Vitalik's views on EF's future direction: it will reduce ETH sell-offs

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My personal views on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn).

First of all, this is my personal opinion. The board is not just me, and I do not have special powers beyond other members on the board. @aerugoettinea is the main person executing this transformation. My involvement is mainly on technical issues. The board is currently expanding, and my personal influence within the organization will continue to decline, frankly, that’s exactly what I want to see.

The 2025 era has brought many significant improvements to EF (Ethereum Foundation), enhancing its execution capability. Many issues have been resolved, and EF has benefited so far from increased efficiency and a stronger focus on specific goals. After these issues were addressed, early this year, I realized that the biggest remaining vulnerability this year is something else that has been bothering me: I often see people saying, “Vitalik (Vitalik) has said many beautiful words about Ethereum needing decentralization, privacy, and becoming a safe haven technology, but why doesn’t EF’s actions reflect that?”

Now, the voices you hear may be completely different. You might not feel any crisis at all, or even hear people saying that we are finally taking execution and business development (BD) seriously, and the main task now is to maintain this momentum, do better, faster. So, there may indeed be a real gap between you and me—that is, the kind of criticism I value most and which kind of criticism hurts me the most.

To give an analogy, let’s temporarily switch to another field.

Regarding Google, you might have one view: it’s a success story that has brought great benefits to humanity in organizing global information. You might have another view: they started with a beautiful idealism, but at some point, the corruption of mainstream corporate culture seeped in, and they completely abandoned the motto “Don’t be evil.”

My specific view of Google might fall somewhere in between. But if you could take me back to around 2008 and give me a button that, when pressed, could raise Google’s standards on “dogmatism” by two sigma (for example, granting Richard Stallman a permanent veto on certain key policies), I wouldn’t hesitate to press it.

Because a company’s choices are not the whole world, not even a country’s choice. Google’s past and present exist within the context of the tech industry: why has the world generally abandoned its early ideals and the foundation of “Don’t be evil,” shifting toward greed for economic benefits, a totalitarian vision of accelerating super artificial intelligence, infiltration by anti-social personalities, and submission to government-imposed thought control, surveillance, and war pressures (or even actively participating in them)? Therefore, a single company making different choices, positioning itself as what George Bernard Shaw called the “Unreasonable Man,” resisting the tide of the times, probably all large companies tend to bow to mainstream trends. This is part of my pluralist perspective.

This way of thinking is not only my personal view but also very close to what Aya (Aya) and others have in mind as “The Mandate.”

Now, how does this connect with EF’s role?

EF is not “the center of Ethereum,” but rather “a node with a clear goal, coexisting with other nodes.” We have always said EF should be a disaster, but people in the Ethereum ecosystem (including those inside EF) want us to be a disaster. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we become a disaster.

This is very important because EF is a limited organization with limited resources and organizational capacity. EF holds only about 0.16% of all ETH (a minority of individual ETH holders), whereas in other blockchains, “centralized” holdings of 10-50% are common. In terms of foundation finances, EF was initially designed to fulfill the scope of work outlined in the token issuance documents and other pre-release materials (building chain software; crossing borders, homeland, metropolis, and tranquil phases). This was fully completed by 2022; it turns out the design was not meant to be an eternal steward.

Therefore, today, EF chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue “longevity” rather than “breadth” (yes, this means we will reduce ETH sales). EF’s focus is specifically on activities that are critical to Ethereum’s success as an anti-censorship/anti-capture, open, privacy, and security system (CROPS), and that would not happen without such efforts. This involves making tough choices, sometimes even shifting activities and highly respected individuals outside EF. Highly skilled technical talent, public reputation, and mission recognition related to CROPS moving outside EF are actually necessary if we want important tasks to attract external capital. This also means EF must demonstrate a clear stance culturally.

All of this is to cooperate with all other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum world also highly respect CROPS and related values. But high respect does not mean committing fully to specializing in the initial domain and dedicating ourselves entirely (on the other hand: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, I like vegetarianism, but I am not a fully unconditional vegan).

EF is still in a transitional period, and we expect its long-term new form to stabilize in the coming months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am just one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (with some key non-technical aspects as well).

The core host, Ethereum must be astonishing. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and rapid technological acceleration. “Maintaining the status quo of EVM, supplemented by one or two hard forks per year to optimize for short-term user needs” is unappealing.

Some say, “Shocking” means: 250 milliseconds latency and 1 million TPS (transactions per second). I believe Ethereum’s attempt to go down this path is a mistake. Chasing speed and necessary scalability while only slightly increasing decentralization compared to other chains is a path to mediocrity; if we try this, we will definitely lose.

I believe Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive hardest in another dimension: that is CROPS. This means:

• Proven bug-free Ethereum (Provously bug-free Ethereum). This was considered an absurd and impossible goal by all network security researchers until about six months ago. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it is within reach. Therefore, we should lead in this area.
• Usable chain consensus (usable chain consensus). Ethereum is, and will continue to be with mainstream consensus, the only chain that has both of the following: (i) traditional BFT-style properties, i.e., safe under asynchronous conditions before reaching high fault tolerance; (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties, i.e., capable of withstanding up to 49% attackers in synchronous environments. As I see it, no other chain has or plans to have this; Bitcoin only pursues (ii), and most other chains only pursue (i). Some may remember I argued strongly for this, “irrationally” insisting that relying on social consensus and hard forks to rescue Ethereum from the 34% dilemma is not worthwhile. For chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, this is fine. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, it’s not worth it.
• Minimizing internal smart contract wallets, protocols like Railgun, etc., which must be compressed on-chain by sending transactions, is frankly embarrassing and a persistent vulnerability. Therefore, pushing forward work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and Frontline), aiming to achieve internal minimalization of transaction sending in a truly universal way, with shared mempool and strong inclusion properties, covering not only secp256r1 but also privacy protocols and more. Kohaku is pushing small-scale solutions at the user layer, moving Ethereum away from wallets that even do not verify the chain, sending data to a dozen third-party servers, toward a brighter CROPS future.

The goal here is “irrational”—perhaps Ethereum can “get by” with only 50% implementation—if we rely on it, but making switching easy? But only achieving 50% will not allow Ethereum to reach “extreme shock” at the CROPS level. So, we pursue 100%.

Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is a major focus of research (especially in state expansion). Well-designed L2 solutions can also help, especially those optimized for specific applications (like high-frequency trading, privacy, etc.). Thanks to Raul’s work on erasure coding peer-to-peer and other optimizations, these goals are even compatible with significantly reduced slot times.

From a perspective, the most valuable “product” of the Ethereum blockchain is ETH assets. Ethereum has $250 billion worth of ETH as financial security. The attributes of Ethereum I mentioned above are very favorable for ETH assets. I hold nearly 90% of my net worth in ETH, with most of the rest in about $40 million of on-chain fiat, each dollar allocated to open-source biotech, software, or hardware projects. Nonetheless, some aspects supporting ETH assets—even necessary aspects—have gone beyond EF’s responsibilities. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than EF) to step up and help. Recently, EF has been thinking deeply about how to connect with other such organizations and provide initial support.

Compared to previous years, EF will become a smaller ship, with several other more opinionated ships—in some cases, their opinions may be hard for ordinary people to understand—but it will be a longer-lasting ship, one capable of ensuring Ethereum brings more meaningful change to the world. We thank everyone inside and outside EF who is helping to realize this goal.

Article link: https://www.hellobtc.com/kp/du/05/6327.html

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