Vitalik Buterin Emphasizes ETH as Ethereum's Most Valuable Product

Editor’s Note: In the early hours of May 25, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy post on X, in which he personally reinterpreted his expectations for Ethereum’s future and the planned role of the Ethereum Foundation.

Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum should not conform to mainstream trends, but must be impressive and uphold the CROPS values of censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security. Vitalik also explicitly stated that "Ethereum's highest-value product is ETH" and unusually revealed that nearly 90% of his net worth is held in ETH.

The following is the original text by Vitalik, translated by Odaily Planet Daily.

Share some of my personal thoughts on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF).

First, this is merely my personal opinion. The board is not composed of me alone, and I do not have any special authority over other board members. Aya Miyaguchi is leading many of the execution efforts in this transition, while I am primarily involved in providing input on technical matters. The board is also expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to decline in the future—honestly, that’s exactly what I want to see.

During this phase in 2025, EF made significant improvements in execution capability. Many issues were resolved, and to this day, EF continues to benefit from greater efficiency and a more focused approach toward specific goals. As these issues were gradually addressed, I became aware around the beginning of this year that another matter I had long been troubled by had become the largest remaining challenge.

I often hear people say things like—“Vitalik always talks about how Ethereum should remain decentralized, protect privacy, and become a sanctuary technology, but why aren’t EF’s actual actions reflecting these principles?”

Of course, the voice you hear might be completely different. You might feel no sense of crisis at all, and perhaps even hear people saying that we’re finally starting to take execution and business development (BD) seriously. Our main focus now is to maintain this momentum and do even better, faster.

If that’s the case, then it’s likely that there’s a genuine difference between us—regarding which type of criticism I value most, and which critic’s feedback cuts me the deepest.

I’d like to use an example from another field to illustrate this.

Regarding Google, you can hold one belief: that it is a success story that has brought immense benefit to humanity by organizing the world’s information; but you can also hold another belief: that it began with a beautiful, idealistic vision, but was gradually corrupted by mainstream corporate culture, slowly and step by step abandoning its “Don’t be evil” motto.

My personal views on Google may lie somewhere in between. But if you could take me back to around 2008 and give me a button that, when pressed, would make Google even more ideologically dogmatic by one or two standard deviations—such as granting Richard Stallman permanent veto power over certain key policies—I would press it without hesitation.

Why? Because a company’s choices are not just its own—they impact the entire national system, and even the world. Google’s past and present context reflects a broader trend across the tech industry: a departure from early idealism and the principle of “don’t be evil,” toward greed for economic gain, an all-encompassing vision of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by antisocial personalities, and subservience (or worse, active participation) in government-driven efforts to impose thought control, surveillance, and war pressures.

Therefore, if there were a “certain company” that did the opposite—becoming what George Bernard Shaw called an “Unreasonable Man” by resisting prevailing trends—its existence would be more beneficial to freedom, power balance, and societal stability than when all large corporations succumb to mainstream trends.

This is part of my understanding of "pluralism." This perspective is not just my own idea—it also aligns closely with the thinking of Aya and others when developing the EF mission framework.

So, what does all of this have to do with EF’s role?

EF is not the "center of Ethereum"; rather, EF is "one node among others, with a clearly defined role." We have always advocated for EF to become the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem—including some within EF—have hoped we would become the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure we become the latter.

This is especially important because the EF itself is an organization with limited resources and organizational capacity. The EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH—less than many individual ETH holders—while the central foundations of many other blockchains typically hold 10%–50%. Financially, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited scope of work defined in the token sale documentation and other pre-launch materials: developing on-chain software and navigating the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity phases, all of which were fully completed by 2022.

EF was not designed to be an eternal custodian. Therefore, today EF has chosen to allocate its remaining resources toward achieving "long-term existence" rather than "unlimited growth" (yes, this also means we will sell less ETH).

EF focuses exclusively on tasks that are critical to Ethereum as a censorship-resistant, uncapturable, open, private, and secure system (i.e., the CROPS dimensions)—and that no one else would do if we didn’t. This means making difficult choices, and in some cases, even activities and individuals we deeply admire are better suited outside EF. In fact, for our critical mission to attract external capital, it may be necessary for highly skilled, publicly respected individuals—even those whose values closely align with CROPS—to remain outside EF.

This also means EF will take a clear stance culturally. None of this is intended to oppose other parts of the Ethereum ecosystem, but rather to collaborate. We know that many other organizations within the Ethereum world also strongly align with CROPS and related values, but “strong alignment” is not the same as “choosing to specialize and fully commit to a specific area.” For another example, I believe reducing animal cruelty is important, and I enjoy plant-based food, but I am not a strict vegan myself.

EF is still in the midst of its transformation, and we expect its new long-term structure to stabilize over the coming months. What are the guiding principles of this new structure?

To reiterate, I am just one person, but I can provide my answer from a technical perspective (along with important non-technical aspects).

The key is that Ethereum must be impressive. We live in an era where AI and various other technologies are advancing rapidly. A system that merely maintains the status quo with an EVM, undergoing hard forks one or two times per year to optimize for users' short-term needs, is unattractive.

For some, "amazing" means 250 milliseconds of latency and 1 million TPS. I believe Ethereum’s attempt to go down this path is a mistake. Pursuing speed and scalability at all costs, while only slightly more decentralized than other public blockchains, is a path to mediocrity—and if we try to follow it, we will inevitably lose.

I believe Ethereum should scale, but I think Ethereum should make its greatest effort in another dimension to achieve something truly remarkable—that is, the CROPS dimension (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security). This includes the following specific goals.

First, build a provably bug-free Ethereum. Until about six months ago, all cybersecurity researchers would have considered this an absurd and impossible goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, this is on the verge of becoming reality. Therefore, we should be the pioneers driving this forward.

Second, achieve high-availability on-chain consensus. Ethereum has been, and will continue to be after the introduction of lean consensus, the only chain with the following characteristics: (i) possesses traditional BFT-style properties, ensuring safety even under high fault tolerance in asynchronous environments; and (ii) possesses Bitcoin PoW-style properties, capable of resisting attackers of up to 49% in synchronous environments.

To my knowledge, no other chain literally has this feature or is planning for it. Bitcoin only pursues (ii), while most other chains only pursue (i). Some may recall that I once strongly insisted on this—I was “stubborn” in believing that Ethereum could not rely on social consensus and hard forks to handle a scenario where 34% of nodes go offline. This is irrelevant for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, or Tempo. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, it is unacceptable.

Third is "intermediary minimization"—reducing middlemen as much as possible. In fact, today, smart contract wallets and protocols like Railgun still require intermediaries to send transactions in order to be included on-chain, which is quite awkward and remains a source of systemic vulnerability.

Therefore, we are advancing FOCIL, EIP-8141 (along with EIP-7701 and related work from previous years) to establish a truly universal transaction submission mechanism that minimizes reliance on intermediaries, featuring an open mempool and strong inclusion properties—applicable not only to secp256r1, but also to privacy protocols and many other use cases.

Kohaku is also driving decentralization at the user level, moving Ethereum away from its current dystopian reality—where wallets don’t even verify the chain itself but send our private data to a dozen third-party servers—and toward a future more aligned with the CROPS philosophy.

Among the three goals above, some may seem "irrational"—perhaps Ethereum could still do "just fine" at only 50%, for example, if we rely on intermediaries but make switching between them easy. However, achieving only 50% won’t make Ethereum truly awe-inspiring on the CROPS journey. Therefore, we aim for 100%.

Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is a major focus of research (particularly on state scaling). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially those optimized for specific applications (such as high-frequency trading, privacy, etc.). Thanks to Raul’s work on erasure-coded P2P and numerous other optimizations, these goals can even be compatible with significantly reduced slot times.

From a financial perspective, the most valuable "product" on the Ethereum blockchain is the ETH asset. Ethereum safeguards $250 billion worth of ETH. The Ethereum features I mentioned earlier all significantly enhance ETH’s value as an asset.

Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, with the majority of the remainder—approximately $40 million in on-chain fiat—allocated to various open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware projects.

At the same time, there are essential tasks required to support ETH’s asset value that fall outside EF’s scope—this is when other “heroes” need to step in (some of whom hold even more ETH than the EF). The EF has recently begun to reflect more deeply on how to build relationships with these organizations and provide them with the necessary initial support.

In the future, EF will be more like a “small boat” than it has been in recent years. It will take stronger positions, some of which may even be difficult to understand, but it will also last longer and be better suited to ensuring that Ethereum truly brings something meaningful to the world.

We thank everyone inside and outside of EF who helped make this possible.