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ToggleIn his latest blog post, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin frankly admitted that the foundation is often criticized for its slogans of decentralization and privacy protection, while its actual operations don't quite live up to them. However, he then shifted his tone, revealing in a long post on X that the foundation holds only 0.16% of ETH, less than many large holders; the true maintainers of ETH's value are the "large holders" in the ecosystem who hold massive amounts of tokens.
I'd like to share some of my personal thoughts on where the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is headed in the future.
First, let me clarify that this is just my personal opinion. The foundation isn't run by me alone, and I don't have any special privileges on the board. This transformation is primarily being implemented by Aerogo , and my main responsibility is contributing technical ideas. The board is currently recruiting new members, and my power within the foundation will gradually diminish—frankly, this is exactly what I want.
In 2025, the foundation's efficiency improved significantly, resolving many long-standing issues. However, at the beginning of this year, a new concern arose in my mind. I often hear criticism: "Vitalik constantly emphasizes Ethereum's decentralization, privacy protection, and security, but how come the foundation's own work is completely different?"
The foundation quipped: We are just one of thousands of nodes, not the leader.
You may have heard different perspectives. Perhaps you feel things are fine now, there's no crisis, and you even think the foundation is finally starting to take execution and business expansion seriously, and that it just needs to keep going. If that's the case, then you and I may disagree on questions like "which type of criticism do I value most" and "which type of critic can make me feel the most pain through their criticism."
To illustrate this point, I'll use an example from another circle.
Regarding Google, you can consider it a successful company that has helped organize information for all of humanity, doing immeasurable good. But you can also view it this way: it started with the slogan "Don't be evil," with lofty ideals, but later it succumbed to the problems of large corporations, gradually losing sight of its original mission.
My opinion of Google falls somewhere in between. However, if there were a button that could take me back to 2008 and forcefully inject some "stubborn ideas" and "idealism" into Google (such as giving open-source guru Richard Stallman a permanent veto over Google's policies), I would press it without hesitation.
CROPS replaces TPS: Vitalik bluntly states that "pursuing a million TPS leads to mediocrity."
Why? Because the choices a company makes can impact the entire world. The tech industry environment Google has faced, and continues to face, has largely deviated from its early idealistic "Don't be evil" foundation. Everyone is focused on profit, pursuing authoritarian super AI, being infiltrated by antisocial individuals, and even bowing to government surveillance and power for profit. When everyone is following the crowd, if a large company can step forward as a "gatekeeper," upholding the bottom line, it would be a tremendous benefit to the freedom and stability of society as a whole. This is my understanding of diversity.
I wasn't the only one with this idea; Aya and others at the foundation also thought the same way when formulating our "mission".
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 thousands of nodes in the ecosystem, with a specific mission. We've always said this, but many in the community (even within the foundation) insist on treating us as the "leader." Now, we're going to prove with our actions that we really are just an ordinary node.
Three core objectives: zero bugs, unbreakable consensus, and elimination of third-party intermediaries.
This is crucial because the foundation has limited resources and funds. We only hold about 0.16% of ETH (less than many large Ethereum holders), while other blockchain projects often hold 10% to 50% of the tokens. Financially, the Ethereum Foundation was initially defined by its token sale documents and other launch materials to complete a limited scope of work (including building the chain software and completing phases like Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity), tasks that were fully accomplished in 2022. It was never intended to dominate Ethereum forever.
Therefore, 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 ETH sales). From now on, the Foundation will only do one thing: focus on things that are crucial to Ethereum, that keep Ethereum censorship/capture resistant, open, private, and secure (we call them CROPS), and that cannot be done without our help.
This means making tough choices, and in some cases, even activities we highly value and people we deeply respect may be excluded from EF. If we want our important missions to attract outside capital, it's practically necessary to keep talented individuals with exceptional technical skills, public respect, and a strong alignment with our mission and CROPS (censorship/capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security) outside EF. This also means EF needs to take a strong stance culturally.
All of this is in order to collaborate with all other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum world also highly respect CROPS and related values. However, high respect does not equate to choosing to specialize and be completely committed to a particular area (just as I think animal protection is important and I love being vegetarian, but I can't eat a completely vegan diet every day).
Major investors step forward: Foundation's ETH holdings are only 0.16%, the real force behind market stabilization is the ecosystem whale.
The foundation is still in a transitional phase and is estimated to take several more months to finalize its structure. What will the future foundation look like? From a technical perspective, my core requirements are:
Ethereum is truly amazing.
We live in an era of rapidly developing, highly intelligent AI and various other technologies. The approach of "maintaining the EVM as it is and performing one or two hard forks per year to optimize for the short-term needs of users" is no longer attractive.
For some, "amazing" means: 250 milliseconds of latency and 1 million TPS. I think Ethereum is making a mistake trying to go down this path. Prioritizing speed and scalability over other chains, offering only a negligible degree of decentralization, is a path to mediocrity, and we are doomed to fail if we try to do so.
Foundation Transformation: Fewer People, Stronger Stance, But Longer Life
Ethereum certainly needs scaling, but we should strive for excellence in another dimension: CROPS (Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, and Security). Specifically, this means:
- An Ethereum absolutely bug-free system. Six months ago, security experts would have thought this was an impossible task. But now, with AI-assisted verification, it's becoming a reality. We must be number one in this area.
- An unbreakable consensus mechanism. Ethereum is currently (and will continue to be, with the support of lean consensus) the only chain that can achieve two things simultaneously: first, the characteristics of traditional BFT-style security, meaning it is safe up to a very high level of fault tolerance in asynchronous situations; second, the characteristics of Bitcoin's PoW-style security, meaning it is safe up to a 49% attack in synchronous situations. To my knowledge, it is no exaggeration to say that no other chain possesses this or is planning to do so. Other chains can only achieve the first point or the second. I have argued about this many times before, and I firmly believe that for chains of Ethereum and Bitcoin's caliber, if 34% of the nodes go offline, recovery absolutely cannot be achieved by "pulling the plug" or through social consensus. This is acceptable for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, and Tempo. But for Bitcoin, Ether, or even Zcash, this is unacceptable.
- Reduce intermediaries. Currently, many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still rely on third-party intermediaries to send transactions to the blockchain, which is embarrassing and a persistent security risk. Therefore, FOCIL and EIP-8141 (as well as the previous 7701 and years of work) are committed to minimizing intermediaries in the transaction transmission process in a truly universal way through public memory pools and strong on-chain inclusion features, covering not only secp256r1, but also privacy protocols. Kohaku is using the user layer to drive down intermediaries, freeing Ethereum from the dystopian situation where wallets don't even verify the chain and send our private data to a dozen third-party servers, moving towards a brighter CROPS future.
Some goals are unreasonable; perhaps 50% is good enough. What if we rely on intermediaries but make switching easy? However, only going 50% won't make Ethereum's CROPS truly impressive. Therefore, we should strive for 100%.
Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is a major focus of research (especially in terms of state scaling). Well-designed L2 can also help, particularly L2 optimized for specific applications such as high-frequency trading and privacy. Thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P and many other optimizations, these goals are even compatible with significantly reduced slot times.
To put it simply, the most valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is the ETH asset itself. Ether currently protects $250 billion in assets. The various characteristics of Ethereum that I mentioned above are highly beneficial to the ETH asset.
I personally own nearly 90% of my money in ETH, and the remaining $40 million has been donated to certain open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware projects.
However, there are some things the foundation can't control to maintain the value of ETH. This requires other key players in the ecosystem (some of whom hold more ETH than the foundation) to step in and help. The foundation has recently been considering how to provide early support to these new organizations.
In conclusion, the future Ethereum Foundation will have fewer people, and its stance will be more defined (sometimes which may be incomprehensible to others), but it will live longer. Its existence is to ensure that Ethereum can truly leave something meaningful for the world. Thank you to everyone inside and outside the Foundation who has helped achieve this goal.
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