The Foundation is just an ordinary node! Vitalik: Maintaining ETH value depends on "whales" stepping up

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On May 25, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy personal article on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), detailing the organizational transformation the Foundation is undergoing, strategic adjustments in resource allocation, and how Ethereum should maintain its uniqueness amid an increasingly competitive technological wave. He emphasized that Ethereum's core competitiveness lies not in simply pursuing extreme TPS, but in achieving excellence in censorship resistance, decentralization, and security (CROPS). Below is the compiled original content. Regarding where the Ethereum Foundation (EF) should head in the future, I'd like to share some of my personal views. To be clear upfront, this is only my personal opinion. The Foundation isn't a one-man show under me, and I hold no special privileges on the board. This transformation is mainly being executed by Aerugo on the ground, while I primarily contribute some technical ideas. The board is currently recruiting new members, and my power within the Foundation will continue to diminish—frankly, this is exactly what I hope for. In 2025, the Foundation's operational efficiency improved significantly, resolving many long-standing issues. But earlier this year, a new concern took root in my mind. I often heard people grumble: "Vitalik is out there constantly extolling Ethereum's decentralization, privacy protection, and security to the skies, but when the Foundation itself gets down to business, it's a completely different story." You may have heard different takes. Perhaps you think things are fine as they are—no crisis, and even that the Foundation has finally started taking execution and business development seriously, so it should just keep going. If so, then on questions like "which type of criticism do I value most" and "which type of critics' criticism causes me the most pain," there may be disagreements between you and me. To make this clearer, let me draw an analogy from another sphere. Regarding Google, you could view it as a successful enterprise that has organized information for all humanity—a tremendous merit. But you could also see it this way: it started out chanting the slogan "don't be evil," with grand ideals, but later still picked up the bad habits of big corporations, gradually losing its original aspirations. My view of Google falls somewhere between the two. But if there were a button right now that, when pressed, could send me back to 2008 to forcibly inject Google with a bit of "stubborn principle" and "idealism" (for instance, giving open-source figurehead Richard Stallman permanent veto power over Google policy), I would press it without hesitation. Why? Because a company's choices affect the entire world. The tech industry environment Google was in and is now in is broadly drifting away from the early-idealism "don't be evil" foundation—everyone is chasing money, everyone is building totalitarian super AI, getting infiltrated by sociopathic personalities, and even bowing to government surveillance and authoritarian power for profit. When everyone is going with the flow, if one major company could stand up to be a "thorn in the side" and hold firm to its bottom line, it 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 crafting our "mission," thought along the same lines. 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, simply carrying specific tasks. We've always said this, but many in the community (and even within the Foundation) insist on treating us as the "leader." Now, we need to prove with concrete action: we really are just an ordinary node. This point is extremely important, because the Foundation has limited capabilities 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, intended to complete a limited scope of work (including building the chain software and completing the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity stages), tasks that were thoroughly accomplished by 2022. It was never meant to rule Ethereum forever. So today, the Foundation has chosen to use its remaining resources to pursue long-term development rather than blind expansion (yes, this also means we'll reduce ETH sales). From now on, the Foundation will do only one thing: focus on those efforts that are crucial for Ethereum, that keep Ethereum censorship-resistant/capture-resistant, open, private, and secure (which we abbreviate as CROPS), and that cannot get done without our help. This means making difficult choices—in some cases, even activities we highly endorse and people we deeply respect will be excluded from the EF. If we want important missions to attract external capital, then keeping people with outstanding technical talent, public respect, and even high alignment with our mission and CROPS (censorship resistance/capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security) outside of the EF is actually necessary. This also means the EF must take an opinionated stance culturally. All of this is for the sake of collaborating 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 doesn't equal choosing to specialize and fully commit to one area (just as I think protecting animals is important and I love eating vegetarian food, but I myself cannot manage to eat fully vegan at every meal). The Foundation is still in transition, and it will probably take several more months to fully settle. What will the future Foundation look like? From a technical perspective, my core requirement is: Ethereum must be awe-inspiring. We live in an era where highly intelligent AI and various other technologies are accelerating in development. The approach of "maintaining the EVM status quo, with one or two hard forks per year to optimize for users' short-term needs" is no longer compelling enough. For some people, "awe-inspiring" 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 while being only marginally more decentralized than other chains is a path to mediocrity, and if we try this, we will surely fail. Ethereum of course needs to scale, but we should achieve excellence on another dimension—namely CROPS (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security). Specifically: - An absolutely bug-free Ethereum. Half a year ago, security experts would have considered this a pipe dream. But now, with AI-assisted verification, this is close to becoming reality. We must be first in this regard. - An unbreakable consensus mechanism. Ethereum is (and, with lean consensus, will continue to be) the only chain that can simultaneously achieve two things: first, traditional BFT-style properties, meaning it is safe up to a high fault-tolerance level under asynchronous conditions; second, Bitcoin PoW-style properties, meaning it is safe up to a 49% attacker under synchronous conditions. As far as I know, without exaggeration, no other chain has this or is planning this. Other chains can only achieve either the first or the second. I've argued with people about this many times—I'm stubborn on this point: for chains at the level of Ethereum and Bitcoin, if 34% of nodes go offline, you absolutely cannot rely on "pulling the network cable" or social consensus to save the day. For chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc., this is acceptable. But for Bitcoin, Ether, or for example Zcash, this is unacceptable. - Fewer middlemen. Currently, many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still rely on third-party relays to send transactions on-chain—this is genuinely embarrassing, and it's also a persistent security risk. Therefore, FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and earlier 7701 and years of work) are dedicated to, in a truly general way, minimizing intermediary links in the transaction-sending process through public mempools and strong on-chain inclusion properties, covering not only e.g. secp256r1 but also privacy protocols and more. Kohaku is pushing to reduce intermediation at the user layer, moving Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo where wallets don't even verify the chain and send our private data to a dozen third-party servers, toward a brighter CROPS future. Some goals don't quite make sense, and perhaps achieving 50% is fine—what if we rely on intermediaries, but make switching easy? But walking only 50% of the road cannot make Ethereum deeply awe-inspiring in terms of CROPS. Therefore, we must strive to achieve 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, particularly L2s optimized for specific applications (e.g., 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 bluntly, the most valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is the asset ETH itself. Ether currently secures $250 billion in assets. The various Ethereum properties I mentioned above are extremely beneficial for the ETH asset. Personally, nearly 90% of my wealth is in ETH, and the remaining $40 million in on-chain fiat has all been donated to various open-source biotech, software, or hardware projects. However, maintaining ETH's value involves some things the Foundation cannot manage. This requires other heavyweights in the ecosystem (some of whom hold more ETH than the Foundation) to step up and help. The Foundation has also been thinking recently about how to provide some early support to these new organizations. In summary, the future Ethereum Foundation will have fewer people, will be more opinionated (sometimes perhaps incomprehensibly so), but it will live longer. Its existence is to ensure that Ethereum can truly leave something meaningful for this world. Thanks to everyone, inside and outside the Foundation, who is helping to make this happen. (The above content was excerpted and reprinted with authorization from partner PANews; original link)

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