Written by: Changan, Biteye Content Team

In the past year, Ethereum has had a tough time. On one hand, it has been chased and attacked by high-performance public chains, and on the other hand, it has been repeatedly questioned by the community: it is too slow.

Earlier today, Vitalik published a long article, directly addressing the ultimate anxieties of the entire Web3 industry and re-answering a question that determines Ethereum's survival:

What does Ethereum need to win?

Is it higher TPS, faster transactions, stronger marketing, or is it the harder-to-articulate but more long-term elements of decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, and security?

1. EF is not Vitalik's "one-man show"

In the eyes of many users and institutions, EF sounds like "the official." Coupled with Vitalik's personal charisma, the outside world often equates EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. However, this is precisely contrary to the "decentralization" belief that Ethereum upholds.

In this long article, Vitalik made it clear that the EF board is not decided by him alone; he has no special privileges internally. A large amount of transformation work is being carried out by Aya Miyaguchi, while he has returned more purely to technical matters.

The EF board consists of more than just Vitalik, and he does not have more special power than other members. Many transformation tasks are handled by Aya Miyaguchi, while he primarily participates in technical issues.

Therefore, EF is not looking to make itself a larger Ethereum center, but rather to shrink its power boundaries: to delve deeper into what it should do and to pass on what it should not handle to others in the ecosystem.

2. If it becomes like Google, then it has truly lost

Vitalik stated that since 2025, EF has made many improvements in execution, efficiency, and goal focus.

Recently, the criticisms of EF from the outside world have mainly focused on "acting too slowly," "insufficient execution," and "not placing enough emphasis on applications and business collaborations." Thus, after 2025, EF began to become more efficient and focused on specific goals.

However, Vitalik said that this year, the issues he feels have changed.

He often sees doubts raised: Vitalik and EF have consistently emphasized that Ethereum should be decentralized, protect privacy, and resist censorship, but what EF is actually doing does not reflect these values.

In the past, people were worried that EF was not moving fast enough, while Vitalik is now more concerned that if EF only becomes faster, better at marketing, and more like a regular tech company, then Ethereum might ultimately place its original values in a secondary position.

To illustrate this point, Vitalik made an analogy with Google.

In its early days, Google also had a strong idealistic color, such as "Don't be evil." But as the company grew, it increasingly resembled a standard large tech company: having to consider commercial interests, regulatory pressures, platform power, and user data.

3. EF's new positioning: not the center of Ethereum, but a node in the ecosystem

Vitalik redefined EF's positioning: EF is not the center of Ethereum, but a node within the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the past, many people viewed EF as the core of Ethereum. When issues arose in the Ethereum ecosystem, people would ask why EF was not solving them.

But this time, Vitalik wants to emphasize that EF cannot do everything and should not do everything.

Vitalik also mentioned that EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH, which is even less than what many ETH holders possess. In contrast, many other blockchain foundations may control 10% to 50% of the tokens.

This means that EF does not have that much funding and does not possess such significant organizational capabilities, nor should it become Ethereum's eternal manager.

Therefore, EF will be more cautious in using its resources, investing money and people into the most fundamental, long-term, and hardest-to-commercialize aspects that are also vital to Ethereum.

4. EF's core mission: CROPS

Vitalik repeatedly mentioned a keyword in this article: CROPS.

Simply put, CROPS refers to the few things that Ethereum values most: censorship resistance, control resistance, open source, privacy, and security.

This is also the direction that has already been clarified in EF's Mandate this year: EF's mission is not to turn itself into a larger ecological company, nor to purely pursue more users, higher income, or higher token prices, but to help Ethereum uphold these fundamental commitments.

So, in fact, Vitalik is further clarifying boundaries this time: EF will not expand around "all things beneficial to Ethereum"; instead, it will focus more on CROPS.

EF is responsible for guarding the most fundamental, long-term, and hardest to commercialize parts, while other tasks such as applications, marketing, ecosystem growth, asset support, and institutional collaboration need to be undertaken by more external teams, capital, and community organizations.

5. We cannot just chase TPS, or we will head towards mediocrity

Vitalik stated that Ethereum must feel impressive. However, he does not believe that this prominence is solely about 250ms latency, 1 million TPS, or faster transaction confirmations.

Many new public chains challenge Ethereum with higher TPS, lower latency, and cheaper fees. Solana, BNB Chain, Hyperliquid, and some new L1s all emphasize being faster, smoother, and more suitable for transactions.

Vitalik is not denying the importance of scaling. Ethereum certainly needs to improve performance; directions such as L2, state scaling, and lower slot time will continue to advance.

Because if it only competes on speed, it is hard for Ethereum to always be the most extreme one. There will always be chains willing to sacrifice more decentralization in exchange for higher TPS, lower latency, and better short-term experiences.

If Ethereum follows this road, it might only end up becoming "a slightly more decentralized high-performance chain," which is not Ethereum's goal.

Vitalik wants to emphasize that the areas where Ethereum should truly excel are censorship resistance, control resistance, open source, privacy, and security.

Speed is certainly important, but speed is not all that defines Ethereum.

The truly irreplaceable aspect of Ethereum should be: while performance continues to improve, it still guards these harder and more long-term foundational capabilities.

6. Vitalik identified three technical directions

After discussing that Ethereum should not solely chase TPS, Vitalik also provided a few technical directions that he considers more important.

1. Proving Ethereum is bug-free

The first direction is formal verification.

Simply put, it means using a stricter and more mathematically proof-like method to verify the correctness of Ethereum protocols, clients, and related code.

In the past, "proving Ethereum has no bugs" sounded almost impossible because blockchain systems are too complex, with massive interactions between code, clients, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts.

However, Vitalik believes that with the development of AI-assisted formal verification, this is becoming more realistic.

This also indicates that he is not viewing AI as merely a buzzword at the application layer, but is more focused on whether AI can help Ethereum strengthen its underlying security.

2. Available chain consensus

The second direction is consensus security.

Vitalik mentioned that Ethereum wants to possess a rather unique capability: even in poor network environments or if part of the nodes fail, Ethereum should not easily rely on human coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to resolve issues.

He believes that for some chains, if a large number of nodes go offline, relying on project parties, validators, and community coordination to recover might be acceptable. But for systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash, which emphasize censorship resistance and neutrality, such dependencies are very risky.

Because once a system needs to rely on a few people to coordinate for recovery, it exposes itself to centralization risks.

3. Reducing intermediary dependence

The third direction is reducing intermediary dependence.

Currently, many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still need to rely on some intermediary services when sending transactions to the chain, such as RPCs, third-party servers, transaction relays, and packing services.

These intermediary services can lead to a smoother user experience but also bring problems.

For example, if a particular intermediary service refuses to process your transaction, your transaction might not go through. If a wallet needs to send data to a third-party server, your privacy could be exposed.

Vitalik believes that this state does not align with the direction Ethereum wants.

Therefore, he mentioned that works like FOCIL, EIP-8141, 7701, Kohaku, etc., are essentially solving the same problem: allowing users to engage directly with Ethereum without the need to rely on a plethora of intermediary services.

7. Assets are being brought to the forefront, but it will not become an ETH pump organization

Vitalik also unusually placed ETH assets in a very important position.

He said that from a financial perspective, Ethereum's most valuable product is ETH. Ethereum now protects about $250 billion of ETH.

He also mentioned that nearly 90% of his net worth is in ETH, with the rest mostly in on-chain fiat currencies, which have already been allocated to open-source biotechnology, software, and hardware projects.

He admitted that ETH is Ethereum's most important asset. Ethereum's security, censorship resistance, privacy, and openness will ultimately affect ETH's long-term value.

However, matters related to the value of ETH, such as marketing, institutional communication, asset narratives, and ecosystem growth, are better suited to be undertaken by teams and organizations outside of EF.

In conclusion

The most noteworthy aspect of Vitalik's long article is not that EF will become smaller or that EF will sell less ETH, but rather that he has re-answered a more fundamental question:

What does Ethereum ultimately aim to become?

The direction he provided is that: EF becomes smaller, Ethereum becomes more focused, and others in the ecosystem take on more roles.

This path may not sound very appealing and may not necessarily satisfy the short-term market, but it also re-explains why Ethereum remains special: it aims for more than just speed, costs, and transaction experience; it seeks foundational capabilities that are harder to censor, harder to capture, place greater importance on privacy, are more secure, and more open.

In the future, EF may be a smaller ship, but Vitalik hopes what it protects are the things that Ethereum should never dilute.