Vitalik explains Ethereum Foundation's new direction: downsizing, focusing, and tackling the hardest problems

Original author: Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum
Original compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Highlights: The Ethereum Foundation (EF) holds only 0.16% of all ETH, while other “central foundations” of other public chains often hold 10–50%. With limited resources, EF is making a difficult choice: giving up “being big and comprehensive,” and focusing on things others won’t do but that are crucial for Ethereum’s resistance to censorship, privacy, and security—even if that means letting great people leave EF to attract external funding.

Vitalik believes that in an era of AI and technological acceleration, Ethereum shouldn’t pursue a mediocre path of “just a bit faster than others, just a bit more decentralized.” Instead, it should achieve something truly astonishing on the CROPS dimensions (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security).

Below are some of my thoughts on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn).

First of all, let me make it clear that these are only my personal views. The board isn’t just me, and I don’t have more special powers than other board members. @aerugoettinea is doing most of the work to carry out this transition. My involvement is mainly focused on technical issues. The board is expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to decrease; honestly, that’s exactly what I want.

2025 has brought many important improvements to EF and its execution capabilities. Many issues have been resolved, and EF continues to benefit from increased efficiency and a stronger focus on specific goals.

After those problems were addressed, earlier this year the biggest lingering issue I perceived turned into another thing that has been troubling me for a long time: I often see people saying, “Vitalik says Ethereum needs decentralization, needs privacy, needs to become a refuge technology. Those words are good—but why can’t EF’s actions reflect that?”

Now, you may be hearing different voices. You may not even feel a sense of crisis—instead you may hear people saying that we’re finally taking execution and business development seriously, and that our main task is to keep this direction and do it better and faster.

So, between you and me, there may indeed be a real difference—in what kind of criticism I value most, and in the fact that which critics can make me feel pain through their critiques.

Let’s switch to another area for the sake of an analogy.

When it comes to Google, you can have one belief: that it’s a success story that has brought many benefits to humanity in terms of organizing the world’s information. You can also have another belief: that they began with a beautiful idealistic start, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they gradually completely abandoned the “don’t be evil” slogan.

My specific view of Google is probably somewhere between the two. But if you took me back to around 2008, and gave me a button that would let me shift Google’s direction by one or two standard deviations toward “creed”—for example, giving Richard Stallman permanent veto power over certain key policies—I would press it immediately.

Why? Because a company’s choices are not the choices of the entire world, and not even the choices of a country.

Google existed and still exists within the context of a technology industry—an industry that, overall, has been drifting away from the early idealistic roots of “don’t be evil,” toward greed for economic interests, an extreme vision of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by societal psychopaths, and a shameful surrender (or, worse, active participation) in ideological control, surveillance, and warfare by governments.

Therefore, having one company do something different—positioning itself as the “unreasonable person” that George Bernard Shaw talked about, resisting the tide of the times—would be better for freedom, for the balance of power, and for overall social stability. It would be better than all big companies yielding to mainstream trends. This is part of my version of pluralism.

This line of thinking isn’t just mine either; it’s not far from Aya’s and others’ ideas in Mandate.

So how does all of this relate to EF’s role?

EF is not “the center of Ethereum,” but “a node with a clear objective, coexisting with other nodes.” We’ve always said EF should be the latter, but many people in the Ethereum ecosystem (even within EF) hope we will be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure we become the latter.

This is especially important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources, and limited organizational capacity. EF holds only about 0.16% of ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), while in other blockchains, it’s the norm for “central foundations” to hold 10–50%.

Financially, EF was originally designed to complete the limited scope of work defined in the token sale documents and other pre-launch materials (building chain software; completing Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which were all completed by 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal manager.

Therefore today, EF chooses to pursue longevity rather than breadth with its remaining resources (yes, this means selling fewer ETH). EF focuses on activities that are crucial to the success of Ethereum as a censorship-resistant/capture-resistant, open, private, and secure system—activities that otherwise would not happen.

This means making difficult choices, and in some cases, even activities that we highly approve of and people we highly respect will leave EF.

People with outstanding technical talent, public respect, and alignment with the mission and CROPS values leaving EF is actually necessary if we want important tasks to attract external funding. This also means that EF must take a culturally principled stance.

All of this is to cooperate with all the other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But high respect and choosing to focus and fully commit to a particular area are not the same thing (for a comparison in another domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegetarianism, but I’m not an unconditional vegan myself).

EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize within 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 also some equally critical non-technical aspects).

At the core is that Ethereum must be astonishing. We live in a highly intelligent AI and various other technologies accelerating era. “Keeping the status quo of the EVM, with one or two hard forks per year to optimize users’ short-term needs” isn’t interesting enough.

For some people, “astonishing” means: 250 millisecond latency and 1 million TPS. I think Ethereum taking that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, only slightly more decentralized than other chains—this is the road to mediocrity. If we try that, we will lose.

I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should work hardest to be profoundly astonishing in another dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means:

A provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that, about 6 months ago, all network security researchers would have considered absurd and impossible. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it’s getting close to being feasible. So we should become pioneers in this area.

Usable chain consensus. Ethereum is—and will continue to be—the only chain that simultaneously has (i) traditional BFT-style properties—safety at the highest fault tolerance level under asynchronous conditions—and (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties—security against 49% attackers under synchronous conditions.

As far as I know, almost no other chains have or are planning to do this. Bitcoin only pursues (ii); most other chains only pursue (i).

Some people will remember the fight I put up for this—to insist in an unyielding way that Ethereum cannot rely on social consensus and hard forks to save Ethereum from the impact of 34% of nodes going offline. This can work for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. But it doesn’t work for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or zcash.

Minimizing intermediaries. Smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc., must send transactions through intermediaries in order to get them on-chain—frankly, that’s embarrassing, and it’s a persistent weakness.

So we’ve been working on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701, and years of work before that), using public mempools and strong inclusion properties to truly minimize the intermediaries in transaction sending in a truly universal way—not only covering secp256r1, but also privacy protocols, and more.

Kohaku is pushing at the user layer to minimize intermediaries—pulling Ethereum out of the dystopian reality where our wallets don’t even verify the chain, and our private data is sent to a dozen third-party servers—toward a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are unreasonable—maybe Ethereum achieving only 50% is “fine”—if we rely on intermediaries but make switching easy. But going only halfway won’t make Ethereum profoundly astonishing in the CROPS way. So we’re pushing for 100%.

Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is a major focus of research (especially in state expansion). Well-designed L2s can help too, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (for example, large volumes of transactions, privacy, etc.). These goals are even compatible with significantly reducing slot times, thanks to Raul’s work on erasure-coding P2P and many other optimizations.

The highest-value “product” of the Ethereum blockchain in financial terms is the asset ETH. Ethereum safeguards $250 billion worth of ETH.

The Ethereum properties I mentioned above are very favorable for this asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is ETH, and most of the remainder is about $40 million in on-chain fiat—every dollar of which has already been allocated to some open-source biotech, software, or hardware project.

That means supporting certain aspects of ETH as an asset—even necessary aspects of it—goes beyond EF’s scope. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than EF) to step in and help. EF has been thinking about how it will build relationships with other organizations like this and provide the initial support they need.

EF will be a smaller vessel than in previous years, and a more principled one—in some cases, in ways that may be hard to understand—but a more enduring one, fit for ensuring that Ethereum brings meaningful things to the world. We thank everyone inside and outside EF who helps make this happen.

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