Author: Jocy, founder of IOSG

Ethereum does not need another technical faith; it needs a Musk-style compromise.

When people first hear about ETHLabs, their immediate reaction is "second foundation," but I think that's the wrong question. Five former EF core researchers, with funding from BitMine, SharpLink, and Lubin, have come together; the former is the world's largest ETH treasury company, holding over 5 million ETH. They haven’t created a forked foundation, but rather filled a gap that the EF intentionally left. What is most intriguing about this step is that it wasn’t initiated by Vitalik; it was the ecosystem doing it for him. The formation of an organization around the founder is itself a vote of distrust in the market towards "non-interference and remaining small and decentralized." It’s not a forum vote; it’s a capital vote.

I have been thinking a lot about the differences between Musk and V.

Musk's talent has never been about the rocket itself. He truly understands how business turns, where money comes from, and what users want, and he is willing to personally do the dirtiest and hardest work, willing to delay Mars in order to land on the Moon first. He first fully grasps the real world, then lets technology reach reality. V does the opposite; he starts from the purest technology and values, hoping reality will emerge on its own.

This path has been taken over the past decade. Because there were no other options before; killer apps like ICO, DeFi, and NFT emerged from the community themselves. Ethereum was fortunate enough that every cycle had someone creating new things on it. But today, there are too many choices. Luck will not always be on your side.

Today in the Ethereum rebirth group, I see two kinds of voices. One says what Ethereum lacks is a Starlink-level killer app and a clear business direction; the other says it lacks BD and compromise with business reality. I think these two statements are not contradictory; they are two sides of the same coin. What Ethereum lacks is not another technical roadmap, but a person who truly engages in understanding business and battling with real-world applications.

So my expectations for V are very specific. It’s not about making him write a more beautiful white paper. I hope he takes the time to seriously study how Musk started his businesses and understood a venture, then refocuses most of his energy on one thing: what applications can Ethereum run in the real world. Until we clarify this matter, all technical narratives are hollow.

The real issue with EF, the harshest criticism comes from insiders. Dankrad Feist's words left a deep impression on me—those who leave are all CROPS believers, the problem is not strategy, but management; talent outflow is a real negative for Ethereum. The weight of this statement lies in its indication that the remedy is not direction; it’s the organization itself. And the sickness of the organization cannot be cured by a founder who is always half a step away and unwilling to get their hands dirty.

The new model is a small EF combined with a bunch of independent steward nodes, with ETHLabs and Etherealize making decisions separately. This actually validates the direction I have been advocating: the single foundation model can no longer hold, and responsibilities must be dispersed. But the path they are taking is much more radical than I thought. It appears to be more decentralized, but the problems are actually greater. Multiple nodes making decisions independently raises the questions of who aligns the agenda, who arbitrates disagreements, and where the cohesion comes from? Distributing the checkbook is easy; dispersing the direction without fragmentation is the real challenge.

My own answer is that this cohesion can ultimately only come from the value binding of ETH as a common reference asset; it cannot come from any single organization or person.

This is also why V's article in May stated that the foundation has never been the center of Ethereum, just an ordinary node in the ecosystem, holding only 0.16% of the ETH. The foundation cannot manage maintaining ETH's value; it relies on large holders in the ecosystem who possess even more tokens to step up. I agree with this judgment. But merely relying on the money from the big holders cannot create cohesion—what binds cohesion is first having a real-world narrative that everyone understands and is willing to bet on together.

There is also an unavoidable point. The so-called independence is now a declaration, not a fact. Lubin is both the CEO of ConsenSys and the chairman of SharpLink; the funders and beneficiaries are the same group of people, and the research is funded by a group holding billions of dollars in ETH positions, making directional bets. ETHLabs' response is independent grants administrators disbursing funds, quarterly reports, annual audits, and not interfering with the research agenda. The design is reasonable. But this kind of trust takes many years to cultivate and cannot be delivered by a single press release.

Finally, to touch on the deepest layer. Scaling L1 itself is extremely difficult; the current roadmap is still focused on infra—MEV elimination, default privacy, ETH Pay—these are necessary but do not address the real threats. Ethereum's opponent has never been Solana. It is the attention itself shifting towards AI. This window is probably only 12 to 18 months. Infra cannot regain attention. What can regain it is a founder who truly focuses on real applications and is willing to get their hands dirty like Musk, and a narrative that makes top graduates willing to give up OpenAI or Anthropic.

I still believe that V's ideal light has not gone out. But for the light of ideals to shine into reality, what is needed is not another gaze at the stars, but a bowing into the arena.

And the time left for this bowing is running out. Time is the only adversary here that does not negotiate with you.

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