Vitalik personally "dismantles" the Ethereum Foundation

Over the past year, Ethereum's days have not been easy. On one side, it’s being chased by high-performance public chains, and on the other, it’s repeatedly questioned by the community: actions are too slow.

Early this morning, Vitalik published a long article, directly addressing the industry's ultimate anxiety in Web3, and re-answering a question that determines Ethereum’s survival:

What does Ethereum rely on to win?

Is it higher TPS, faster transactions, stronger marketing, or the more difficult but longer-term values like decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, and security?

1. EF is not Vitalik’s “One-Man Show”

In the eyes of many users and institutions, EF sounds like “official.” Plus, with the halo of Vitalik’s personal reputation, outsiders tend to equate EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. But this directly contradicts Ethereum’s core belief in “decentralization.”

In this long article, Vitalik clearly states that the EF Board of Directors is not under his sole control; he has no special privileges internally. Currently, much of the transformation work is carried out by Aya Miyaguchi, while he himself is returning more purely to technical matters.

The EF Board of Directors is not just Vitalik; he does not have more power than other members. Many transformation tasks are led by Aya Miyaguchi, and he mainly focuses on technical issues.

Therefore, EF’s next step is not to make itself a bigger Ethereum central authority, but to shrink its scope of power: do deep work where it’s needed, and delegate other tasks to the broader ecosystem.

2. If You Live Like Google, You’ve Truly Lost

Vitalik says that since 2025, EF has made many improvements in execution, efficiency, and focus on goals.

In the past, external criticism of EF mainly centered on “actions being too slow,” “lack of execution,” and “not enough emphasis on applications and commercial partnerships.” So after 2025, EF started becoming more efficient and more goal-oriented.

But Vitalik says that this year, he perceives a different problem.

He often sees doubts raised: Vitalik and EF emphasize decentralization, privacy, and censorship resistance, but what EF actually does doesn’t reflect these values at all.

Previously, the concern was that EF was too slow; now, Vitalik worries that if EF just becomes faster, more market-savvy, and more like an ordinary tech company, Ethereum might end up placing its original values secondary.

To illustrate this, Vitalik makes an analogy with Google.

Google also had strong idealistic colors early on, like “Don’t be evil.” But as the company grew, it increasingly resembled a standard large tech firm: considering commercial interests, regulatory pressures, platform power, and user data.

3. EF’s New Positioning: Not the Center of Ethereum, but a Node in the Ecosystem

Vitalik redefined EF’s positioning: EF is not the core of Ethereum, but a node within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Many people previously treated EF as the core of Ethereum. When problems arose in the Ethereum ecosystem, they would ask why EF didn’t solve them.

But this time, Vitalik wants to emphasize: EF cannot do everything, and it shouldn’t do everything.

He also mentions that EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH, even less than many large ETH holders. In contrast, many other blockchain foundations control between 10% and 50% of tokens.

This means EF doesn’t have vast funds or organizational capacity, and it shouldn’t be the eternal manager of Ethereum.

Therefore, EF will be more cautious in deploying its resources—investing money and people into the most fundamental, long-term, hard-to-commercialize but critically important aspects of Ethereum.

4. The Core Mission of EF: CROPS

Vitalik repeatedly mentions a key term in this article: CROPS.

Simply put, CROPS refers to the most valued aspects of Ethereum: censorship resistance, control resistance, open source, privacy, and security.

This is also the direction explicitly outlined in EF’s 2023 Mandate: EF’s mission is not to turn itself into a larger ecosystem company, nor merely to pursue more users, higher revenue, or higher token prices, but to help Ethereum uphold these foundational commitments.

So, Vitalik is further clarifying boundaries: EF will not expand around “all things beneficial to Ethereum,” but will focus more on CROPS.

EF is responsible for safeguarding the most fundamental, long-term, and hardest-to-commercialize parts, while application development, market growth, ecosystem expansion, asset backing, and institutional partnerships should be undertaken by external teams, capital, and community organizations.

5. Don’t Just Chase TPS, or You’ll Become Mediocre

Vitalik says Ethereum must make people feel it’s awesome. But he doesn’t believe this is only about 250ms latency, 1 million TPS, or faster transaction confirmation.

Many new public chains are challenging Ethereum with higher TPS, lower latency, and cheaper fees. Solana, BNB Chain, Hyperliquid, and some new L1s all focus on faster, smoother, and more trading-friendly performance.

Vitalik does not deny the importance of scaling. Ethereum should indeed improve performance—L2 solutions, state sharding, lower slot times, and other directions will continue to advance.

Because if it’s only about speed, Ethereum will find it hard to remain the most extreme. There will always be chains willing to sacrifice more decentralization for higher TPS, lower latency, and better short-term experience.

If Ethereum follows this path, it might end up just being “a slightly more decentralized high-performance chain,” which is not Ethereum’s goal.

Vitalik emphasizes that Ethereum’s true strengths are censorship resistance, control resistance, open source, privacy, and security.

Speed is important, but it’s not everything for Ethereum.

What makes Ethereum irreplaceable is its ability to continue improving performance while maintaining these more difficult, long-term foundational capabilities.

6. Vitalik Highlights Three Technical Directions

After discussing that Ethereum shouldn’t just chase TPS, Vitalik also points out several technical directions he considers more important.

1. Provably Bug-Free Ethereum

The first is formal verification.

Simply put, using more rigorous, mathematically close methods to verify the correctness of Ethereum protocols, clients, and related code.

In the past, “proving Ethereum is bug-free” sounded almost impossible. Because blockchain systems are complex, with extensive interactions among code, clients, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts.

But Vitalik believes that with the development of AI-assisted formal verification, this is becoming more feasible.

This also shows that he doesn’t see AI as just an application layer trend, but is more focused on whether AI can help strengthen Ethereum’s underlying security.

2. Available Chain Consensus

The second direction is consensus security.

Vitalik mentions that Ethereum aims to have a special capability: even in poor network conditions or when some nodes fail, Ethereum should not rely easily on human coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to resolve issues.

He believes that some chains can accept large-scale node outages if they rely on project teams, validators, and community coordination to recover. But for systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash, which emphasize censorship resistance and neutrality, such reliance is dangerous.

Because if the system needs to depend on a small group of people to recover, it exposes centralization risks.

3. Reducing Dependence on Intermediaries

The third direction is reducing reliance on intermediaries.

Currently, many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still depend on intermediary services when sending transactions to the chain, such as RPC nodes, third-party servers, relays, and bundlers.

While these intermediaries improve user experience, they also introduce issues.

For example, if a certain intermediary refuses to process your transaction, it might not go through. If a wallet needs to send data to a third-party server, your privacy could be exposed.

Vitalik believes this isn’t aligned with Ethereum’s intended direction.

Therefore, he mentions work like FOCIL, EIP-8141, 7701, Kohaku, which fundamentally aim to solve the same problem: enabling users to interact with Ethereum more directly, without relying heavily on middlemen.

7. Assets Are Back in the Spotlight, But Won’t Become ETH Pumping Organizations

Vitalik also unusually emphasizes ETH assets.

He says that from a financial perspective, the most valuable product of Ethereum is ETH. Currently, Ethereum secures about $250 billion worth of ETH.

He also mentions that nearly 90% of his net worth is in ETH, with the rest mostly in on-chain fiat, allocated to open-source biotech, software, and hardware projects.

He admits that ETH is Ethereum’s most important asset. The security, censorship resistance, privacy, and openness of Ethereum ultimately influence ETH’s long-term value.

But matters related to ETH’s value—such as marketing, institutional communication, asset narratives, and ecosystem growth—are better handled by teams and organizations outside EF.

In conclusion

The most noteworthy aspect of Vitalik’s long article isn’t that EF will shrink or sell less ETH, but that he re-answers a more fundamental question:

What does Ethereum ultimately want to become?

His proposed direction is: a smaller EF, a more focused Ethereum, with others in the ecosystem taking on more roles.

This path may sound less glamorous and might not please the short-term market, but it also redefines why Ethereum remains special: what it aims to win isn’t just speed, cost, and transaction experience, but more difficult-to-censor, harder-to-capture, privacy-valuing, secure, and open underlying capabilities.

EF may become a smaller vessel in the future, but Vitalik hopes it will safeguard the most critical, least diluted aspects of Ethereum.