Editor's Note: In the early hours of May 25, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy post on X. In this post, Vitalik re-explained, from a personal perspective, his expectations for Ethereum's future development and his vision for the role and function of the EF.
Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum should not bow to mainstream trends, but must be impressive, and needs to uphold the CROPS values of censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security. Vitalik also explicitly stated that "the highest-value product of Ethereum is ETH," and unusually revealed that nearly 90% of his personal net worth is in ETH.
Below is the full content of Vitalik's original post, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily.
Sharing some of my personal thoughts on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF).
First, these are just my personal views. I am not the only person on the board, and I don't have any special powers within the board more than other directors. Aya Miyaguchi is leading much of the execution work for this transition, while I am mainly providing input on technical matters. The board is also expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to decline in the future — frankly, that's what I want to see.
In this 2025 phase, the EF has made many important improvements in execution capabilities. Many issues have been resolved, and even today, the EF continues to benefit from greater efficiency and a more focused approach to specific goals. As these problems were gradually solved, around the beginning of this year, I realized that another issue that had been bothering me had become the biggest remaining problem.
I often see people saying things like — "Vitalik is always talking about how Ethereum should remain decentralized, should protect privacy, should be a sanctuary technology, but why don't the EF's actual actions reflect these principles?"
Of course, the voices you hear might be completely different. You might not sense any crisis at all, and might even hear people saying that we've finally started taking execution and business development (BD) seriously. Our main task now is to maintain this momentum, doing better and faster.
If that's the case, then there is likely a real disagreement between you and me — in which criticisms I value most, and which critics' words sting me the most.
An Analogy About Google
I'd like to illustrate with an example from another field.
Regarding Google, one belief you can hold is that it's a success story that has brought immense benefits to humanity by organizing the world's information; but you can also hold another belief: they had a good and idealistic beginning, but were gradually corrupted by mainstream corporate culture, slowly, step by step, completely abandoning their "Don't be evil" motto.
My personal specific views on Google probably lie somewhere between these two. However, if you could take me back to around 2008 and give me a button that, when pressed, would make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic" ideologically (e.g., giving Richard Stallman a permanent veto over certain key policies), I would press it without hesitation.
Why? Because a company's choices aren't just that company's choices; they affect an entire national system, even the whole world. The context in which Google has existed, past and present, is that the entire tech industry has been generally drifting away from its early idealism and "Don't be evil" roots, turning instead towards greed for economic gains, a full-on vision for accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and servile submission to (or worse, active participation in) government-imposed thought control, surveillance, and war pressure.
Therefore, if there is "one company" that can go against the grain, become what George Bernard Shaw called the "Unreasonable Man," and resist the trends of the times, then such an existence is actually more beneficial for freedom, balance of power, and the stability of society as a whole, compared to a scenario where all large companies bow to the mainstream.
This is part of how I understand "pluralism." This line of thinking isn't just my personal idea; it's actually not far from the direction of thought that Aya and others have been taking when formulating the EF's mission framework.
What Does This Mean for the Ethereum Foundation?
So, what does all this have to do with the role of the EF?
The EF is not "the center of Ethereum." On the contrary, the EF is "one node with specific functions, existing alongside other nodes." We've always said the EF should be the latter, but many people in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) want us to be 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 limited organizational capacity. The EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH (even less than many individual ETH holders), while many other blockchain's "central foundations" often hold 10%-50%. Financially, the EF was initially designed to fulfill the limited scope of work defined in the token sale documents and other pre-launch materials (developing on-chain software; navigating the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity phases), work which was fully completed in 2022.
The EF was not designed to be an eternal steward. Therefore, today's EF chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue "long-term existence" rather than "infinite expansion" (yes, this also means we will sell less ETH).
The EF will focus specifically on things that are crucial for Ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private, and secure system (i.e., the CROPS dimensions), and which likely would not get done if we didn't do them. This means making hard choices; in some cases, even activities we highly value and people we deeply respect will move outside the EF. In fact, if we want important tasks to attract external capital, it is necessary for some individuals with extremely high technical capabilities, public reputation, and even strong alignment with the CROPS mission and values to remain outside the EF.
This also means the EF will take culturally distinct stances. All of this is not to oppose other parts of the Ethereum ecosystem, but to collaborate. We know that many other organizations in the Ethereum world also highly value CROPS and related values, but "highly valuing" is not the same thing as "choosing to specialize and fully commit to an area." To use another example, I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but I myself am not a strict vegan.
The EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize in the coming months. What are the guiding principles for this new form?
To reiterate, I'm just one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (of course, with critical non-technical aspects as well).
The Technical Core: Ethereum Must Be Impressive
The core idea is that Ethereum must be impressive. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and accelerated development of various other technologies. A system that is a "status quo EVM, performing one or two hard forks per year to optimize for users' short-term needs" is completely unappealing.
For some, "impressive" means 250ms latency and 1 million TPS. I think it would be a mistake for Ethereum to try and go down that road. Pursuing being as fast and scalable as possible, while only being slightly more decentralized than other public chains, is a path to mediocrity, and if we try to walk it, we will surely lose.
I think Ethereum should scale, but I think Ethereum should put its greatest effort into being deeply impressive in another dimension — the CROPS dimension (Censorship-Resistant, Open, Private, Secure). This includes the following specific goals.
First, build a provably bug-free Ethereum. Until about 6 months ago, all cybersecurity researchers would have considered this an absurd and impossible goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it's on the verge of becoming possible. Therefore, we should be the pioneers pushing this forward.
Second, achieve highly available on-chain consensus. Ethereum has been, and will continue to be with the introduction of lean consensus, the only chain that simultaneously possesses both: (i) traditional BFT-style properties, guaranteeing safety under asynchronous conditions even against high levels of fault tolerance; (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties, resisting attackers with up to 49% power under synchronous conditions.
To my knowledge, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it. Bitcoin only pursues (ii), while most other chains only pursue (i). Some might remember that I was once very insistent on this point — I was "stubborn" in thinking that Ethereum should not rely on social consensus and hard forks to handle situations where 34% of nodes go offline. For chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc., this doesn't matter. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, it's unacceptable.
Third, "Intermediary minimization," minimizing middlemen. In fact, it's quite embarrassing now that smart contract wallets, protocols like Railgun, still need to send transactions through intermediaries to be included on-chain. This is also always a source of system fragility.
Hence, we are pushing forward with FOCIL, EIP-8141 (and 7701 and related work over previous years), aiming to establish a truly universal transaction sending mechanism with as little reliance on intermediaries as possible, possessing public mempool and strong inclusion properties. This applies not only to secp256r1 but also to privacy protocols and more scenarios.
Kohaku is also pushing "de-intermediation" at the user layer, moving Ethereum away from its current dystopian reality — where wallets don't even validate the chain itself, but send our private data to a dozen third-party servers — and toward a future more aligned with CROPS ideals.
Some of the above goals might seem "irrational" — maybe Ethereum would do "just fine" achieving only 50% — for example, what if we rely on intermediaries but make switching them easy? But, achieving only 50% will not make Ethereum "deeply impressive" on the CROPS path. So we must pursue 100%.
Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is also a major research focus (especially on state scaling). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (e.g., high-frequency trading, privacy, etc.). Thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P and many other optimizations, these goals can even be compatible with significantly reduced Slot Time.
Looking Ahead
From a financial perspective, the Ethereum blockchain's highest-value "product" is the ETH asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion worth of ETH. And the Ethereum properties I mentioned earlier are actually very beneficial for the value of ETH as an asset.
Nearly 90% of my personal net worth is in ETH, with most of the remainder being around $40 million in on-chain fiat, every dollar of which has already been allocated to some open-source biotech, software, or hardware project.
But at the same time, there is work essential for supporting the value of the ETH asset — and this work does not fall within the EF's remit. At such times, we need other "heroes" to step up and help (some of whom even hold more ETH than the EF). The EF has also recently started thinking more about how to build relationships with these organizations and provide them with the necessary initial support.
The EF of the future will be more like a "small boat" than it has been in the past few years. It will have more stances, some of which might even be difficult to understand, but it will also be longer-lasting and better suited to ensuring that Ethereum truly brings something meaningful to the world.
We are grateful to everyone, both inside and outside the EF, who is helping to make all this happen.
