Author: Jae, PANews
The price of ETH has recently continued to decline, but Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been intensively signaling about technological evolution and ecosystem development.
Vitalik sees 2026 as the year for Ethereum to "regain lost ground." In addition to wanting to address the centralization concerns caused by the pursuit of scalability over the past decade from a technical perspective, the Ethereum Foundation has launched a "financial slimming" plan. Vitalik personally will also donate over 16,000 ETH to promote an open-source, verifiable full-stack ecosystem.
This series of actions aims to add more certainty to Ethereum's future amidst the fog of market volatility.
Saying Goodbye to Excessive Spending, Foundation Initiates "Financial Slimming"
Last week, Vitalik confirmed via Twitter that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is entering a phase of "moderate tightening."
On-chain analysis platform Arkham shows that the foundation currently holds approximately $392 million worth of ETH, while Vitalik personally holds about $517 million. Against the backdrop of ETH prices being in a volatile cycle, the foundation has decided to implement stricter financial discipline over the next five years.
This decision is driven by the pressure of dual objectives: on one hand, Ethereum needs to deliver a roadmap with urgent timelines to ensure its status as a high-performance, scalable "world computer"; on the other hand, the foundation must ensure its own long-term sustainability to withstand market fluctuations and external challenges.
However, financial tightening does not mean stopping development or investment, but rather a form of "focus." The foundation's role is also shifting from an "ecosystem funder" to a "protocol guardian." The foundation will direct resources towards the development of the underlying protocol, while some tasks originally designated for "special projects" will be handed over to Vitalik personally.
Vitalik emphasizes that Ethereum's priority is shifting from "pursuing mainstream adoption" to "providing tools for those who truly need it." This will be a battle against "corporate waste."
The so-called enterprise-level solutions often excessively sacrifice decentralization for compliance or convenience, but Ethereum will prioritize tools that enable individuals and communities to gain autonomy, security, and collaborative capabilities in this new phase. This return to a "cyberpunk" spirit may guide Ethereum in reshaping its long-term fundamentals.
Recently, the Ethereum Foundation announced its funding situation for Q4 2025, with funding amounts dropping from approximately $32.65 million in Q1 2025 to $7.38 million in Q4, focusing on core areas such as protocol growth, developer tools, cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs, and consensus layers.
This also reflects that the foundation has shifted from excessive spending to precise funding, bidding farewell to blind ecological expansion and instead delving into the stability and security of the underlying protocol.
The foundation's strategic contraction is also a stress test of its organizational resilience. As the hot money of the bull market recedes, whether the Ethereum ecosystem can survive based on intrinsic value and financial discipline is an answer that is being written.
It is worth mentioning that compared to Bitcoin, which is in a controversial phase regarding quantum defense, the Ethereum Foundation has shown a stronger sense of urgency and action.
Recently, the Ethereum Foundation has formed a dedicated post-quantum team and has listed this work as a top strategic priority for the Ethereum network. This process also indicates that it is shifting from background research to active engineering practice, which will build a stronger security shield for Ethereum.
Donating 16,384 ETH, Aiming for a Full-Stack System of Software and Hardware
In stark contrast to the foundation's contraction is Vitalik's aggressive personal funding bet.
To fill the potential funding gap created by the foundation's contraction, Vitalik will take on responsibilities belonging to the foundation's "special projects" and has already withdrawn 16,384 ETH (approximately $45 million) from his personal address, dedicated to building an open-source, secure, verifiable full-stack system to protect personal lives and public environments. According to OnchainLens monitoring, Vitalik has sold 1,441 ETH in the past two days, totaling $3.297 million, which may be used for donation plans.
Interestingly, the number 16,384 holds strong symbolic significance, as it is the genesis launch threshold of the Ethereum beacon chain, perhaps representing Vitalik's high expectations for Ethereum entering a new five-year development phase.
Essentially, this is not just a simple fund transfer, but a significant investment in an open-source, verifiable full-stack ecosystem. Vitalik has discussed in his blog that the internet has become a major part of real life, with finance, communication, and health all driven by digitalization.
However, if the underlying operating systems, processors, or compilers are closed "black boxes," then even if the blockchain is decentralized, users still face the risk of "Trojan horses."
Full-stack verification means that users can verify from the hardware instruction set all the way to the terminal interaction interface (UI).
Ethereum will play the role of a "trust anchor" in this goal. By decentralizing verification capabilities to the terminal, it eliminates users' "passive trust" in centralized infrastructure service providers.
Therefore, Vitalik's donation funds will have a wide range of uses, not limited to the traditional scope of blockchain, but also covering applications in software and hardware, communication, and even biotechnology:
- Open-source chips (Vensa project): Aimed at promoting the commercialization of open-source hardware, ensuring that security applications no longer rely on closed, untrustworthy chip architectures.
- Advanced privacy solutions (ucritter): Supporting a technology stack that integrates zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and differential privacy.
- Encrypted communication and operating systems: Funding open-source encrypted communication applications, decentralized social media, and "local-first" operating systems to combat monitoring by centralized platforms.
- Biotechnology: Including support for open-source vaccine technology and investment in indoor air quality monitoring tools.
Vitalik's donation funds will also establish a private funding system that complements the foundation, further increasing the fault tolerance of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Restructuring the Creator Economy, Proposing a Creator Prediction Market
At the application layer, Ethereum's creator economy experiment has also entered deeper waters.
During the last bull market, creator tokens were once highly anticipated by the market, believed to solve the exploitation of creators by platforms, but the results were minimal.
Vitalik bluntly stated: In an era where AI can generate massive amounts of content at low cost, simply increasing incentives will only lead to speculative bubbles. The real challenge lies in how to identify and amplify high-quality content.
In other words, the fundamental pain point of the "creator token" model is not insufficient incentives, but the lack of a "high-quality content curation mechanism."
Currently, most creator tokens are trapped in a "traffic-speculation" cycle: The token price reflects the creator's traffic rather than the depth of their work. This model often drives creators to produce content that caters to algorithms and short-term speculators, ultimately leading to the mediocrity of the ecosystem.
Additionally, since creator tokens are typically driven by speculators, their holder groups lack diversity and are easily manipulated by whales. Any individual with a financial advantage can control governance by purchasing 51% of the tokens, leading to a serious disconnect between the tokens and the quality of the content they represent.
Using Substack as an example, Vitalik pointed out that it has established a deep subscription system based on reputation and subjective curation. Although Substack is not decentralized, it demonstrates the value of a "curation mechanism" in the content ecosystem.
Inspired by Substack, Vitalik proposed establishing a "creator prediction market" system:
- Create DAO curators: Establish small DAOs that are not aimed at token issuance but have strong curation capabilities, acting as gatekeepers responsible for discovering and endorsing high-quality creators.
- Tokens as prediction tools: Transform the function of creator tokens into a prediction tool, used to predict whether the creators issuing tokens will be accepted by the DAO.
The value of creator tokens will be anchored through a revenue buyback and burn mechanism after entering the DAO, thereby linking token value to the professional recognition of the creators.
This will also encourage speculators to become "predictors of potential creators," guiding the game towards the quality of content itself.
This strategic shift means that Ethereum will no longer focus solely on how to "distribute benefits," but will shift to how to "define value." By combining the "creator prediction market" system, Ethereum is attempting to build a content distribution layer that is closer to a knowledge market, thereby curbing the spread of junk information.
Mainnet Expansion Squeezes Survival Space, L2 Script Will Be Rewritten
Looking back at its development history, Ethereum's exploration of scalability has always been an evolving and correcting process. As the core of Ethereum's scalability narrative, L2 is now facing the most severe scrutiny.
Recently, Vitalik stated that the original vision of L2 as "branded sharding" is no longer applicable unless L2 can achieve "extreme scalability" or provide unique innovations beyond scaling. This statement directly addresses the awkward situation of the current L2 ecosystem.
L2 was initially tasked with bearing the high-frequency computation and storage pressure of L1 to reduce users' gas burden, but the situation has changed dramatically:
Leap in mainnet performance: With a significant increase in gas limits and the implementation of data sampling technologies like PeerDAS, Ethereum L1 itself is becoming an extremely powerful computing layer. When mainnet fees are low enough, mediocre L2s will lose their reason for existence.
Stagnation in L2 security advancement: Many L2s are making slow progress in achieving fully decentralized verification (Stage 2). Some projects, due to regulatory compliance or technical inertia, prefer to remain at Stage 1, making them more like independent L1s with cross-chain bridges rather than extensions of Ethereum L2.
Vitalik believes that L2 should not only pursue "being cheaper than L1," but should aim for "things that L1 cannot do." He listed several innovative directions for L2, which also delineate new survival rules for L2:
- Non-EVM privacy-specific features/virtual machines: Providing a native, user-friendly privacy trading environment that is currently difficult for L1 to achieve on a large scale.
- Functional differentiation: Focusing on providing features that the mainnet does not possess, such as efficiency optimization for specific applications and new designs for non-financial applications like AI, social, and identity.
- Extreme performance: Offering "extreme TPS" or "ultra-low latency" that cannot be achieved even after mainnet scaling.
Overall, the L2 market will transition from the barbaric growth phase of "scaling dividends" to a specialized competitive phase of "innovation transformation." In this process, the mediocre will exit, and the fittest will survive.
Ethereum is shifting from a "large and comprehensive" expansion phase to a "focused and deep" phase, no longer attempting to be a "panacea for all problems," but clearly defining its position as "serving those who truly need it."
The foundation's initiation of financial tightening is to accumulate sustainable development capabilities for the long term, while Vitalik's personal funding is to fill gaps in key areas. The dual optimization of ecology and technology is forcing ecological projects to shift from mere "speculative arbitrage" to genuine "functional innovation."
Although the transformation will be accompanied by growing pains, it will also lead to a more resilient open-source, verifiable full-stack ecosystem, which may be the survival wisdom for Ethereum to navigate the next five years.
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