Vitalik urges ETH whales: The Foundation is just a node, Ethereum's value depends on you

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ETH makes up nearly 90% of Vitalik's personal assets, but he admits the foundation only holds 0.16% of the tokens, far less than whales. The future core of Ethereum is not a TPS race, but CROPS — censorship-resistance, openness, privacy, security — pushed to the extreme in the AI era. The foundation will shrink, take stronger positions, and only do what no one else will do for Ethereum. (Background: Ethereum Foundation's major transformation: Vitalik releases the CROPS framework, downsizes, refuses to keep being an ETH dumper) (Context: Ethereum core developer Péter Szilágyi furiously blasts: ETH Foundation pay is unfair, power is concentrated around Vitalik Buterin..) Revealed, the foundation holds only 0.16% of ETH, less than many whales; the real defenders of ETH's value should be the "whales" in the ecosystem holding massive amounts of tokens. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, in his latest blog post, admits that outsiders often criticize the foundation for shouting slogans of decentralization and privacy protection, while its actual operations are nothing like that. But he shifted tone and, in a long post on X about where the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is heading in the future, said: I want to share some of my personal views. First, a disclaimer — this is just my personal opinion. The foundation is not solely my decision, and I have no special privileges on the board. This transition is mainly being executed by Aerugo, while I'm mainly responsible for contributing technical ideas. The board is currently recruiting new members, and my power within the foundation will become smaller and smaller — honestly, this is exactly what I hope for. In 2025, the foundation's operational efficiency improved significantly, resolving many old issues. But earlier this year, I started having a new concern. I often hear criticism like: "Vitalik is out there every day emphasizing Ethereum's decentralization, privacy protection, and security, so why is the foundation's own work completely inconsistent with that?" Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My… — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 24, 2026 Great to see Aya @AyaMiyagotchi (@ethereumfndn ) and Duncan join QZ @not_qz for a high-level fireside chat on Ethereum's core principles and its institutional future. ✅ Ethereum Foundation's role is to coordinate and keep the ecosystem resilient and decentralized. ✅ CROPS as… pic.twitter.com/Rc7MUbCeAm— Hong Kong Ethereum Community Hub (@ethereumhkhub) April 22, 2026 You may have heard different views. Maybe you think things are fine now, no crisis at all, and you even feel the foundation has finally started taking execution and business development seriously, and just needs to keep it up. If so, then on questions like "which type of criticism matters most to me" and "which kind of critics cause me the most pain through their criticism," you and I may disagree. To make this clearer, let me take an example from another field. About Google — you can view it as a successful company that organized information for all of humanity, an immense merit. But you can also view it this way: it started out shouting the slogan "don't be evil," with lofty ideals, but later still became tainted by big-corporation problems, gradually losing its original intent. My view on Google is somewhere in between. But if there were a button right now that, when pressed, could send me back to 2008 to forcibly inject a bit of "stubborn ideology" and "idealism" into Google (for example, giving open-source legend Richard Stallman a permanent veto over Google's policies), I would press it without hesitation. Why? Because a company's choices affect the whole world. The tech industry environment Google was in then and is in now is broadly drifting away from the "don't be evil" foundation of early idealism — everyone is chasing money, everyone is building authoritarian super-AI, being infiltrated by sociopaths, even bowing to government surveillance and authoritarian power for profit. When everyone is going with the flow, if a major company could stand up as a "gatekeeper" and hold the line, that would absolutely be a great thing for society's freedom and stability. This is what I understand as pluralism. This idea isn't only mine — Aya and others at the foundation, when shaping our "mission," thought the same way. So what does this have to do with the Ethereum Foundation? The foundation has never been the "center" of Ethereum — it's just one of countless nodes in the ecosystem, just with a specific mission. We have always said this, but many people in the community (and even within the foundation) insist on treating us as the "head of the family." Now, we want to prove through action that we are truly just an ordinary node. This is very important, because the foundation has limited capacity and limited funds. We only hold about 0.16% of ETH (less than many Ethereum whales), while other blockchain project teams often hold 10% to 50% of their tokens. Financially, the Ethereum Foundation was originally defined according to the token sale documents and other launch materials, aimed at completing a limited scope of work (including building the chain software and completing stages such as Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity), and those tasks were thoroughly completed by 2022. It was never meant to forever rule over Ethereum. So today, the foundation chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue long-term development rather than blind expansion (yes, this also means we will reduce dumping ETH). From now on, the foundation will only do one thing: specifically tackle work that is critical to Ethereum, that keeps Ethereum censorship-resistant/capture-resistant, open, private, and secure (which we abbreviate as CROPS), and which cannot be accomplished without our help. This means making tough choices — in some cases, even activities we highly endorse and people we deeply respect will be excluded from EF. If we hope important missions can attract external capital, then keeping people with outstanding technical talent, publicly respected, and even highly aligned with our mission and CROPS (censorship-resistance/capture-resistance, openness, privacy, security) outside of EF is actually necessary. This also means EF must take an opinionated cultural stance. All of this is to collaborate with every other part of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum world also deeply respect CROPS and related values. But, high respect is not the same as choosing to specialize and fully commit to a certain field (just as I think protecting animals is important, and I love eating vegetarian, but I personally cannot eat fully vegetarian every meal). The foundation is still in transition, and it will probably take a few more months to fully take shape. What will the future foundation look like? From a technical perspective, my core requirement is: Ethereum must be amazing. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and various other technologies accelerating rapidly. "Maintaining the EVM status quo, with one or two hard forks a year to optimize users' short-term needs" is no longer attractive enough. For some people, "being amazing" means: 250 millisecond latency and 1 million TPS. I think it would be a mistake for Ethereum to try to walk this path. Pursuing speed and scalability as much as possible, with only marginally more decentralization than other chains, is a path toward mediocrity, and if we try this, we will surely lose. Of course Ethereum must scale, but we should push to the extreme in another dimension — CROPS (censorship-resistance, openness, privacy, security). Specifically: - Absolutely bug-free Ethereum. Half a year ago, security experts would have thought this was an impossible task. But now with AI-assisted verification, this is close to becoming reality. We must be first in this area. - Unbreakable consensus mechanism. Ethereum is now (and will continue to be, with lean consensus) the only chain that can simultaneously achieve two things: first, traditional BFT-style properties, meaning it is safe under asynchronous conditions up to a very high fault tolerance level; second, Bitcoin PoW-style properties, meaning under synchronous conditions it is safe even against 49% attackers. As far as I know, without exaggeration, no other chain has this or plans to have it. Other chains can only achieve one or the other. I've argued with people about this many times before — my stubborn belief: chains at the level of Ethereum and Bitcoin must absolutely not rely on "pulling the network plug" or social consensus to recover when 34% of nodes go offline. For chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc., this is acceptable. But for Bitcoin, Ether, or Zcash for example, this is unacceptable. - Reducing middlemen. Currently many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still need third-party relays to broadcast transactions onto the chain, which is genuinely embarrassing and is also a persistent security risk. Therefore, FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and earlier 7701, and many years of work) aim to truly universally minimize the intermediate links in transaction sending through public mempools and strong on-chain inclusion features, covering not just things like secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and more. Kohaku is pushing for fewer intermediaries at the user layer, freeing Ethereum from the dystopian status quo where wallets don't even verify the chain and send our private data to a dozen third-party servers, moving toward a brighter CROPS future. Some goals may not seem reasonable — maybe 50% is good enough, what if we rely on intermediaries but make switching easy? But going only 50% of the way cannot make Ethereum deeply astonishing in CROPS. So we must strive for 100%. Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is also a major focus of research (especially in state scaling). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (such as high-frequency trading, privacy, etc.). Thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P and many other optimizations, these goals are even compatible with significantly shortened slot times. To put it plainly, the most valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is the ETH asset itself. Ether currently secures $250 billion in assets. The various properties of Ethereum I mentioned above are very beneficial to the ETH asset. Personally, nearly 90% of my money is in ETH, and the remaining $40 million has been donated to certain open-source biotech, software, or hardware projects. However, to maintain ETH's value, there are things the foundation cannot control. This requires other big players in the ecosystem (some of whom hold more ETH than the foundation) to step up and help. The foundation has also been thinking lately about how to provide some early support to these new organizations. In summary, the future Ethereum Foundation will have fewer people, take stronger positions (sometimes perhaps incomprehensible), but it will live longer. Its existence is to ensure that Ethereum can truly leave something meaningful in this world. Thanks to everyone, inside and outside the foundation, helping to realize this goal.

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