Author: Jocy, Founder of IOSG
Ethereum doesn't need another leap of technical faith; it needs a Musk-style compromise.
When it comes to the ETHLabs matter, the first reaction for many is "a second foundation," but I think that's asking the wrong question. Five former core EF researchers, funded by BitMine, SharpLink, and Lubin—the first being the world's largest ETH treasury company, sitting on over 5 million ETH—they didn't fork the foundation but filled a gap intentionally left by the EF. The most intriguing part is that this move wasn't initiated by Vitalik; it was done by the ecosystem for him. The fact that an organization is beginning to take shape around the founder itself is a vote of no confidence from the market in "governance by inaction, staying small and decentralized." This isn't a forum vote; it's a capital vote.
I've been thinking lately about the difference between Musk and V.
Musk's talent has never been the rockets themselves. It's that he truly understands how business works, where the money comes from, what users want, and he's willing to get his hands dirty with the toughest work, willing to postpone Mars to first secure the Moon. He masters the real world first, then lets technology reach for it. V is the opposite; he starts from the purest technology and values, expecting reality to grow around it.
This path worked in the past decade. Because there were no other choices back then; killer apps like ICOs, DeFi, NFTs all emerged from the community themselves. Ethereum was lucky enough that in each cycle, someone built something new on it. But today there are too many choices. Luck won't always be on your side.
Today in the Ethereum Rebirth group, I see two voices. One says what Ethereum lacks is a killer app on the level of Starlink and a clear business direction. The other says it lacks BD, a compromise with commercial reality. I don't think these two views are contradictory at all; they are two sides of the same coin. What Ethereum lacks is not another technical roadmap, but someone who truly gets down into the trenches, understands business, and wrestles with real-world applications.
So my expectation for V is very concrete. Not for him to write a prettier whitepaper. I hope he first seriously studies how Musk builds businesses, how he reads an industry, and then focuses the vast majority of his energy on one thing: figuring out what applications Ethereum can actually run in the real world. Until this is clear, all technical narratives are hanging in the air.
And the real problem with the EF, the harshest criticism comes from an insider. Dankrad Feist's words stuck with me—those who left were all believers in CROPS, the problem isn't strategy, it's management; the brain drain is a real negative for Ethereum. The weight of this statement lies in showing that the cure isn't direction, but the organization itself. And the sickness of an organization can't be cured by a founder who always stands half a step away, unwilling to get his hands dirty.
The new model is a small EF plus a bunch of independent steward nodes, with ETHLabs, Etherealize each making their own calls. This actually validates the direction I've been talking about: the single foundation model can't hold anymore; responsibility must be distributed. But the path they're taking is more radical than I imagined. It seems more decentralized, but the problems are actually greater. With multiple nodes making decisions, who aligns the agenda, who arbitrates disagreements, where does cohesion come from? It's easy to disperse the checkbook; dispersing direction without shattering is the real challenge.
My own answer is that this kind of cohesion can ultimately only come from ETH's value binding as a common reference asset, not from any organization or any single person.
This is also why V said in his article in May that the Foundation was never the center of Ethereum, just an ordinary node in the ecosystem, holding only 0.16% of ETH. Maintaining ETH's value is not something the Foundation can manage; it requires major holders in the ecosystem, who hold more ETH than it does, to step up. I agree with this assessment. But cohesion can't be bound by the money of major holders alone—the prerequisite for binding cohesion is first having a real-world narrative that everyone can understand and is willing to bet on together.
There's another unavoidable point. The so-called independence is currently a declaration, not a fact. Lubin is both the CEO of ConsenSys and the Chairman of SharpLink; the funders and the beneficiaries are the same group, with research funded by people holding multi-billion dollar ETH positions making directional bets. ETHLabs' response is an independent grants administrator disbursing funds, quarterly reports, annual audits, and not touching the research agenda. The design is reasonable. But this kind of trust takes many years to earn, not something a press release can give.
Finally, the deepest layer. Scaling L1 itself is extremely difficult, and the current roadmap is still stuck at infra—MEV elimination, default privacy, ETH Pay, all necessary, but none answer the real threat. Ethereum's opponent is never Solana. It's that attention itself is migrating towards AI. This window is probably only 12 to 18 months. Infra won't win back attention. What can win it back is a founder truly focused on real-world applications, willing to get his hands dirty like Musk, and a ten-year narrative that makes top university graduates willing to give up OpenAI or Anthropic.
I still believe V's idealistic light hasn't gone out. But for that light to shine into reality, what's needed is not another gaze at the stars, but a stoop to enter the fray.
And the time left for this stoop is running out. Time is the only opponent here that doesn't negotiate with you.
