Vitalik talks about the future of the Ethereum Foundation: a smaller, more distinctive, yet more enduring ship

Author: Vitalik

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

The Crisis I Feel

I would like to share some of my views on the future direction of @ethereumfndn (Ethereum Foundation).

First of all, this is just my personal opinion. The board is not just me, and I do not have any privileges that other members of the board do not have.

@aerugoettinea is doing most of the work for this transition. My input is mainly on technical issues. The board is expanding, and my own power within this organization will continue to diminish, which, to be honest, is what I hope for.

The era of 2025 brings many significant improvements to the Ethereum Foundation (EF), enhancing its execution capabilities. Many issues have been resolved, and to this day, EF continues to benefit from these efficiency gains and a further focus on specific goals.

With these issues resolved, earlier this year, I noticed the biggest omission was a completely different feeling that has been troubling me: I often see people say, "Vitalik talks about Ethereum needing to be decentralized, needing privacy, needing to be a sanctuary technology, and while the words sound nice, why do EF's actual actions not reflect this?"

You might be hearing another voice. You may not feel a sense of crisis at all, and even hear someone say that we are finally starting to take execution and BD (business development) seriously, with the current main task being to continue down this path and do better and faster.

If that is the case, then there is likely a real difference between you and me—the difference lies in which type of criticism I value most and which type of critic can hit my sore spot with their criticism.

For example, let’s temporarily switch to another field.

For Google, you can view it as a success story that has brought many benefits to humanity in organizing the world's information.

You could also hold another view: they had a beautiful and idealistic start, but at some point, the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they gradually abandoned the "don't be evil" motto.

My personal view of Google probably lies somewhere in between. However, if you took me back to around 2008 and gave me a button that, when pressed, would raise Google's "dogmatism" by one or two standard deviations, such as granting Richard Stallman a permanent veto over certain key policies, I would press it without hesitation.

Why? Because a company's choices do not equate to the choices of the entire world, nor do they represent the choices of a country.

Google has been operating within the backdrop of a tech industry that is drifting away from the early idealistic foundations of "don't be evil," instead chasing financial interests, embracing a grand narrative of accelerating superintelligence that devours everything, being infiltrated by unscrupulous individuals, and cowardly yielding to government pressures regarding ideological control, surveillance, and war (even actively participating in it).

For this reason, having a company do something different, positioning itself as what George Bernard Shaw called "the unreasonable man," resisting the tide of the times, is more beneficial for freedom, power balance, and the stability of society as a whole than all major companies succumbing to mainstream trends. This is also part of what I understand as diversity.

This line of thinking is not just my personal view; it is not far from the ideas that Aya and others had when initially formulating the Mandate.

EF is Not the Center, but One of the Nodes

So, what does all this have to do with EF's role?

EF is not "the center of Ethereum," but rather "a node that stands alongside others with clear responsibilities." We have always emphasized that EF should be the latter, but many people in the Ethereum ecosystem (even within EF) hope we become the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure we become the latter.

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

Financially, EF was initially designed to complete a limited scope of work defined in the token sale documents and other pre-release materials (building chain software; going through the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity phases), all of which were fully completed in 2022; it was never designed to be an eternal manager.

Therefore, today’s EF chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue the long term rather than blindly spreading itself thin (yes, this means we will sell less ETH). EF will clearly focus on those activities that are crucial for the success of Ethereum as a censorship-resistant, anti-capture, open, private, and secure system, and that would not happen without our push.

This means making tough choices: in some cases, even activities we highly endorse and very respected individuals will operate independently of EF.

To attract external capital for important tasks, it is essential for those who are technically skilled, highly respected by the public, and even strongly identify with EF's mission and CROPS (Censorship Resistance, Resilience, Openness, Privacy, Security) values to step outside of EF. This also means that EF will hold a distinct cultural stance.

All of this is to work in concert with all other parts of Ethereum. We also understand that many participants in the Ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values.

But high respect does not equate to choosing to specialize and fully commit to a certain field (to use a different analogy: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, I also like to eat vegetarian, but I am not an unconditional vegan myself).

Ethereum Must Be Amazing

EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize in the coming months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am just one person, but I can provide my answer from a technical perspective (of course, there are also key non-technical aspects).

At its core: Ethereum must be amazing. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and various technological accelerations. "Maintaining the status quo of the EVM, hard forking once or twice a year to meet users' short-term needs," this route is utterly unimaginative.

For some, "amazing" means 250 milliseconds of latency, 1 million TPS. I believe it is a mistake for Ethereum to go down this path. Pursuing speed and scalability while being only slightly better in decentralization is a road to mediocrity, and if we do this, we will inevitably fail.

I believe Ethereum needs to scale. But I think Ethereum should strive to be amazing in another dimension—that is the CROPS dimension. This means:

• Provably bug-free Ethereum. About six months ago, all cybersecurity researchers would have thought this was an absurd and impossible goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it is on the verge of becoming a reality. Therefore, we should be leaders in this field.

• Highly available chain consensus. Ethereum is now, and will continue to be under lean consensus, the only chain that possesses both of the following attributes:

• (i) Traditional BFT-style attributes, meaning it can maintain security under a very high fault tolerance rate in an asynchronous network; (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style attributes, meaning it can withstand attacks of up to 49% in a synchronous network.
  As far as I know, almost no other chain possesses this or is planning for it; Bitcoin only pursues (ii), while most other chains only pursue (i).
  Some may remember that I once "unreasonably" argued for this, insisting that Ethereum must never rely on social consensus and hard forks to recover from failures caused by 34% of nodes going offline.
  This may be acceptable for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, but absolutely not for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash.

• Minimizing intermediaries. Frankly, protocols like smart contract wallets and railgun must send transactions through intermediaries to get on-chain, which is embarrassing and has always been a weak point.
  This is why we are promoting FOCIL and EIP-8141 (as well as 7701 and years of prior work), aiming to minimize intermediaries in transaction sending in a truly universal way—covering not only secp256r1 but also privacy protocols and more scenarios.
  Kohaku is pushing for minimizing intermediaries at the user layer, pulling Ethereum out of the dystopian situation where "wallets don’t even verify the chain and send our private data to dozens of third-party servers," moving towards a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are "unreasonable"—perhaps if Ethereum only achieves 50%, it would still be "acceptable"? What if we rely on intermediaries but make switching easy? But achieving only 50% does not make Ethereum amazing in the CROPS dimension. So we must strive for 100%.

Fortunately, these goals do not conflict with high TPS, which is also a key focus of current research (especially scaling at the state layer). Well-designed L2 can also provide support, particularly L2 optimized for specific applications (such as high-frequency trading, privacy).

Thanks to Raul's work on erasure coding P2P and many other optimizations, these goals are even compatible with significantly shortening block times.

A Smaller, More Distinct, Yet More Enduring Ship

From a financial perspective, the most valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is ETH as an asset. Ethereum secures ETH worth $250 billion. The Ethereum characteristics I mentioned above are extremely beneficial for ETH as an asset.

I have nearly 90% of my net worth in ETH, with the remaining majority being about $40 million in on-chain fiat, each dollar of which has been allocated to some open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware project.

That said, certain aspects that support ETH as an asset (even necessary aspects) go beyond EF's responsibilities. In these areas, we need other heroes to step up (some of whom hold more ETH than EF). EF has recently been thinking deeply about how to connect with such organizations and provide them with the necessary initial support.

Compared to previous years, EF will be a smaller ship, a ship with a clearer stance. Some positions may even be difficult to understand at first, but it will be a ship that sails longer, a ship that can ensure Ethereum brings true meaning to the world. Heartfelt thanks to everyone inside and outside EF who has contributed to this effort.

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