Author: Nancy, PANews
While leading blockchains like Solana and Base are fully committing to attract developers, capture traffic, and expand their ecosystems, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has chosen to step back into a secondary role.
Key talent continues to depart, compounded by multiple rounds of ETH selling pressure, fueling growing FUD around EF. This passive strategy is steadily eroding market trust in EF.
On May 25, Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy response to recent controversies, stating that the EF is merely an ordinary node with a special mission, clearly outlining the EF’s upcoming streamlining strategy and future technical roadmap, and explicitly stating that maintaining the price of ETH is not within the EF’s responsibilities.
After losing its "leader," how will Ethereum move forward in the post-foundation era?
From executionism to long-termism: the divergence in public chain foundation styles
Recently, the loss of core team members, frequent ETH sales, and ongoing controversies over ecosystem execution have intensified external skepticism toward the EF, with some even calling for a new initiative.
Meanwhile, Vitalik recently disclosed that the EF currently holds only about 0.16% of the total ETH supply, far below the common 10%–50% range seen among many public chain foundations.
In other words, the initial allocation of approximately 6 million ETH to the EF (8.3% of the initial total supply) has been depleted over the past decade, leaving only about 100,000 ETH remaining. Today, the EF can no longer sustain its role in supporting the rapid operation of the large ecosystem, whether in terms of financial reserves, personnel size, or organizational execution.
As one of the most representative pure foundations in the industry, the EF has long focused on protocol research, public goods development, and supporting open-source ecosystems. Although the EF does not directly control the Ethereum network, it has long been regarded as a key coordinating and driving force in the Ethereum ecosystem, thanks to its early accumulation of ETH reserves and the ongoing influence of key developers such as Vitalik.
However, as the Ethereum ecosystem gradually matures, the EF and Vitalik are intentionally reducing their centralized influence and shifting toward a more low-profile, behind-the-scenes support role. This transition stems both from a commitment to neutrality and long-term principles, and from real-world pressures.
As the role of the EF diminishes within Ethereum, the previous growth model—highly dependent on foundation resources—is becoming less effective. Ecosystem expansion is now shifting toward community-driven innovation and diverse external collaboration.
In fact, the foundation models of different blockchains not only shape their respective governance cultures but also determine the maturity, degree of decentralization, and long-term evolution paths of their ecosystems.
In contrast, other emerging public blockchains are still in a phase of aggressive expansion, with foundations playing a more active and dominant role. For example, emerging blockchains such as Solana, Aptos, and TON adopt a more flexible foundation-driven model, leveraging early ownership of a large portion of token reserves to implement intensive resource investment, ongoing incentive programs, and support from DAT companies—even with founding teams directly involved to maintain high execution efficiency and growth momentum.
Base represents an alternative path. As an L2 supported by Coinbase, it does not rely on a traditional independent foundation structure but instead drives ecosystem growth through the parent company’s resources and business network, supplemented by an ecosystem fund to support developer and application integration. This model’s advantage lies in its highly efficient resource integration, enabling rapid user growth and product deployment.
Platforms like Polygon and Avalanche adopt a hybrid model with a foundation and Labs operating in parallel: the foundation oversees governance transparency and community affairs, while Labs focuses on product development and business execution, avoiding excessive centralization by a single entity while accelerating decision-making and implementation. The Hyperliquid Foundation, by contrast, follows a more finance-native governance approach, deeply integrating governance rights, economic incentives, and ecosystem development funds through token mechanisms, while allocating resources to policy research and external communication, enhancing the ecosystem’s self-sufficiency and adaptability.
More importantly, since emerging public blockchains are still in a phase of intense expansion and competition, they commonly offer high cash salaries and generous token incentives to aggressively attract developer talent, giving them a clear advantage in the short-term battle for talent. In contrast, Ethereum lacks competitiveness in terms of compensation and relies more on developers’ idealism, alignment with open-source culture, and the long-term reputation of its ecosystem to sustain contributions. Meanwhile, many core developers who entered the Ethereum ecosystem early have already received substantial financial returns during the previous bull market. Some of these individuals have gradually stepped back from frontline development and maintenance roles, resulting in a noticeable shortage of sustained execution capacity within the ecosystem.
The transition to an ETF can be seen as both a result of Ethereum’s development and evolution, and a long-term survival strategy given constraints on capital and execution.
The foundation will reduce coin sales; greater ETH value growth requires more large holders.
The Ethereum Foundation has done a lot of technical work, but the market treats it like a company, and this gap in expectations leads to dissatisfaction. In the end, it’s all about the price,” said crypto KOL Lanhu Notes, cutting to the heart of the matter.
For the Ethereum community, nearly all debates ultimately come back to the issue of ETH's low price.
Crypto journalist Laura Shin pointed out that since the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum’s一系列 roadmap decisions have consistently lacked adequate consideration of tokenomics, overly prioritizing ideology over capital markets and price performance, leading to dissatisfaction among the community and investors. Involving external organizations can only help expand business, not fundamentally address market issues at the ETH asset level.
More importantly, the competition has only just begun. Laura Shin believes we are currently at a critical stage of real-world adoption. However, while competitors are actively seizing market share and attracting developers and capital, the Ethereum Foundation increasingly appears to be relying on past successes. Especially as the ecosystem’s most competitive talent continues to leave, this laissez-faire attitude may ultimately empower competitors and even give rise to new challengers.
Vitalik also addressed market skepticism in a lengthy post, emphasizing that ETH is the most valuable product of the Ethereum blockchain, with the total value of ETH secured and supported by the Ethereum network now reaching approximately $250 billion. He revealed that over 90% of his personal net worth is allocated to ETH, with the remainder primarily consisting of about $40 million in on-chain fiat assets, all of which have been invested in open-source biotechnology, software, and hardware projects.
However, Vitalik also stated that although the foundation will reduce ETH sales in the future, maintaining the price of ETH is not within the EF’s scope of responsibility. In his view, there are already numerous individuals and institutions within the Ethereum ecosystem with far greater financial resources than the EF; true growth in ETH’s asset value requires the collective efforts of more “heroes” within the ecosystem. The EF is also planning to establish connections with such organizations and provide them with necessary initial support.
Blockchain researcher William Mougayar has expressed a similar view. He believes that ETH is fundamentally an asset, Ethereum is a shared computing infrastructure, and the Ethereum Foundation is a nonprofit organization tasked with advancing the protocol. One of its long-term goals is even to “make the founders themselves gradually become irrelevant.”
As EF is actively stepping back from the spotlight, ETH is entering a new phase increasingly driven by its own ecosystem.
While the community expresses concern over ETH’s price, Ethereum’s mainstream adoption is accelerating. Two Ethereum-based companies, BitMine and Sharplink, are expected to be added to the U.S. Russell Indexes on June 29. BMNR will be included in the Russell 1000 Index and Russell 3000 Index, while SBET will be included in the Russell 2000 Index and Russell 3000 Index.
According to Tom Lee, Chairman of BitMine, based on BitMine’s current market capitalization of $10.75 billion, a successful inclusion would bring at least $2.15 billion in buying pressure.
Blue Fox Notes further points out that the total assets tracking the Russell 2000 and Russell 3000 indices globally reach the trillions of dollars. Once officially included, related index funds will be required to hold the corresponding stocks, effectively opening the floodgates for passive capital to SBET and BMNR, enabling a large number of ordinary investors who previously had no exposure to the crypto market to automatically hold these shares, thereby channeling Ethereum into the mainstream of traditional finance. The purchases by passive funds create real demand, often providing short-term price support around the time of inclusion, and in the long term, enhancing the stock’s liquidity and institutional ownership percentage. It should be noted that although these funds buy stocks rather than ETH directly, they may indirectly strengthen demand for ETH.
In the post-foundation era, who might be Ethereum’s next leader? Tom Lee has stepped forward, and his affiliated firms, Fundstrat and BitMine, are considered top candidates by the community. BitMine currently holds approximately 5.28 million ETH, accounting for 4.37% of the total supply, making it the world’s largest ETH treasury.
Reject the performance race, uphold CROPS values
In addition to the Ethereum Foundation's new positioning, Vitalik shared his personal thoughts on Ethereum's future technical roadmap.
In Vitalik’s view, Ethereum must build a unique and hard-to-replicate competitive advantage. With AI technology rapidly evolving and the entire tech industry experiencing explosive growth, if Ethereum merely clings to its existing EVM architecture and satisfies short-term user demands through periodic hard forks, it will gradually lose its appeal.
He believes that pursuing high-speed scaling alone, with only a slight advantage in decentralization over other blockchains, will ultimately reduce Ethereum to mediocrity. Ethereum needs scaling, but it must also prioritize CROPS: censorship resistance, anti-expropriation, openness, privacy, and security.
In fact, over the past few years, market attention on public chain competition has focused almost entirely on performance, cost, and user growth. Whether it’s Solana, Sui, or various modular narratives, all essentially compete around being faster, cheaper, and more user-friendly.
But Vitalik clearly does not want Ethereum to remain trapped in this performance race. In reality, Ethereum struggles to decisively outperform new-generation high-performance public blockchains, and continuously sacrificing its unique characteristics for performance would gradually erode its most fundamental value.
Vitalik emphasized that for foundational public blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin, it is unacceptable to rely on social consensus or hard forks to recover if 34% of nodes go offline—this may be acceptable for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, and Solana, but not for Ethereum, Bitcoin, Zcash, and others.
Meanwhile, state scaling remains a key research focus for Ethereum. Well-designed Layer 2 networks continue to deliver lasting value to the ecosystem, particularly in vertical use cases such as transactions and privacy, where dedicated L2 solutions remain critically important. Additionally, as erasure coding P2P technologies and other optimization approaches advance, Ethereum’s future block intervals are also expected to be further reduced.
Compared to ecosystem growth, Vitalik now seems more focused on ensuring Ethereum’s irreplacability—a technological path aligned with his values.
In Vitalik’s view, if a company appears overly dogmatic in upholding its principles, the worst outcome is merely a slowdown in its own growth, while technological progress continues to be driven by other companies. The best outcome, however, is that a company truly aligned with community values can earn organic support, talent, and marketing resources from the community—support that cannot be easily bought with money alone. He believes that some previous AI companies attempted to achieve similar effects through effective altruism, but due to the susceptibility of consequentialism to corruption, their results were ultimately limited.
In the post-Ethereum Foundation era, although the EF has gradually stepped back from the center stage of Ethereum under the banner of neutrality and long-termism, it remains uncertain whether it can truly quell negative market sentiment. More crucially, the market is more concerned with how Ethereum, during a downturn cycle, can initiate an upward trajectory through roadmap reforms.