Author: Vitalik Buterin
Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow
DeepSight Summary: The Ethereum Foundation holds only 0.16% of all ETH, whereas central foundations of other blockchains often hold 10–50%. With limited resources, the EF is making a difficult choice: abandoning the "big and everything" approach to focus instead on critical tasks that others won’t undertake—but are essential for Ethereum’s censorship resistance, privacy, and security—even if it means talented individuals leave the EF to attract external funding. Vitalik believes that in an era of accelerating AI and technology, Ethereum should not pursue a mediocre path of being "slightly faster" or "slightly more decentralized," but should instead achieve groundbreaking excellence in the CROPS dimensions: censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security.
Here are my thoughts on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn).
First, I want to clarify that this is solely my personal opinion. The board consists of more than just me, and I do not hold any special authority over other board members. @aerugoettinea has carried out the majority of the work for this transition. My contributions have primarily focused on technical issues. The board is expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to diminish—and honestly, that’s exactly what I want.
2025 brought many significant improvements to the EF and its execution capabilities. Many issues were resolved, and the EF continues to benefit from increased efficiency and stronger focus on specific goals. After those issues were addressed, earlier this year, the most prominent remaining issue I perceived became another long-standing concern: I often hear people say, "Vitalik says Ethereum needs decentralization, needs privacy, needs to be a sanctuary technology—these are great words, but why don't the EF’s actions reflect this?"
Now, you may have heard different voices. You might not feel any sense of crisis at all; instead, you may hear people say that we are finally taking execution and business development seriously, and our main task is to stay on this path and do it better and faster. So there may indeed be a genuine difference between you and me—regarding what kind of criticism I value most, and which critics can make me feel pain through their feedback.
For example, let's temporarily switch to another field.
Regarding Google, you can believe it’s a success story that has brought immense benefits to humanity by organizing the world’s information. Alternatively, you can believe it began with a noble, idealistic mission, but at some point, the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they gradually abandoned their “Don’t be evil” motto entirely.
My view of Google is roughly somewhere in between. But if you could take me back to around 2008 and give me a button that would shift Google one or two standard deviations in a more "dogmatic" direction—such as granting Richard Stallman permanent veto power over certain key policies—I would press it immediately.
Why? Because a company’s choice is not the world’s choice, nor even a nation’s choice. Google existed then and exists now within a technological industry that has generally moved away from its early idealistic “don’t be evil” roots toward greed for economic gain, an extreme vision of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by societal pathologies, and a shameful capitulation—or worse, active participation—in response to government pressures regarding ideological control, surveillance, and war. Therefore, it is better for freedom, power balance, and overall social stability when one company does something different, positioning itself as what George Bernard Shaw called an “unreasonable person,” resisting the tide of the times, rather than all major corporations succumbing to the mainstream trend. This is part of my version of pluralism.
This approach isn't just mine—it's also quite similar to what Aya and others have proposed in Mandate.
How does all of this relate to EF's role?
EF is not "the center of Ethereum," but rather "a node with a clear mission, coexisting alongside other nodes." We have always said that EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (even within EF) have wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure we become the latter.
This is especially important because the EF is a limited organization with constrained resources and organizational capacity. The EF holds only about 0.16% of ETH—less than many individual ETH holders—whereas it is common for a "central foundation" to hold 10–50% on other blockchains. Financially, the EF was originally designed to complete a limited scope of work defined in the token sale documentation and other pre-launch materials (building chain software; completing Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity), all of which were accomplished by 2022; it was never intended to be a permanent steward.
Therefore today, EF has chosen to use its remaining resources to pursue depth rather than breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). EF is focusing on activities critical to the success of Ethereum as a censorship-resistant, uncapturable, open, private, and secure system—activities that otherwise would not happen. This means making difficult choices, and in some cases, even those we highly value and deeply respect may leave EF. It is actually necessary for individuals with exceptional technical talent, public respect, and alignment with our mission and CROPS values to leave EF if we want our critical mission to attract external funding. This also means EF must take a principled stance culturally.
All of this is aimed at collaborating with all other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum ecosystem hold CROPS and its associated values in high regard. However, holding something in high regard is not the same as choosing to focus entirely and commit fully to it (for comparison in another field: I believe reducing animal cruelty is important, and I enjoy plant-based food, but I am not an unconditional vegan myself).
EF is still in transition, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the coming months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I’m just one person, but I can offer my answer from a technical perspective (along with some equally critical non-technical aspects).
The point is, Ethereum must be astonishing. We live in an era of rapid acceleration driven by highly intelligent AI and various other technologies. Maintaining the status quo with the EVM, making hard forks once or twice a year to optimize for users' short-term needs, is not exciting enough.
For some, "amazing" means 250-millisecond latency and 1 million TPS. I believe Ethereum taking that path is a mistake. Going as fast and as scalable as possible, only slightly more decentralized than other chains, is the road to mediocrity—and if we try that path, we will lose.
I believe Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive hardest to make a profound impact in another dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means:
Provably bug-free Ethereum. A goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have considered absurd and impossible just six months ago. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it is becoming achievable. So we should be pioneers in this area.
Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and under refined consensus will continue to be, the only chain that simultaneously possesses (i) traditional BFT-style properties—security with high fault tolerance under asynchronous conditions—and (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties—security against 49% attackers under synchronous conditions. To my knowledge, very few other chains have or plan to achieve this; Bitcoin pursues only (ii), and most other chains pursue only (i). Some may recall my persistent, uncompromising advocacy that Ethereum cannot rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue it from 34% node offline scenarios. This may work for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc., but it does not work for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash.
Minimize intermediaries. Protocols like smart contract wallets and Railgun currently require transactions to be sent through intermediaries to be included on-chain, which is frankly awkward and a persistent vulnerability. Therefore, we are working on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (along with EIP-7701 and years of prior work) to achieve true, general-purpose transaction submission minimization through public mempools and strong inclusion properties—covering not only secp256r1 but also privacy protocols and more. Kohaku is driving intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum out of a dystopian reality where our wallets don’t even verify the chain and send our private data to a dozen third-party servers—toward a brighter CROPS future.
Some of these goals may seem unreasonable—perhaps it’s “fine” if Ethereum only achieves 50%—but what if we rely on intermediaries while making the transition easy? Yet, only going halfway won’t deeply impress in the CROPS approach. That’s why we push for 100%.
Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, a major focus of research (especially on state scaling). Well-designed L2s can also help, particularly L2s optimized for specific applications (such as high-volume transactions, privacy, etc.). These goals are even compatible with significantly reduced slot times, thanks to Raul’s work on erasure coding in P2P networks and numerous other optimizations.
The highest-value asset on the Ethereum blockchain is ETH. Ethereum secures $250 billion worth of ETH. The properties of Ethereum I mentioned earlier are highly beneficial to the ETH asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, with most of the remainder—about $400 million in on-chain fiat—allocated to various open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware projects. In other words, certain aspects—or even essential elements—supporting the ETH asset extend beyond the scope of the EF. This is why we need other heroes—some of whom hold more ETH than the EF—to step in and help. The EF has recently been reflecting on how it will build relationships with other such organizations and provide them with the initial support they need.
EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a ship with more conviction—in some cases, a conviction that may be difficult to understand—but a more enduring ship, one suited to ensuring Ethereum brings meaningful value to the world. We thank everyone inside and outside the EF who helped make this possible.