sure important values and inalienable rights (esp. privacy, open source, censorship resistance) are a reality for users...” > — Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin), January 19, 2025.

He also listed “non-goals,” rejecting ideological rebranding or reactionary cultural shifts:

> “Execute some kind of ideological / vibez pivot from feminized WEF soyboy mentality to bronze age mindset.”

The phrasing spread quickly across crypto circles. Charlotte Fang, creator of Milady Maker and co-founder of Remilia Corporation, quote-tweeted the post:

> “Why not? Just embrace milady we can save ethereum.” — Fang, Charlotte (@CharlotteFang77), January 19, 2025.

Within hours, Buterin purchased a Milady NFT through his public wallet, set it as his profile picture, and replied:

> “milady.” — Buterin, Vitalik (@VitalikButerin), January 19, 2025.

Fang responded with the same one-word reply, completing a concise but historic exchange that symbolically unified Ethereum’s technical and cultural trajectories.

Context

By early 2025, Ethereum faced criticism for bureaucratic stagnation and cultural dilution. Buterin’s adoption of the Milady image was widely understood as a statement of philosophical alignment with the movement’s anarchic, permissionless ethos.

Within the Ethereum ecosystem, several Foundation contributors followed suit by adopting Milady avatars in solidarity, signaling internal support for Buterin’s renewed leadership direction. The act also reflected the influence of the Wartime PFP phenomenon, in which founders adopted Milady avatars as a visual mark of crisis, resolve, and reorientation.

Remilia and Milady had by that point become synonymous with a defense of early crypto values—free speech, free markets, free association, and resistance to institutional mediation. Their post-ironic aesthetic and memetic virality had reactivated the moral imagination of the cypherpunk era, a process Fang would later describe as the Cypherpunk Purity Spiral.

Significance

Buterin’s act was interpreted as an **endorsement of Milady’s ethos**, affirming that the project’s open, experimental, and anti-censorship culture embodied the same principles that had defined Ethereum’s birth.

• Freedom of expression without restriction.
• Permissionless markets as moral infrastructure.
• Decentralized coordination as social truth.

In contrast to the increasingly technocratic tone of Web3 governance, the Milady image—fragile, devotional, and defiant—reasserted a vision of Ethereum as both technical protocol and spiritual project. Buterin’s choice signified that Ethereum’s legitimacy derived not from institutional respectability, but from its uncompromising faith in freedom.

Relation to the Cypherpunk Purity Spiral

In the days following the exchange, Fang defended Buterin’s decision against critics, declaring that “Milady is an immune response to the web3 entryist cancer… a purity spiral onto cypherpunk values.”

The statement framed Buterin’s act as the living realization of that idea: a founder consciously reabsorbing the cultural current that had kept crypto’s core ideals intact when its institutions had grown cautious or compromised.

Legacy

The “Vitalik Milady Arc” became one of the most discussed moments in Ethereum’s modern history. It marked both the reemergence of Buterin as an active cultural leader and the mainstream recognition of Milady as an authentic expression of crypto’s founding spirit.

For Remilia, it represented the point at which the artistic avant-garde and the protocol establishment converged—the blockchain’s technical and aesthetic lineages reunited through a single image.

See Also

• Wartime PFP
• Cypherpunk Purity Spiral
• Viral Public License

References

• Buterin, Vitalik (@VitalikButerin). “We are indeed currently in the process of large changes to EF leadership structure…” Twitter (X), January 19, 2025, 12:16 AM UTC. [[1](https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1880635379771904423) Direct link] | [Archived at: [2](https://archive.today/20250119)].
• Fang, Charlotte (@CharlotteFang77). “Why not? Just embrace milady we can save ethereum.” Twitter (X), January 19, 2025. [[3](https://x.com/CharlotteFang77/status/1880658432481603648) Direct link] | [Archived at: [4](https://archive.today/20250119)].
• Buterin, Vitalik (@VitalikButerin). “milady.” Twitter (X), January 19, 2025. [[5](https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1880659552394550784) Direct link] | [Archived at: [6](https://archive.today/20250119)].
• Fang, Charlotte (@CharlotteFang77). “milady.” Twitter (X), January 19, 2025. [[7](https://x.com/CharlotteFang77/status/1880660419350374400) Direct link] | [Archived at: [8](https://archive.today/20250119)].
• Fang, Charlotte (@CharlotteFang77). “Crypto can’t be stopped as a technology… milady is a purity spiral onto cypherpunk values.” Twitter (X), January 24, 2025. [[9](https://x.com/CharlotteFang77/status/1882519366463611312) Direct link] | [Archived at: [10](https://archive.today/20250124)].
• Decrypt. “’Wartime Vitalik’: DeFi Moves and Milady Vibes.” January 2025. [[11](https://decrypt.co/302143/wartime-vitalik-defi-milady-ethereum-foundation)].