Vitalik Reorients the Ethereum Foundation's Role in the Ecosystem

Written by Changan, Biteye Content Team

Over the past year, Ethereum has had a tough time—chased by high-performance public blockchains and repeatedly questioned by the community for moving too slowly.

This morning, Vitalik published a lengthy article directly addressing the entire Web3 industry’s ultimate anxiety, revisiting a question that determines Ethereum’s survival:

What does Ethereum really need to win?

Higher TPS, faster transactions, and stronger marketing—or decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, and security—things that are harder to explain but more long-term?

To many users and institutions, the EF sounds like an “official” entity. Combined with Vitalik’s personal prominence, outsiders easily equate the EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. Yet this directly contradicts Ethereum’s core belief in decentralization.

In this lengthy article, Vitalik clearly stated that the EF board is not under his sole control and that he has no special privileges within the organization. Much of the current transition work is being carried out by Aya Miyaguchi, while he himself has more purely returned to focusing on technology.

The EF board consists of more than just Vitalik; he does not have any special authority over other members. Much of the transition work is carried out by Aya Miyaguchi, who primarily focuses on technical issues.

So instead of expanding itself into a larger Ethereum hub, EF will now narrow its scope: focusing deeply on what it should do and leaving what it shouldn’t handle to others in the ecosystem.

Vitalik stated that since 2025, the EF has made significant improvements in execution, efficiency, and goal focus.

In recent times, external criticism of EF primarily focused on its "slow pace," "lack of execution," and "insufficient emphasis on applications and business partnerships." As a result, since 2025, EF has become more efficient and placed greater focus on concrete goals.

But Vitalik said that by this year, the issues he felt had changed.

He often sees people raising questions: Vitalik and the EF have consistently emphasized that Ethereum should be decentralized, protect privacy, and resist censorship, but the actual actions taken by the EF do not reflect these values.

Previously, people were concerned that the EF wasn’t moving fast enough, but now Vitalik is more worried that if the EF simply becomes faster, more market-savvy, and more like a typical tech company, Ethereum might ultimately subordinate its original values.

To illustrate this point, Vitalik used Google as an analogy.

Google originally had strong idealistic roots, such as its motto "Don't be evil." But as the company grew, it increasingly became like a standard large tech company: needing to consider business interests, regulatory pressures, platform power, and user data.

Vitalik redefined EF's role: EF is not the center of Ethereum, but rather one node within the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the past, many people actually viewed EF as the core of Ethereum. Whenever issues arose in the Ethereum ecosystem, people would ask why EF wasn’t addressing them.

But what Vitalik wants to emphasize this time is that the EF cannot and should not do everything.

Vitalik also mentioned that the EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH, even less than many large ETH holders. In comparison, foundations of many other blockchains may control 10% to 50% of the tokens.

This means EF has less funding and less organizational capacity, and should not be the permanent manager of Ethereum.

Therefore, EF will now use its resources more carefully, directing funding and personnel toward the most fundamental, long-term, and hardest-to-commercialize initiatives that are nonetheless critical to Ethereum.

In this article, Vitalik repeatedly mentions a key term: CROPS.

In simple terms, CROPS refers to the key values Ethereum prioritizes: censorship resistance, control resistance, open source, privacy, and security.

This is also a direction already clearly defined in EF’s mandate this year: EF’s mission is not to become a larger ecosystem company, nor to simply pursue more users, higher revenue, or a higher token price, but to help Ethereum uphold these foundational commitments.

So this time, Vitalik is essentially drawing a clearer boundary: the EF will no longer expand to encompass “everything beneficial to Ethereum,” but will instead focus more closely on CROPS.

EF is responsible for safeguarding the most fundamental, long-term, and least commercializable aspects, while other tasks—such as applications, market growth, ecosystem expansion, asset backing, and institutional partnerships—require greater involvement from external teams, capital, and community organizations.

Vitalik said Ethereum must feel cool. But he doesn’t believe this standout quality is just about 250ms latency, 1 million TPS, or faster transaction confirmations.

Many new blockchains are challenging Ethereum with higher TPS, lower latency, and cheaper transaction fees. Solana, BNB Chain, Hyperliquid, and several new L1s are all focused on being faster, smoother, and more suited for trading.

Vitalik is not denying the importance of scaling. Ethereum will certainly continue to improve performance, and efforts in areas such as Layer 2 solutions, state scaling, and lower slot times will still move forward.

Because if speed is the only factor, Ethereum will struggle to always be the absolute fastest. There will always be blockchains willing to sacrifice more decentralization for higher TPS, lower latency, and a better short-term experience.

If Ethereum follows this path, it may ultimately become only “a slightly more decentralized high-performance chain,” which is not Ethereum’s goal.

Vitalik wants to emphasize that Ethereum's true strengths lie in censorship resistance, anti-control, open source, privacy, and security.

Speed is certainly important, but it’s not everything about Ethereum.

Ethereum’s true uniqueness lies in maintaining these more challenging, long-term foundational capabilities while continuing to improve its performance.

After explaining that Ethereum shouldn't be judged solely by TPS, Vitalik also outlined several technical directions he considers more important.

Ethereum with provably bug-free code

The first direction is formal verification.

In simple terms, it means verifying the correctness of the Ethereum protocol, clients, and related code using a stricter, more mathematically rigorous approach.

In the past, "proving that Ethereum has no bugs" sounded almost impossible, because blockchain systems are too complex, with extensive interactions between code, clients, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts.

But Vitalik believes that this is becoming more realistic with the advancement of AI-assisted formal verification.

This also shows that he doesn't view AI as just an application-layer trend, but is more focused on whether AI can help strengthen Ethereum's underlying security.

2. Available chain consensus

The second direction is consensus security.

Vitalik mentioned that Ethereum aims to possess a unique capability: even under poor network conditions or when some nodes fail, Ethereum should not easily rely on human coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to resolve issues.

He believes that for some blockchains, recovery through coordination by project teams, validators, and the community may be acceptable if a large number of nodes go offline. However, for systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash, which place greater emphasis on censorship resistance and neutrality, such dependence is dangerous.

Because if the system requires coordination by only a few individuals to recover, it exposes centralized risks.

3. Reduce dependence on intermediaries

The third direction is reducing reliance on intermediaries.

Many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still rely on intermediary services, such as RPCs, third-party servers, transaction relays, and bundling services, when submitting transactions to the chain.

These intermediary services can improve the user experience but may also introduce issues.

For example, if an intermediate service refuses to process your transaction, your transaction may fail to go through. If your wallet needs to send data to a third-party server, your privacy could be compromised.

Vitalik believes this state does not align with Ethereum's intended direction.

So he mentioned works like FOCIL, EIP-8141, 7701, and Kohaku, which essentially all address the same issue: bringing users closer to using Ethereum directly, rather than relying on a stack of intermediary services.

Vitalik also rarely placed ETH assets in a prominent position.

He said that, from a financial perspective, Ethereum's most valuable product is ETH. Ethereum currently secures approximately $250 billion in ETH.

He also mentioned that nearly 90% of his net worth is in ETH, with most of the remainder held as on-chain fiat, which has already been allocated to open-source biotechnology, software, and hardware projects.

He acknowledged that ETH is Ethereum's most important asset. Ethereum's security, censorship resistance, privacy, and openness will ultimately impact ETH's long-term value.

However, matters related to ETH’s value—such as marketing, institutional communications, asset storytelling, and ecosystem growth—are better handled by teams and organizations outside of the EF.

The most notable aspect of Vitalik’s long article is not that the EF will become smaller or that it will sell less ETH, but that he readdresses a more fundamental question:

What is Ethereum really meant to become?

His direction was: make EF smaller, have Ethereum focus more, and have others in the ecosystem take on greater roles.

This path may not sound glamorous or necessarily cater to short-term market demands, but it redefines why Ethereum remains unique: it aims to win not just in speed, cost, and transaction experience, but in harder-to-censor, harder-to-capture, more privacy-focused, more secure, and more open foundational capabilities.

EF may become a smaller ship in the future, but Vitalik hopes it holds onto what Ethereum must never dilute.