Vitalik Buterin recently stated that his influence within the Ethereum Foundation will continue to decline, a shift that is part of the foundation’s current governance direction. According to him, the foundation does not intend to become the absolute core of the entire ecosystem or the permanent administrator of the network.
The board continues to expand.
Buterin said that the Ethereum Foundation board is expanding, and he does not hold any special authority over other board members. As the organizational structure continues to evolve, his influence within the foundation will further diminish—and this is precisely what he hopes to see.
He also emphasized that the foundation was never intended from the outset to serve as the network’s sole central authority. The ideal future state is for the foundation to operate in a more streamlined manner, creating more space for a broader range of ecosystem participants.
Treasury management shifts toward long-term sustainability
Regarding funding, Buterin stated that the Ethereum Foundation holds a relatively small amount of ETH, accounting for approximately 0.16% of the total ETH supply. According to him, this percentage is significantly lower than that of many other Layer 1 blockchains' underlying foundations.
- The foundation holds approximately 0.16% of the total ETH supply.
- The treasury management is being restructured.
- Fund usage places greater emphasis on long-term sustainability.
The foundation is currently refining its long-term treasury management approach to enhance sustainability and prioritize long-term operational resilience. This also means the foundation will reduce ETH sales in the future, rather than continuously increasing sell-offs to cover broader expenses.
Do not trade decentralization for performance
On the technical roadmap, Buterin criticized the industry's excessive focus on throughput and ultra-low latency. He argued that sacrificing decentralization and security to achieve 250-millisecond latency and one million transactions per second is not the right path for Ethereum.
He pointed out that if a project focuses solely on “faster and bigger” while only slightly more decentralized than other networks, it will ultimately lose its competitive edge. According to him, Ethereum needs to prioritize maintaining leadership in foundational capabilities—such as more reliable code, more robust on-chain consensus, and minimizing intermediaries—rather than competing purely on speed.