Editor's Note: In the early hours of May 25th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy post on X. In the article, Vitalik reinterpreted his personal expectations for Ethereum's future development and the role planning of the EF.
Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum should not succumb to mainstream trends but must be impressive, while adhering to 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.
The following 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 board member, and I do not have any special power over other board members. Aya Miyaguchi is leading much of the execution work in this transformation, while my main involvement is providing input on technical issues. The board is also expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to decline in the future—frankly, this is what I want to see.
During the 2025 phase, the EF made many important improvements in execution capability. Many issues were resolved, and to this day, the EF continues to benefit from higher efficiency and a more focused approach to specific goals. As these problems gradually resolved, around the beginning of this year, I realized that another matter that had been bothering me had become the biggest lingering issue.
I often hear people say things like—"Vitalik always talks about Ethereum remaining decentralized, protecting privacy, and becoming a sanctuary technology, but why don't the EF's actual actions reflect these ideas?"
Of course, the voices you hear might be completely different. You might not feel any sense of crisis at all, or you might even hear people saying that we are finally taking execution and business development (BD) seriously. Our main task now is to maintain this momentum and do it better and faster.
If that's the case, there is likely a real disagreement between you and me—in terms of which criticism I value most and which critic's words sting me the most.
An Analogy About Google
I want to use an example from another field to illustrate.
About Google, you could hold one belief that it is a success story, bringing great benefits to humanity by organizing the world's information; but you could also hold another belief: it had a beautiful and idealistic beginning but was gradually corrupted by mainstream corporate culture, slowly and step by step completely betraying the "Don't be evil" motto.
My personal view of Google specifically likely lies 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 ideologically more "dogmatic" by one or two standard deviations (e.g., granting Richard Stallman permanent veto power over certain key policies), I would press it without hesitation.
Why? Because the choices of a company are not just that company's choices; they affect the entire national system and even the whole world. The context in which Google existed in the past and exists now is that the entire tech industry is generally drifting away from its early idealism and "Don't be evil" roots, turning towards greed for economic gain, a full vision of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by antisocial personalities, and kowtowing to (or worse, actively participating in) government-imposed thought control, surveillance, and war pressure.
Therefore, if there is "a company" that can go against the grain and become what George Bernard Shaw called the "Unreasonable Man," resisting the trends of the times, then compared to all large companies succumbing to mainstream trends, such an existence is actually more beneficial for freedom, balance of power, and the stability of the entire society.
This is part of my understanding of "pluralism." This line of thinking is not just my personal idea; it is 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, how does all this relate to the role of the EF?
The EF is not "the center of Ethereum"; on the contrary, the EF is "a node with a clear function, coexisting with other nodes." We have 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 organizational capabilities. The EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH (even less than many individual ETH holders), while many other blockchain "central foundations" typically 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 stages), all of which was fully completed in 2022.
The EF was not originally designed to be an eternal steward. Therefore, the EF today 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 specifically focuses on things that are crucial for Ethereum as a censorship-resistant/anti-capture, open, private, and secure system (i.e., the CROPS dimensions) and that would not be done if we didn't do them. This means making difficult choices, and in some cases, even activities we highly value and people we highly respect will move outside the EF. In fact, if we want important tasks to attract external capital, it is necessary for some people with extremely high technical capabilities, public reputation, and even high alignment in mission and CROPS values to remain outside the EF.
This also means the EF will take a culturally distinct stance. 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 identify with CROPS and related values, but "highly identifying" is not the same thing as "choosing to specialize and fully commit to a certain area." To give another example, I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but I myself am not a thorough 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 of this new form?
To reiterate, I am just one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (and also key non-technical aspects).
Technical Core: Ethereum Must Be Impressive
The core is that Ethereum must be impressive. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and the accelerated development of various other technologies. A system that is a "status quo EVM, with one or two hard forks per year to optimize short-term user needs" is utterly unattractive.
For some, "impressive" means 250ms latency and 1 million TPS. I think it is a mistake for Ethereum to try to go down this path. Pursuing being as fast as possible, as scalable as possible, while only being a little more decentralized than other public chains, is a path to mediocrity, and if we try to go down this path, we will inevitably lose.
I think Ethereum should scale, but I think Ethereum should put its greatest effort into being impressively compelling in another dimension—that is, the CROPS dimension (Censorship resistance, Openness, Privacy, Security). This includes the following specific goals.
First, building 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, this is on the verge of being achievable. Therefore, we should be the pioneers pushing for this.
Second, achieving highly available on-chain consensus. Ethereum was in the past, and after introducing lean consensus will continue to be, the only chain that simultaneously possesses the following characteristics: (i) having traditional BFT-style properties, guaranteeing safety even in asynchronous environments facing high fault tolerance; (ii) having Bitcoin PoW-style properties, resisting attackers with up to 49% stake in synchronous environments.
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 I was once very insistent on this—I "stubbornly" believed that Ethereum could not rely on social consensus and hard forks to deal with a situation 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 is unacceptable.
Third, "Intermediary minimization," minimizing intermediaries. In fact, it's quite embarrassing that now smart contract wallets, protocols like Railgun, still need to send transactions through an intermediary to be included on-chain, and this is always a source of system fragility.
Therefore, we have been pushing for FOCIL, EIP-8141 (and 7701 and related work over many years before that), with the goal of establishing a truly universal transaction sending mechanism that minimizes reliance on intermediaries, with public mempool and strong inclusion properties. This applies not only to secp256r1 but also to privacy protocols and more scenarios.
Kohaku is also pushing for "de-intermediation" at the user layer, moving Ethereum away from its current dystopian state—where wallets don't even validate the chain itself but send our private data to a dozen third-party servers—and towards a future more aligned with CROPS principles.
Among the three goals above, some might seem "irrational"—maybe Ethereum could be "just fine" achieving only 50%—for example, what if we rely on intermediaries but make switching intermediaries easy? However, achieving only 50% would not make Ethereum "impressively compelling" on the CROPS path. So we 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 those 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 highest-value "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is the ETH asset. Ethereum protects $250 billion worth of ETH. And the Ethereum features I mentioned earlier are actually very beneficial to 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 currency, every dollar of which has already been allocated to some open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware project.
But at the same time, there are some tasks necessary to support the value of the ETH asset—and these tasks do not fall within the EF's responsibility. At this time, we need other "heroes" to step up and help (some of whom hold even 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.
In the future, the EF will be more like a "small boat" than in the past few years. It will be more principled, some stances might even be hard to understand, but it will also last longer and be more suitable for ensuring that Ethereum truly brings something meaningful to the world.
We thank everyone, inside and outside the EF, who has helped make all this happen.
