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Vitalik Explains Ethereum Foundation's New Direction: Slimming Down, Focusing, and Doing the Hard Things

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Vitalik believes that in the age of AI and technological acceleration, Ethereum should not pursue a mediocre path of "being slightly faster than others, slightly more decentralized," but should instead strive to be stunning in terms of CROPS dimension.

Original Author: Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Co-Founder
Original Translation: DeepTech TechFlow

DeepTech Summary: The Ethereum Foundation holds only 0.16% of all ETH, while other public chain "Central Foundations" often hold 10-50%. The resource-constrained EF is making a difficult choice: to give up on being "broad but not deep" and focus on things that others won't do but are crucial for Ethereum's anti-censorship, privacy, and security — even if it means letting great people leave the EF to attract external funding.

Vitalik believes that in the age of AI and technological acceleration, Ethereum should not pursue a mediocre path of "being slightly faster than others and slightly more decentralized," but should aim to be stunning in the CROPS dimensions (Censorship resistance, Openness, Privacy, Security).

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

First of all, this is just my personal opinion. The board is not just me, and I do not have any more special power on the board than other directors. @aerugoettinea is doing most of the work on this transition. My involvement is mainly focused on technical issues. The board is expanding, and my power within the organization will continue to diminish, which is frankly what I want.

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

After those issues were resolved, the biggest legacy issue I perceived earlier this year turned into another thing that has always troubled me: I often see people say, "Vitalik says Ethereum needs decentralization, privacy, to be a sanctuary technology, these words sound great, but why don't EF's actions reflect this?"

Now, you may have heard different voices. You may not feel a sense of crisis at all, but instead hear people say that we are finally taking execution and business development seriously, and our main task is to maintain this direction and do it even better and faster.

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

For example, let's briefly switch to another field.

Regarding Google, you can have a belief that it is a success story, bringing many benefits to humanity in organizing the world's information. You can also have another belief that they had an idealistic start, but at some point, the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes crept in, and bit by bit, they completely abandoned the motto of "Don't be evil."

My specific view of Google is probably somewhere in between. However, if you were to take me back to around 2008 and give me a button that would allow me to shift Google one to two standard deviations in the "Doctrine" direction, such as giving Richard Stallman a permanent veto over certain key policies, I would press it immediately.

Why? Because a company's choices are not the world's choices, not even a country's choices.

Google existed then and exists now in the context of a tech industry that has overall moved away from its early idealist roots, towards greed for economic interests, an extreme vision of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and base capitulation (or worse, active participation) to government pressure on ideological control, surveillance, and war.

Thus, a company doing something different, positioning itself as George Bernard Shaw's "unreasonable person," resisting the spirit of the age, is better for liberty, power balance, and overall social stability than all large companies conforming to mainstream trends. This is part of my version of pluralism.

This line of thinking is not just mine but is not far from Aya's and others' thinking in Mandate.

So how does all of this relate to the role of the EF?

The EF is not the "center of Ethereum" but "a purposeful node among other nodes." We have always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (even internally within the EF) want us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.

This is particularly important because the EF is a finite organization with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF holds only about 0.16% of ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas in other blockchains, it is common for the "central foundation" to hold 10-50%.

Financially, the EF was initially designed to complete a limited scope of work defined in the token sale documents and other pre-launch materials (building chain software; completing Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), all of which have been completed by 2022; it was not meant to be a perpetual steward.

Therefore, today, the EF chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means selling less ETH). The EF focuses on activities crucial to Ethereum's success as an uncensorable/uncapturable, open, private, and secure system—activities that would not otherwise happen.

This means making tough choices, where in some cases, even activities highly valued by us and people highly respected by us would depart from the EF.

Individuals with outstanding technical talent, public respect, and even alignment with the mission and CROPS values leaving the EF is, in fact, necessary if we want critical missions to be able to attract outside funding. This also means the EF needs to take a stand culturally.

All of this is in service of collaborating with all the other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum world highly respect CROPS and associated values. But high respect and choosing to focus and be fully dedicated to an area are not the same thing (to make an analogy to another area: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, I also enjoy vegetarian food, but I myself am not unconditionally vegetarian)

The EF is still in a transitional period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few 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 point of view (and there are also some equally critical non-technical aspects).

At the core, Ethereum must be awe-inspiring. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and various other technologically accelerated things. "Maintaining the status quo EVM, with hard forks every year or two to optimize short-term user needs" is not interesting enough.

For some, "awe-inspiring" means: 250ms latency and 1 million TPS. I think Ethereum taking that path is a mistake. Being as fast as possible, as scalable as possible, just a bit more decentralized than other chains — that's a path to mediocrity, and we would lose if we try that path.

I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive most to be awe-inspiring in another dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means:

A provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all network security researchers would have considered absurd and impossible about 6 months ago. Now, it is within reach thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be at the forefront of this.

Usable chain consensus. Ethereum is, and will continue to be under minimalistic consensus, the only chain that simultaneously has (i) traditional BFT-style properties — safe to the highest fault tolerance level in asynchronous fault scenarios, and (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties — secure against a 49% attacker in synchronous scenarios.

As far as I know, there are few if any other chains that have or plan to do this; Bitcoin pursues only (ii), and most other chains pursue only (i).

Some may remember my efforts to fight for this, unreasonably insisting that Ethereum cannot rely on social consensus and hard forks to save Ethereum from the impact of 34% node offline. This may work for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, and Tempo. But it doesn't for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or, for example, Zcash.

Intermediary Minimization. Smart contract wallets, the Railgun protocol, and other protocols must rely on intermediaries to submit transactions to the chain, which, frankly, is awkward and remains a persistent point of weakness.

Therefore, we have been working on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (as well as 7701 and years of prior work) to achieve intermediary minimization in a truly generic way through a public memory pool and strong inclusion properties for transaction submission—not only covering, for example, secp256r1 but also encompassing privacy protocols, and more.

Kohaku is driving intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum out of its dystopian current state—where our wallets don't even validate the chain, sending our private data to a dozen third-party servers—and towards a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are unreasonable—maybe Ethereum only achieving 50% is "fine"—if we rely on intermediaries but make switching easy. But only going halfway won't deeply impact Ethereum in a CROPS manner. So we are pushing for 100%.

Fortunately, all of these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is a key focus of the research (especially in state scaling). Well-designed L2 can also help, particularly L2 optimized for specific use cases (such as high-throughput transactions, privacy, etc.). These goals are even compatible with significantly reducing slot time, thanks to Raul's work on erasure coding P2P and many other optimizations.

The most financially valuable "product" on the Ethereum blockchain is the asset ETH. Ethereum safeguards $250 billion worth of ETH.

Those Ethereum attributes I mentioned above are very favorable for the ETH asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, with the remaining majority being around $40 million in on-chain fiat, with each dollar already allocated to an open-source biotech, software, or hardware project.

That said, certain aspects that support the ETH asset—some of which are even necessary—are beyond the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF) to step in and provide assistance. The EF has been contemplating how it will engage with other similar organizations and provide them with the initial support they need.

The EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, but a more principled one — principled in a way that may be difficult for some to understand at times — but a more resilient one, one designed to secure something meaningful for the world with Ethereum. We are grateful to everyone inside and outside the EF who has helped to achieve this goal.