Author: Vitalik
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
Sharing some of my thoughts on the future direction of @ethereumfndn (the Ethereum Foundation).
First, these are just my personal opinions. The board is not just me, and I do not have any special privileges on the board that other members don't have.
@aerugoettinea is handling most of this transition. My contributions are primarily on technical issues. The board is expanding, and my own power within the organization will continue to diminish, which honestly is what I want.
The year 2025 brought many important improvements to the Ethereum Foundation (EF), enhancing its execution capabilities. Many problems were resolved, and to this day, EF still benefits from these efficiency gains and the sharper focus on specific goals.
With these issues settled, earlier this year, the biggest omission I perceived was a very different feeling, one that has always troubled me: I often see people saying, "Vitalik talks beautifully about Ethereum being decentralized, private, and becoming a sanctuary technology, but why doesn't EF's actions reflect that?"
You might hear a different voice. You might not sense any crisis at all, or even hear people saying that we are finally getting serious about execution and BD (business development), and that the main task now is to continue down this path, doing it better and faster.
If so, then there likely is a real difference between you and me—a difference in which type of criticism I value most, and which type of critic can most effectively hit a nerve with their critique.
Let's switch to another field for an analogy.
You could view Google as a success story that has brought many benefits to humanity in organizing the world's information.
You could hold another view: they had a beautiful, idealistic start, but at some point, the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they gradually and thoroughly abandoned the "Don't be evil" motto.
My personal view of Google is somewhere in between. But if you took me back to around 2008 and gave me a button that would increase Google's "dogmatism" by one or two standard deviations, for example, granting Richard Stallman permanent veto power over certain key policies, I would press it without hesitation.
Why? Because a company's choices are not the same as the world's choices, or even a nation's choices.
Google existed and exists within the broader context of a tech industry that is drifting away from its early "don't be evil" idealistic roots, chasing financial interests, embracing the all-consuming grand narrative of accelerating superintelligence, being infiltrated by unscrupulous characters, and cowardly (or even actively) succumbing to governmental pressures on ideological control, surveillance, and war.
That is precisely why it is more beneficial for freedom, balance of power, and the stability of the whole society for a company to do something different, to position itself as what George Bernard Shaw called "an unreasonable man," resisting the tide of the times, than for all large companies to succumb to the mainstream trend. This is also part of what I understand as diversity.
This line of thinking isn't just mine; it's not far from what Aya and others were thinking when drafting the Mandate.
So, what does all this have to do with EF's role?
EF is not "the center of Ethereum" but "a node with clear responsibilities alongside other nodes." We've always said EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure we become the latter.
This is especially important because EF is an institution with limited resources and organizational capacity. EF holds only about 0.16% of all ETH (less than many individual ETH holders), while in other blockchains, it's common for the "central foundation" to hold 10% to 50% of the supply.
Financially, EF was originally designed to complete a limited scope of work defined in the token sale documents and other pre-launch materials (building chain software; going through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was never designed to be a permanent manager.
Therefore, today's EF chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity, rather than blindly expanding (yes, this means we will sell less ETH). EF will explicitly focus on activities that are crucial to Ethereum's success as a censorship-resistant, capture-resistant, open, private, and secure system—activities that wouldn't happen without our push.
This means making hard choices: in some cases, even activities we highly endorse and individuals we deeply respect will operate independently of EF.
For important tasks to attract external capital, and for individuals who are technically strong, highly respected by the public, and even highly aligned with EF's mission and CROPS (Censorship-Resistance, Resilience, Openness, Privacy, Security) values to move outside EF, this is actually a necessary path. It also means EF will take a culturally distinct stand.
All this is done to work in synergy with all other parts of Ethereum. We also know that many participants in the Ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values.
But high respect is not the same as choosing to specialize and fully commit to an area (an analogy from another field: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, I enjoy eating vegetarian, but I am not myself an unconditional vegan).
EF is still in transition, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize in the coming months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I'm just one person, but I can answer from a technical perspective (and of course, there are crucial non-technical aspects too).
At its core is this: Ethereum must be amazing. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and accelerating technological development. A path of "maintaining the EVM status quo, doing one or two hard forks a year to meet users' short-term needs" is unimaginative.
For some, "amazing" means 250ms latency, 1 million TPS. I think it would be a mistake for Ethereum to go down that road. Blindly pursuing speed and scalability while being only slightly better than others in decentralization is a path to mediocrity, and if we do it, we will fail.
I think Ethereum needs to scale. But I think Ethereum should go all out, strive to be deeply impressive in another dimension—the CROPS dimension. This means:
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Provably bug-free Ethereum. About six months ago, all cybersecurity researchers would have thought this an absurd and impossible goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it is on the verge of becoming reality. Therefore, we should be leaders in this area.
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Highly available chain consensus. Ethereum is and will remain, even under lean consensus, the only chain with both:
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(i) traditional BFT-style properties, meaning remaining secure under extremely high fault tolerance even in asynchronous networks; (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties, meaning being able to withstand up to 49% attackers in synchronous networks.
As far as I know, almost no other chain has this or is planning for it; Bitcoin only pursues (ii), most other chains only pursue (i).
Some might remember that I "unreasonably" argued for this, insisting that Ethereum must never rely on social consensus and hard forks to recover from a failure where 34% of nodes go offline.
That might be acceptable for hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc., but absolutely not for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash. -
Minimizing intermediaries. Frankly, it is embarrassing that smart contract wallets, protocols like Railgun must send transactions through intermediaries to get on-chain, and this has always been a point of fragility.
That's why we are pushing FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of prior work), aiming to achieve minimization of intermediaries for transaction sending in a truly universal way, leveraging the public mempool and strong inclusion properties—covering not just secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and more.
Kohaku is pushing for minimization of intermediaries at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo where "wallets don't even verify the chain, sending our private data to a dozen third-party servers" toward a brighter CROPS future.
Some of these goals are "unreasonable"—maybe Ethereum would be "okay" with only 50%? If we rely on intermediaries but make switching easy? But being only 50% there doesn't make Ethereum deeply impressive in the CROPS dimension. So we must aim for 100%.
Fortunately, these goals are not in conflict with high TPS, and this is a key focus of current research (especially regarding state layer scaling). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially those optimized for specific applications (e.g., high-frequency trading, privacy).
Thanks to Raul's work on erasure coding P2P and many other optimizations, these goals are also compatible with significantly shorter block times.
From a financial perspective, the most valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is ETH as an asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion worth of ETH. The Ethereum properties I mentioned above are extremely beneficial to ETH as an asset.
Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and the vast majority of the rest is about $40 million in on-chain fiat, every dollar of which is allocated to some open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware project.
That said, some aspects of supporting ETH as an asset (even necessary ones) fall outside EF's responsibilities. In these areas, we need other heroes to step up (some of whom hold more ETH than EF). EF has also been thinking deeply recently about how to connect with such organizations and provide them with the necessary initial support.
Compared to previous years, EF will be a smaller ship, a ship with a more distinct stance. Some stances may even be momentarily hard to understand, but it will be a ship that sails longer, a ship that ensures Ethereum truly makes a difference for the world. Sincere thanks to everyone inside and outside EF working towards this.
