Vitalik Explains the Ethereum Foundation’s New Direction: Downsizing, Focusing, and Tackling the Hardest Problems
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Vitalik Explains the Ethereum Foundation’s New Direction: Downsizing, Focusing, and Tackling the Hardest Problems
Vitalik believes that, in an era of AI and accelerating technology, Ethereum should not pursue a mediocre path—being “a bit faster or slightly more decentralized than others”—but instead achieve stunning results along the CROPS dimensions.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Vitalik Buterin
Compiled by TechFlow
TechFlow Intro: The Ethereum Foundation (EF) holds only 0.16% of all ETH, whereas “central foundations” of other public blockchains commonly hold 10–50%. With limited resources, the EF faces a difficult choice: abandoning the “big and comprehensive” approach to focus instead on those critical tasks—such as enhancing censorship resistance, privacy, and security—that no one else will undertake but that are vital to Ethereum’s long-term health—even if that means allowing talented individuals to leave the EF to seek external funding. Vitalik argues that in an era of accelerating AI and technological progress, Ethereum must not settle for mediocrity—being “slightly faster or slightly more decentralized than others”—but must instead achieve breathtaking excellence along the CROPS dimensions: Censorship-resistance, Ropeness, Openness (as in open systems), Privacy, and Security.
Below are my thoughts on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn).
First, let me clarify: these are purely personal views. The Board does not consist solely of me, nor do I hold any special authority over other Board members. @aerugoettinea has led most of the work executing this transition. My own involvement centers primarily on technical issues. The Board is expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to diminish—a development I welcome frankly.
2025 brought many important improvements to the EF and its execution capacity. Numerous longstanding issues have been resolved, and the EF continues to benefit from increased efficiency and sharper focus on concrete goals. After those issues were addressed, the biggest remaining challenge I perceived earlier this year became another persistent concern: I frequently hear people say, “Vitalik says Ethereum needs decentralization, needs privacy, needs to be refuge technology—those are great words—but why don’t the EF’s actions reflect them?”
Now, you may hear different voices. You may not feel any sense of crisis at all; instead, you may hear people saying we’ve finally begun taking execution and business development seriously, and our main task is simply to stay on this path and do it better and faster. There may indeed be a real divergence between us—notably in which criticisms I value most, and which critics’ voices actually cause me discomfort.
Let’s switch domains for a moment, by way of analogy.
Regarding Google, you could hold the belief that it is a success story—one that has greatly benefited humanity by organizing the world’s information. Alternatively, you might believe it began with noble, idealistic aspirations, but at some point succumbed to mainstream corporate attitudes, gradually abandoning its “Don’t Be Evil” motto altogether.
My personal view of Google lies somewhere between those two poles. Yet if you transported me back to around 2008 and offered me a button that would shift Google’s trajectory one or two standard deviations toward doctrinal rigidity—for instance, 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 world’s choices—or even a nation’s choices. At that time—and still today—Google existed within a broader technology industry that was steadily drifting away from its early idealistic roots of “Don’t Be Evil,” toward greed for economic gain, extremist visions of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by sociopathic actors, and craven submission—or worse, active complicity—to governmental pressures for ideological control, surveillance, and warfare. In such a context, a single company choosing to do something different—to position itself as George Bernard Shaw’s “unreasonable man,” resisting the tide of the times—would serve freedom, balance of power, and societal stability far better than if all large corporations simply conformed to prevailing trends. This is part of my version of pluralism.
This line of thinking isn’t unique to me—it also closely aligns with Aya’s and others’ thinking in the Mandate.
So how does all this relate to the EF’s role?
The EF is not “the center of Ethereum,” but rather “one node with a clear mandate, coexisting alongside other nodes.” We’ve always said the EF should be the latter—but many across the Ethereum ecosystem (and even internally) have wanted us to be the former. Now, we’re taking concrete steps to ensure we become the latter.
This distinction matters especially because the EF is a finite organization—limited in resources and organizational capacity. The EF holds only ~0.16% of ETH (less than many individual ETH holders), while “central foundations” in other blockchains routinely hold 10–50%. Financially, the EF was originally designed to execute a narrowly defined scope of work outlined in the token sale documentation and pre-launch materials (building the chain software; completing Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity)—all of which was completed by 2022. It was never intended to function as an eternal steward.
Hence today, the EF chooses to allocate its remaining resources toward longevity—not breadth (yes, this means selling less ETH). The EF focuses on activities critical to Ethereum’s success as a censorship-resistant/capture-resistant, open, private, and secure system—activities that otherwise simply wouldn’t happen. This entails making hard choices—in some cases, even letting go of highly valued initiatives and deeply respected individuals. It is in fact necessary for exceptional technical talent, publicly respected figures, and those fully aligned with our mission and CROPS values to leave the EF—if we want essential tasks to attract external funding. It also means the EF must adopt culturally grounded, principled stances.
All of this is done in collaboration with all other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum world hold CROPS and related values in high regard. But high regard is not the same as choosing to specialize and fully commit to a particular domain (to draw an analogy from another field: I think reducing animal suffering is important, and I enjoy vegetarian food—but I am not, unconditionally, a full-time vegan).
The EF remains in transition, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the coming months. What principles will guide this new form? Again, I speak only as one person—but I can offer my answer from a technical perspective (alongside several equally critical non-technical dimensions).
At its core, Ethereum must be mind-blowing. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and accelerating technological progress. “Maintaining the status quo EVM, with one or two hard forks per year to optimize short-term user needs,” is simply not interesting enough.
For some, “mind-blowing” means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I believe Ethereum would be mistaken to pursue that path. Maximizing speed and scalability while being only marginally more decentralized than other chains is a road to mediocrity—and if we walk it, we will lose.
I believe Ethereum should scale. But I believe Ethereum should strive hardest to be profoundly mind-blowing along another dimension: the CROPS dimension. That means:
Provably bug-free Ethereum. Six months ago, this goal would have struck most cybersecurity researchers as absurd and impossible. Today, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it is nearing feasibility. So we must pioneer here.
Available chain consensus. Ethereum is—and under streamlined consensus will remain—the only chain possessing both (i) traditional BFT-style properties: safety up to optimal fault tolerance under asynchrony, and (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties: safety against 49% attackers under synchrony. To my knowledge, almost no other chain has or plans to achieve both; Bitcoin pursues only (ii), and most others pursue only (i). Some may recall my stubborn, unreasonable insistence that Ethereum cannot rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue it from a scenario where 34% of nodes go offline. That may be acceptable for Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc. But it is unacceptable for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash.
Minimized intermediation. Protocols like smart contract wallets and Railgun require intermediaries to submit transactions on-chain—an honestly awkward and persistently fragile arrangement. Hence our work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (as well as EIP-7701 and years of prior effort) aims to minimize intermediation in transaction submission via public mempools and strong inclusion guarantees—achieving true generality, covering not just secp256r1 but also privacy protocols and more. Kohaku is pushing minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum out of its dystopian present—where our wallets don’t even verify the chain and send our private data to a dozen third-party servers—toward a brighter CROPS future.
Some of these goals are unreasonable—perhaps Ethereum achieving only 50% would still be “okay”—for example, if we retain intermediaries but make switching easy. Yet stopping at 50% won’t make Ethereum profoundly mind-blowing along CROPS dimensions. So we push to 100%.
Luckily, all these goals are compatible with high TPS—a major research focus (especially in state sharding). Well-designed L2s can help too, particularly application-specific L2s (e.g., for high-volume transactions, privacy…). These goals are even compatible with significantly reduced slot times, thanks to Raul’s work on erasure-coded P2P and numerous other optimizations.
The Ethereum blockchain’s financially most valuable “product” is the ETH asset itself. Ethereum secures $25 billion worth of ETH. The properties of Ethereum I described above strongly benefit the ETH asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is ETH; most of the rest consists of ~$40 million in on-chain fiat currency, each dollar already allocated to an open-source biotech, software, or hardware project. In other words, supporting certain—indeed, essential—aspects of the ETH asset falls outside the EF’s scope. This is precisely where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. The EF has recently been exploring how to build relationships with such organizations and provide them with the initial support they need.
The EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years—a ship with stronger convictions, sometimes in ways that may be difficult to understand—but a more enduring one, one suited to ensuring Ethereum delivers meaningful value to the world. We thank everyone inside and outside the EF who has helped make this possible.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@VitalikButerin
