Author: Changan, Biteye Content Team
The past year has not been easy for Ethereum. It has been chased by high-performance public chains while repeatedly questioned by the community: moving too slow.
Early this morning, Vitalik published a lengthy article, directly responding to the ultimate anxiety of the entire Web3 industry, and re-answering a question that determines Ethereum's survival:
What exactly will make Ethereum win?
Is it higher TPS, faster transactions, stronger marketing, or decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, and security—these harder to explain but more long-term qualities?
1. EF is Not Vitalik's 'One-Man Show'
In the eyes of many users and institutions, the EF (Ethereum Foundation) sounds like the "official" entity. Combined with Vitalik's immense personal halo, it's easy for outsiders to equate the EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. But this is precisely contrary to Ethereum's revered "decentralization" faith.
In this article, Vitalik clearly states that the EF board is not his sole decision; he has no special privileges internally. Currently, a large amount of the transition work is being executed by Aya Miyaguchi, while he himself returns more purely to the technical aspects.
The EF board consists of more than just Vitalik, and he does not have more power than other members within it. Much of the transition work is carried out by Aya Miyaguchi, and he primarily participates in technical issues.
Therefore, the EF's goal is not to become a bigger center for Ethereum, but rather to shrink its own power boundaries: focus deeply on the things it should do, and hand over the things it shouldn't handle to others in the ecosystem.
2. Becoming Google Would Mean Real Defeat
Vitalik mentioned that since 2025, the EF has made many improvements in execution, efficiency, and focus.
In the past, external criticism of the EF mainly focused on "moving too slow," "insufficient execution," "not paying enough attention to applications and commercial partnerships." Therefore, after 2025, the EF started becoming more efficient and more focused on specific goals.
But Vitalik says that this year, the problem he perceives has changed.
He often sees people questioning: Vitalik and the EF keep emphasizing that Ethereum should be decentralized, protect privacy, and resist censorship, but the EF's actual actions don't reflect these values at all.
Previously, people worried that the EF wasn't fast enough, but now Vitalik is more concerned: if the EF just becomes faster, better at marketing, and more like an ordinary tech company, Ethereum might end up placing its original values in a secondary position.
To illustrate this point, Vitalik used Google as an analogy.
Google also had strong idealism in its early days, such as "Don't be evil." But as the company grew, it increasingly resembled a standard large tech company: having to consider commercial interests, regulatory pressure, platform power, and user data.
3. EF's New Positioning: Not the Center of Ethereum, But a Node in the Ecosystem
Vitalik redefined the EF's positioning: the EF is not the center of Ethereum, but a node within the Ethereum ecosystem.
In the past, many people indeed viewed the EF as the core of Ethereum. When problems arose in the Ethereum ecosystem, people would ask why the EF wasn't solving them.
But what Vitalik wants to emphasize this time is: the EF cannot and should not do everything.
Vitalik also mentioned: the EF currently holds only about 0.16% of the total ETH supply, which is even less than many large ETH holders possess. In comparison, many other blockchain foundations might control 10% to 50% of their native tokens.
This means the EF does not have that much capital, nor that great an organizational capacity, and should not become Ethereum's permanent manager.
Therefore, the EF will use its resources more cautiously in the future, directing funds and people towards those most foundational, long-term, least commercializable, yet most important things for Ethereum.
4. EF's Core Mission: CROPS
Vitalik repeatedly mentions a keyword in this article: CROPS.
Simply put, CROPS refers to the things Ethereum values most: Censorship Resistance, Control Resistance, Openness, Privacy, and Security.
This is also the direction already clearly stated in the EF's 2024 Mandate: the EF's mission is not to become a bigger ecosystem company, nor to simply pursue more users, higher revenue, or a higher token price, but to help Ethereum uphold these foundational promises.
So Vitalik is essentially further clarifying the boundaries: the EF will not expand around "everything beneficial to Ethereum," but will focus more specifically on CROPS.
The EF is responsible for guarding the most foundational, long-term, and least commercializable parts, while other tasks like applications, marketing, ecosystem growth, asset support, and institutional partnerships need to be shouldered by more external teams, capital, and community organizations.
5. Chasing Only TPS Leads to Mediocrity
Vitalik says Ethereum must feel impressive. But he doesn't believe this distinction comes merely from 250ms latency, 1 million TPS, or faster transaction confirmations.
Many new public chains are challenging Ethereum with higher TPS, lower latency, and cheaper fees. Solana, BNB Chain, Hyperliquid, and some new L1s primarily promote being faster, smoother, and more suitable for trading.
Vitalik is not denying the importance of scaling. Ethereum, of course, also needs to improve performance, and directions like L2, state scaling, and lower slot time will continue to be advanced.
Because if the competition is only about speed, it's hard for Ethereum to always be the most extreme one. There will always be chains willing to sacrifice more decentralization for higher TPS, lower latency, and better short-term experience.
If Ethereum goes down this path, it might end up becoming a "slightly more decentralized high-performance chain," which is not Ethereum's goal.
What Vitalik wants to emphasize more is that Ethereum's real strength should lie in censorship resistance, control resistance, openness, privacy, and security.
Speed is important, of course, but speed is not everything for Ethereum.
Ethereum's truly irreplaceable quality should be: while continuing to improve performance, it still upholds these harder, more long-term foundational capabilities.
6. Three Technical Directions Highlighted by Vitalik
After discussing that Ethereum shouldn't only chase TPS, Vitalik also gave several technical directions he considers more important.
1. Provably Bug-Free Ethereum
The first direction is formal verification.
Simply put, it means using stricter, more mathematically-proven methods to verify the correctness of the Ethereum protocol, clients, and related code.
In the past, "proving Ethereum has no bugs" sounded almost impossible. Because blockchain systems are too complex, with massive interactions between code, clients, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts.
But Vitalik believes that with the development of AI-assisted formal verification, this is becoming more realistic.
This also shows he isn't treating AI as just an application-layer trend, but is more concerned with whether AI can help Ethereum strengthen its underlying security.
2. Available Chain Consensus
The second direction is consensus security.
Vitalik mentions that Ethereum wants to possess a special capability: even if the network environment is poor, or a portion of nodes have problems, Ethereum should not easily rely on human coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to resolve issues.
He believes that for some chains, if large-scale node outages occur, recovery relying on project teams, validators, and community coordination might be acceptable. But for systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash that emphasize censorship resistance and neutrality more, this dependency is dangerous.
Because once a system needs to rely on coordination by a few people to recover, it exposes centralization risks.
3. Reducing Intermediary Dependency
The third direction is reducing reliance on intermediaries.
Currently, many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols, when trying to send transactions on-chain, still need to rely on some intermediary services, such as RPCs, third-party servers, transaction relays, bundling services, etc.
These intermediary services can make the user experience smoother, but they also bring problems.
For example, if a certain intermediary service refuses to process your transaction, your transaction might not go through. If a wallet needs to send data to a third-party server, your privacy might be exposed.
Vitalik believes this state does not align with Ethereum's intended direction.
So he mentions work like FOCIL, EIP-8141, EIP-7701, and Kohaku, which essentially solve the same problem: bringing users closer to using Ethereum directly, rather than having to rely on a bunch of intermediary services.
7. Assets Brought to the Forefront, But Won't Become an ETH Pump Organization
Vitalik also unusually placed ETH assets in a very important position.
He said, from a financial perspective, Ethereum's most valuable product is ETH. Ethereum currently secures about $250 billion worth of ETH.
He also mentioned that nearly 90% of his personal net worth is in ETH, with most of the remainder being on-chain fiat currency, which has already been allocated to open-source biotechnology, software, and hardware projects.
He acknowledges that ETH is Ethereum's most important asset. Ethereum's security, censorship resistance, privacy, and openness will ultimately affect ETH's long-term value.
But matters related to ETH's value, such as: marketing, institutional communication, asset narratives, and ecosystem growth, are more suitable to be undertaken by teams and organizations outside the EF.
In Conclusion
The most notable aspect of Vitalik's lengthy article is not that the EF will become smaller, nor that the EF will sell less ETH, but that he re-answered a more fundamental question:
What does Ethereum want to become?
The direction he provides is: a smaller EF, a more focused Ethereum, with others in the ecosystem taking on more roles.
This path doesn't sound as sexy and may not please the short-term market the most. But it also re-explains why Ethereum remains special: it wants to win not just in speed, cost, and transaction experience, but in the harder-to-achieve foundational capabilities of being more censorship-resistant, harder to capture, more privacy-focused, more secure, and more open.
The EF in the future might be a smaller ship, but what Vitalik hopes it guards is what should least be diluted about Ethereum.
