Author:Vitalik Buterin
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Deep Tide Intro: The Ethereum Foundation holds only 0.16% of all ETH, while other public chains' "central foundations" often hold 10-50%. With limited resources, EF is making a difficult choice: abandoning "big and complete," focusing on tasks that others won't do but are crucial to Ethereum's censorship resistance, privacy, and security—even if it means letting excellent people leave EF to attract external funding. Vitalik believes that in an era of AI and technological acceleration, Ethereum should not pursue a mediocre path of being "a little faster and a bit more decentralized than others," but should aim to be stunning on the CROPS dimensions (Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, Security).
The following are some of my views on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn).
First, a disclaimer: this is just my personal view. The board is not just me, and I don't have any special power on the board compared to other directors. @aerugoettinea has been doing most of the work in executing this transition. My input is mainly focused on technical issues. The board is expanding, and my power within the organization will continue to diminish—which, to be honest, is what I want.
2025 brought many important improvements to EF and its execution capabilities. Many problems were resolved, and EF still benefits from increased efficiency and a stronger focus on specific goals. After solving those problems, earlier this year, the biggest perceived remaining issue for me became something else that has always bothered me: I often see people saying, "Vitalik talks well about Ethereum needing decentralization, privacy, and being a sanctuary technology, but why don't EF's actions reflect that?"
Now, you might be hearing different voices. You might not sense a crisis at all; instead, you might hear that we are finally taking execution and business development seriously, and our main task is to maintain this direction and do it better and faster. Then there may indeed be a real difference between you and me—in which kind of criticism I value most and which critics can make me feel pain through their criticism.
To give an analogy, let's temporarily switch to another field.
About Google, you can hold one belief that it's a success story, bringing many benefits to humanity by organizing the world's information. You can also hold another belief that it had an idealistic and beautiful beginning, but at some point, the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they gradually and completely abandoned the "Don't be evil" motto.
My specific view of Google is somewhere between these two. But if you took me back to around 2008, gave me a button to shift Google one or two standard deviations in a "dogmatic" direction—say, giving Richard Stallman permanent veto power over certain key policies—I would press it immediately.
Why? Because a company's choices are not the world's choices, or even a country's choices. Google existed then and exists now within the context of a tech industry that is overall drifting away from its early idealistic, "don't be evil" roots toward greed for economic gain, extremist visions of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by societal pathologies, and ignoble submission (or worse, active participation) to governmental pressures for ideological control, surveillance, and war. Therefore, a company doing something different, positioning itself as what George Bernard Shaw called "the unreasonable man," resisting the tide of the times, would be better for freedom, balance of power, and overall social stability than all large companies yielding to mainstream trends. This is part of my version of pluralism.
This line of thinking isn't just mine; it's also not far from what Aya and others think in Mandate.
So, how does all this relate to EF's role?
EF is not "the center of Ethereum," but "a node with a clear purpose, coexisting with other nodes." We've always said EF should be the latter, but many people in the Ethereum ecosystem (even within EF) want us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure we will become the latter.
This is especially important because EF is a limited organization with limited resources and organizational capacity. EF holds only about 0.16% of ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), while in other blockchains, it's common for a "central foundation" to hold 10-50%. Financially, EF was initially designed to accomplish a limited scope of work defined in token sale documents and other pre-launch materials (building chain software; completing Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), all of which was completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal governor.
Therefore, today, EF chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity rather than breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). EF focuses on activities crucial to the success of Ethereum as a censorship-resistant/anti-capture, open, private, and secure system—activities that wouldn't happen otherwise. This means making tough choices; in some cases, even activities we highly endorse and people we highly respect will leave EF. Having people with exceptional technical talent, public respect, and even alignment with the mission and CROPS values leave EF is actually necessary if we want important tasks to attract external funding. It also means EF takes a culturally principled stance.
All of this is done in collaboration with all other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But high respect is not the same as choosing to focus and fully commit to something (to compare with another field: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegetarian food, but I'm not an unconditional full vegetarian myself).
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 give my answer from a technical perspective (there are equally critical non-technical aspects).
The core is that Ethereum must be stunning. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and various other technological accelerations. "Maintaining the status quo EVM, with one or two hard forks per year to optimize for users' short-term needs" is not interesting enough.
For some, "stunning" means: 250 ms latency and 1 million TPS. I think it's a mistake for Ethereum to go down that path. Being as fast and scalable as possible, only slightly more decentralized than other chains, is a path to mediocrity; if we try this path, we will lose.
I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive hardest to be profoundly stunning in another dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means:
Provably bug-free Ethereum. This was a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have considered absurd and impossible about 6 months ago. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it's approaching feasibility. So we should be pioneers in this.
Usable chain consensus. Ethereum is, and will continue to be under streamlined consensus, the only chain that simultaneously has (i) traditional BFT-style properties—safety up to high fault tolerance under asynchrony, and (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties—security against 49% attackers under synchrony. To my knowledge, almost no other chain has or plans for both; Bitcoin pursues only (ii), most other chains pursue only (i). Some will remember me fighting hard for this, being unreasonable in insisting that Ethereum cannot rely on social consensus and hard forks to save Ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. That might be okay for hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. But it's not okay for Bitcoin or Ethereum or, say, Zcash.
Minimization of intermediaries. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like Railgun, etc., have to send transactions through intermediaries to get on-chain is frankly embarrassing and an ongoing point of vulnerability. Therefore, we are working hard on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of prior work) to achieve truly generic, minimized-intermediary transaction sending through public mempools and strong inclusion properties—covering not just things like secp256r1 but also privacy protocols, etc. Kohaku is pushing for minimization of intermediaries at the user layer, pulling Ethereum out of the dystopian present world—where our wallets don't even verify the chain and send our private data to a dozen third-party servers—towards a brighter CROPS future.
Some of these goals are unreasonable—maybe Ethereum would be "fine" achieving only 50%—what if we rely on intermediaries but make switching easy? But going only 50% of the way won't make Ethereum profoundly stunning in the CROPS way. So we push to 100%.
Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, a major focus of research (especially on state expansion). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially those optimized for specific applications (e.g., high transaction volume, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly reducing slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P and many other optimizations.
The most financially valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is the ETH asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion worth of ETH. The properties of Ethereum I mentioned above are very favorable for the ETH asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is ETH, and most of the rest is about $40 million of on-chain fiat, every dollar of which is already allocated to some open-source biotech, software, or hardware project. That is to say, supporting certain aspects of the ETH asset—even necessary aspects—falls outside EF's scope. That's where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than EF) to step in and help. EF has been thinking lately about how it will build relationships with such other organizations and provide them with the initial support they need.
EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a ship with more of a stance—in some cases, a stance that might be difficult to understand—but a more enduring ship, a ship fit for ensuring that Ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to everyone inside and outside EF who is helping make this happen.
