Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the (ETH) network's home region, the European Union, and its revived Chat Control plan would weaken cybersecurity for everyone, days before lawmakers decide whether to restore message scanning.
Key Points:
- MEPs voted 331 to 304 on Tuesday to fast-track a fresh Chat Control decision.
- Opponents need 361 votes on Thursday to block the message-scanning rule.
- Buterin argues mandatory scanning erodes the encryption that secures crypto and Web3.
Chat Control Vote Returns To Parliament
European lawmakers voted Tuesday to reopen the message-scanning fight, approving an urgency motion by 331 votes to 304 with 11 abstentions. The procedural step did not restore scanning on its own. It merely cleared the path to a substantive decision on Thursday.
Parliament will hold that binding vote on its last day before the summer recess, when attendance historically thins out. Because the file sits in a second reading, opponents must gather an absolute majority of 361 votes to block or amend it; any absence effectively counts as approval, and critics already call a successful block a long shot.
EU privacy rules normally bar platforms from reading private chats without specific suspicion. A contested carve-out once let Meta, Google and Microsoft scan messages for child abuse material, though it lapsed in April after members rejected an extension in March by 311 votes to 228, with 92 abstentions. Four European commissioners urged lawmakers to back the measure, warning that most abuse material would otherwise slip past detection.
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Buterin Ties Scanning To Crypto Security
Buterin warned that forcing platforms to monitor private messages weakens security for everyone, not only suspected offenders. He argues that mass surveillance stockpiles become prime targets for hackers and hostile governments, pointing to past cases where wiretap data gathered by one state was later breached by another.
Crypto and Web3 systems lean on strong encryption to guard funds and user data, the same guarantees that underpin encrypted messengers and self-custody wallets. A permanent version of the regulation, a separate mandatory-scanning proposal, would even push providers to bypass end-to-end encryption for every user. Greens negotiator Markéta Gregorová called the maneuver an abuse of procedure, accusing the largest parliamentary group of dragging back a proposal members had already rejected.
Buterin's Long Fight Over Encryption
Buterin has sounded these alarms before. Last autumn he slammed an earlier draft of Chat Control, cautioning that backdoors built for investigators remain inevitably hackable and that a society cannot grow safer by making its own members less secure.
That stance fits his recent push for stronger cryptography across Ethereum. His Lean Ethereum roadmap, floated this month, folds in quantum-resistant proofs and daily validator anonymity, a direction that weakened encryption standards would directly cut against. Several platforms reportedly kept scanning users voluntarily even after the legal cover expired in the spring.
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