Author: Vitalik
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
Share some of my thoughts on the future direction of @ethereumfndn (Ethereum Foundation).
First, this is merely my personal opinion. The board consists of more than just me, and I do not have any privileges on the board that other members do not have.
@aerugoettinea is handling most of the work for this transition. My contributions have mainly been on technical issues. The board is expanding, and my own authority within the organization will continue to diminish—and to be honest, that’s exactly what I want.
The year 2025 brought many important improvements to the Ethereum Foundation (EF), enhancing its execution. Many issues were resolved, and to this day, the EF continues to benefit from these efficiency gains and a sharper focus on specific goals.
As these issues were resolved, earlier this year I noticed a different, persistent omission that had been bothering me: I often hear people say, "Vitalik talks beautifully about Ethereum being decentralized, private, and a sanctuary technology—but why doesn't the EF's actual behavior reflect these values?"
What you hear might be a different voice. You may not feel any sense of crisis at all, and perhaps you’ve even heard people say we’re finally starting to take execution and BD (business development) seriously—our main task now is to keep moving forward on this path, doing it better and faster.
If that's the case, then there is likely a genuine difference between you and me—the difference lies in which type of criticism I value most and which critics are most able to strike a nerve with me.
For example, let’s temporarily switch to another field.
For Google, you can view it as a success story that has brought many benefits to humanity in organizing the world's information.
You could also take the view that they started with a beautiful, idealistic vision, but at some point, the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they gradually abandoned the "don't be evil" motto entirely.
My personal view of Google is somewhere in between. But if you could take me back to around 2008 and give me a button that, when pressed, would raise Google’s adherence to dogmatism by one or two standard deviations—say, granting Richard Stallman permanent veto power over certain key policies—I would press it without hesitation.
Why? Because a company's choice does not equate to the world's choice, nor does it represent a nation's choice.
Google has always operated within a tech industry context characterized by a departure from its early idealistic "don't be evil" roots, shifting instead toward financial gain, embracing the grand narrative of accelerating superintelligence that consumes all, being infiltrated by bad actors, and weakly succumbing to government pressures regarding ideological control, surveillance, and warfare—even actively participating in them.
Therefore, it is more beneficial to freedom, power balance, and societal stability for a company to do something different, positioning itself as what George Bernard Shaw called an "unreasonable person" resisting the tide of the times, than for all large corporations to conform to mainstream trends. This is also part of what I understand as diversity.
This perspective is not just my own; it is also quite close to what Aya and others had in mind when they originally formulated the Mandate.
So, how does all of this relate to EF’s role?
EF is not "the center of Ethereum," but rather "one node among others, with clearly defined responsibilities." We have always emphasized that EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even 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 is an organization with limited resources and capacity. The EF holds only about 0.16% of all ETH (less than many individual ETH holders), whereas in other blockchains, it is common for a "central foundation" to hold between 10% and 50% of the supply.
Financially, the EF was originally designed to accomplish a limited scope of work defined in the token sale documents and other pre-launch materials (building chain software; progressing through the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity phases), all of which were fully completed by 2022; it was never intended to be a permanent manager.
Therefore, today the EF is choosing to allocate its remaining resources toward long-term goals rather than blindly expanding (yes, this means we will sell less ETH). The EF will clearly focus on activities that are critical to the success of Ethereum as a censorship-resistant, capture-resistant, open, private, and secure system—and that would not happen without our involvement.
This means making difficult decisions: in some cases, even our highly regarded initiatives and deeply respected individuals will operate independently of EF.
For important initiatives to attract external capital, it is essential that individuals with strong technical expertise, public respect, and deep alignment with EF’s mission and CROPS values (censorship resistance, resilience, openness, privacy, security) step out of EF. This also means EF will take a clear cultural stance.
All of this is to work in harmony with all other parts of Ethereum. We also recognize that many participants in the Ethereum ecosystem hold CROPS and its associated values in high regard.
But deep respect does not equate to choosing specialization and fully committing to a particular field (using another analogy: I believe reducing animal cruelty is important, and I enjoy eating vegetarian 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 technical perspective (though there are also critical non-technical aspects).
The core idea is this: Ethereum must be amazing. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and rapid technological advancement. The approach of "keeping the EVM as is and doing one or two hard forks per year to meet users' short-term needs" is unimaginative.
For some, "amazing" means 250-millisecond latency and 1 million TPS. I believe Ethereum took the wrong path down this route. Chasing speed and scalability while only slightly outperforming others in decentralization is a path to mediocrity—and if we do this, we will inevitably fail.
I believe Ethereum needs to scale. But I think Ethereum should go all out and achieve something truly astonishing in another dimension—the CROPS dimension. This means:
Provably bug-free Ethereum. About six months ago, every cybersecurity researcher would have considered this an absurd and impossible goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it is on the verge of becoming reality. Therefore, we should be the leader in this field.
High-availability chain consensus. Ethereum is now, and will continue to be under lean consensus, the only chain with both of the following properties:
(i) Traditional BFT-style properties, namely maintaining security with high fault tolerance even in an asynchronous network; (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties, namely the ability to withstand up to 49% attackers in a synchronous network.
As far as I know, few other chains have this capability or are planning for it; Bitcoin only pursues (ii), and most other chains only pursue (i).
Some may remember that I once passionately argued, albeit unreasonably, that Ethereum must never rely on social consensus or hard forks to recover from a failure where 34% of nodes go offline.
This is acceptable for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, and Tempo, but absolutely not for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash.Minimize intermediaries. Frankly, it’s embarrassing and has always been a vulnerability that smart contract wallets and protocols like Railgun must route transactions through intermediaries to get on-chain.
That’s why we’re advancing FOCIL and EIP-8141 (along with 7701 and years of prior work) to achieve minimized mediation in transaction submission through a truly universal approach, leveraging public mempools and strong inclusion properties—not only for secp256r1, but also for privacy protocols and many other scenarios.
Kohaku is driving minimization of intermediaries at the user level, pulling Ethereum away from its dystopian现状 where 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 are "unreasonable"—perhaps Ethereum completing only 50% is "acceptable"? What if we rely on intermediaries but make switching easy? But achieving only 50% won’t make Ethereum profoundly impressive on the CROPS dimension. So we must strive for 100%.
Fortunately, these goals are not in conflict with high TPS, which is also a key focus of current research (especially scaling the state layer). Well-designed L2 solutions can also provide support, particularly L2s optimized for specific applications (e.g., high-frequency trading, privacy).
Thanks to Raul's work on erasure coding in P2P networks and many other optimizations, these goals are also compatible with significantly reducing block times.
From a financial perspective, the most valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is ETH as an asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion worth of ETH. The Ethereum characteristics I mentioned above are highly beneficial to ETH as an asset.
Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, with the vast majority of the remainder—approximately $40 million in on-chain fiat—allocated to various open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware initiatives.
That said, certain aspects of supporting ETH as an asset—even essential ones—extend beyond the EF’s scope. In these areas, we need other heroes to step up (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF). The EF has recently been deeply considering how to connect with such organizations and provide them with the necessary initial support.
Compared to previous years, EF will be a smaller ship, one with a clearer stance. Some of these positions may even be difficult to grasp at first, but it will be a ship that sails longer, one capable of ensuring Ethereum brings real meaning to the world. Heartfelt thanks to everyone inside and outside the EF who has contributed to this effort.