Editor's Note: In the early hours of May 25th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy article on X. In it, Vitalik reinterpreted his expectations for Ethereum's future development and the role and functions of EF from a personal perspective.
Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum should not bow to mainstream trends, but must be impressive, and must uphold the CROPS values of censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security. Vitalik also explicitly stated that "ETH is Ethereum's most valuable product," and exceptionally revealed that nearly 90% of his personal net worth is in ETH.
The following is Vitalik's original text, translated by Odaily.
Here are some of my personal thoughts on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF).
First, this is just my personal opinion. The board isn't just me, and I don't have any special power over other directors. Aya Miyaguchi is leading much of the execution work in this transformation, while my main role is providing input on technical issues. The board is also expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to decline in the future—frankly, that's exactly what I want to see.
By 2025, EF had made many significant improvements in its execution capabilities. Many issues were resolved, and to this day, EF continues to benefit from greater efficiency and a more focused approach to specific goals. However, as these issues were gradually resolved, around the beginning of this year, I realized that another problem that had been bothering me had become the biggest legacy issue.
I often see people say things like, "Vitalik always talks about Ethereum needing to remain decentralized, needing to protect privacy, and needing to become a sanctuary technology, but why doesn't EF's actual actions reflect these ideas?"
Of course, what you hear might be completely different. You might not feel any sense of crisis at all, and you might even hear people saying that we're finally starting to take execution and business development (BD) seriously. Our main task now is to maintain this momentum and do it better and faster.
If that's the case, then there's a real disagreement between us—about which kind of criticism I value most, and which critic's criticism stings me the most.
An analogy about Google
I'd like to use an example from another field to illustrate this.
One belief you can hold about Google is that it's a success story that has brought immense benefits to humanity in organizing the world's information; but another is that they had a beautiful and idealistic beginning, but were gradually eroded by mainstream corporate culture, slowly and step by step abandoning the "Don't be evil" motto.
My personal opinion about Google probably falls somewhere in between. But if you could take me back to around 2008 and give me a button that, when pressed, would make Google ideologically "dogmatic" by one or two standard deviations (for example, granting Richard Stallman a permanent veto over certain key policies), I would press it without hesitation.
Why? Because a company's choices are not just those of that company; they affect the entire national system and even the world. Google's past and present context is that the entire tech industry is generally deviating from its early idealism and "Don't be evil" foundation, turning instead to greed for economic gain, a comprehensive vision of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by antisocial personalities, and groveling (or worse, actively participating) to the thought control, surveillance, and war pressures exerted by governments.
Therefore, if there is a company that can go against the grain and become what George Bernard Shaw calls an "Unreasonable Man," resisting the trends of the times, then such an existence is actually more conducive to freedom, the balance of power, and the stability of the whole society than all large companies bowing to the mainstream.
This is part of my understanding of "pluralism." This line of thinking is not just my personal opinion; it is actually quite similar to the thinking of Aya and others when formulating the EF mission framework.
What does this mean for the Ethereum Foundation?
So, what does all this have to do with EF's role?
EF is not "the center of Ethereum"; rather, EF is "a node with a defined function that coexists with other nodes." We've always said that EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (even those within EF) want us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we are the latter.
This is particularly important because EF itself is an organization with limited resources and organizational capacity. EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH (even less than many individual ETH holders), while many other blockchain "central foundations" typically hold 10%-50%. Financially, EF was initially designed to fulfill the limited scope of work defined in the token sale documentation and other pre-launch materials (developing on-chain software; navigating the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity phases), which was fully completed in 2022.
EF was not designed to be an eternal steward. Therefore, today's EF chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue "long-term existence" rather than "infinite expansion" (yes, this also means we will sell less ETH).
EF specifically focuses on things that are crucial to Ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, privacy-focused, and secure system (i.e., the CROPS dimension), and things that no one else would do if we didn't. This means making tough choices, and in some cases, even activities we highly admire and people we highly respect will move outside of EF. In fact, if we want our important missions to attract outside capital, it's necessary for some people with exceptional technical skills, public reputation, and even a high degree of alignment with our mission and CROPS values to remain outside of EF.
This also means that EF will take a distinct cultural stance. This is not about opposing the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem, but about collaboration. We know that many other organizations in the Ethereum world also highly identify with CROPS and related values, but "highly identifying" is not the same as "specializing and fully committing to a particular area." To give another example, I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but I am not a complete vegan myself.
EF is currently in a transitional phase, and we expect its new long-term structure to stabilize in the coming months. What are the guiding principles of this new structure?
To reiterate, I am just one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (and of course, there are also key non-technical aspects).
Technical Core: Ethereum Must Be Amazing
At its core, Ethereum must be impressive. We live in an era of rapidly evolving, highly intelligent AI and various other technologies. A system that "maintains the status quo EVM, undergoing one or two hard forks per year to optimize for short-term user needs" is utterly unappealing.
For some, "amazing" means 250 milliseconds of latency and 1 million TPS. I think Ethereum made a mistake trying to go down this path. Pursuing the fastest and most scalable possible speed while only being slightly more decentralized than other public chains is a path to mediocrity, and if we try to go down this path, we are bound to lose.
I believe Ethereum should scale, but I think it should make the greatest effort to truly impress in another dimension—the CROPS dimension (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security). This includes the following specific goals.
First, we need to build a provably vulnerability-free Ethereum. Until about six months ago, all cybersecurity researchers would have considered this an absurd and impossible goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it's on the verge of being realized. Therefore, we should be pioneers in pushing this forward.
Second, it achieves highly available on-chain consensus. Ethereum has been, and will continue to be, the only chain with the following characteristics after the introduction of lightweight consensus: (i) it has traditional BFT-style properties, ensuring security even in the face of high levels of fault tolerance in asynchronous environments; (ii) it has Bitcoin PoW-style properties, resisting attacks of up to 49% in synchronous environments.
To the best of my knowledge, literally no other chain possesses this or is planning to do so. Bitcoin only pursues (ii), while most other chains only pursue (i). Some may recall that I used to be very insistent on this point—I "stubbornly" believed that Ethereum could not rely on social consensus and hard forks to handle a 34% node offline scenario. This doesn't matter for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, it's unacceptable.
Thirdly, "intermediary minimization" should be implemented to reduce the number of intermediaries. In fact, smart contract wallets and protocols like Railgun still require intermediaries to send transactions in order to be included on the blockchain, which is an awkward situation and remains a source of system vulnerability.
Therefore, we are advancing FOCIL, EIP-8141 (as well as 7701 and related work from previous years), with the goal of establishing a truly universal transaction sending mechanism that minimizes intermediary dependence, possessing public mempool and strong inclusion properties. This applies not only to secp256r1, but also to privacy protocols and many other scenarios.
Kohaku is also promoting "disintermediation" at the user level, moving Ethereum away from its current dystopian state—where wallets don't even verify the chain itself, but send our private data to a dozen third-party servers—and towards a future more in line with the CROPS (Content on Relationships, Relationships, and Exploitations) philosophy.
Of the three goals mentioned above, some seem "irrational"—perhaps Ethereum could be "pretty good" even if it only achieved 50%—for example, if we rely on intermediaries but make switching intermediaries easy? However, achieving only 50% won't make Ethereum "deeply impressive" in terms of CROPS. Therefore, we should strive for 100%.
Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is a major focus of research (especially on state expansion). Well-designed L2 can also help, especially L2 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 can even be compatible with significantly reduced Slot Time.
Looking to the future
From a financial perspective, the most valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is the asset ETH. Ethereum protects $250 billion worth of ETH. And the Ethereum characteristics I mentioned earlier are all highly conducive to the value of ETH as an asset.
Nearly 90% of my personal net worth is in ETH, with the remainder being approximately $40 million in on-chain fiat currency, every dollar of which has been allocated to certain open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware projects.
However, there is also work necessary to support the value of ETH assets—work that falls outside EF's responsibilities. This is where other "heroes" step in to help (some of whom hold even more ETH than EF). EF has recently begun to consider how to build relationships with these organizations and provide them with the necessary initial support.
The future EF will be more like a "small boat" than it has been in the past few years. It will have a stronger stance, some of which may even be difficult to understand, but it will also be more enduring and better suited to ensuring that Ethereum truly brings something meaningful to the world.
We thank everyone inside and outside EF who helped make this happen.
