Editor’s Note: In the early hours of May 25, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, published a lengthy article on X. In the article, Vitalik reinterpreted his expectations for the future development of Ethereum and the role and function planning of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) from a personal perspective.

Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum should not bow to mainstream trends, but must be impressive and adhere to the values of anti-censorship, openness, privacy, and security known as CROPS. He also clearly mentioned, “The highest value product of Ethereum is ETH,” and made an exception by revealing that nearly 90% of his net assets are in ETH.

The following is the original content from Vitalik, translated by Odaily Planet Daily.

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

First, this is just my personal opinion. The board is not just me, and I do not have more special power within the board than other directors. Aya Miyaguchi is leading many of the execution efforts in this transformation, while my main involvement is providing input on technical issues. The board is also expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to decline in the future — to be frank, this is exactly what I want to see.

At this stage in 2025, EF has made many important improvements in execution capability. Many problems have been solved, and even today, EF continues to benefit from a higher efficiency and a work style that is more focused on specific goals. As these issues were gradually resolved, around the beginning of this year, I realized another matter that had been bothering me, which had become the largest legacy issue.

I often see people say things like — “Vitalik always talks about how Ethereum should remain decentralized, should protect privacy, and should be a sanctuary technology, but why do the actual actions of EF not reflect these ideas?”

Of course, the voices you hear might be completely different. You may not feel any sense of crisis at all, and might even hear people saying that we are finally taking execution and business development seriously. Our main task now is to maintain this momentum and do better and faster.

If this is the case, then it is likely that there is a real divergence between us — in terms of which criticisms I value most and which critics' criticisms are most painful to me.

An Analogy About Google

I would like to illustrate this with an example from another field.

Regarding Google, you can hold one belief that it is a success story that has brought significant benefits to humanity in organizing global information; but you can also hold another belief: they had a beautiful and idealistic beginning but were gradually eroded by mainstream corporate culture, slowly and step by step completely abandoning the mantra of “Don't be evil.”

My personal view of Google may lie somewhere in between these two. However, if you could take me back to around 2008 and give me a button that I could press to make Google ideologically “dogmatic” again by adding one or two more standard deviations (for example, granting Richard Stallman a permanent veto over certain key policies), I would not hesitate to press it.

Why? Because the choices of a company are not just that company's choices; they affect entire national systems and even the world. The context in which Google has been situated, both in the past and present, is that the entire tech industry is generally deviating from early idealism and the foundation of “Don't be evil,” turning toward greed for economic interests, a comprehensive vision for accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by antisocial personalities, and submission to government-imposed thought control, surveillance, and war pressure (or worse yet, actively participating in it).

Therefore, if there is “a certain company” that can go against the trend and become what George Bernard Shaw called an “Unreasonable Man” to resist the trend of the times, then such an existence is actually more conducive to freedom, power balance, and the stability of the entire society than all large companies bowing to mainstream trends.

This is part of my understanding of “pluralism.” This line of thinking is not just my personal idea; it actually aligns closely with Aya’s and others’ considerations when defining the mission framework of EF.

What Does This Mean for the Ethereum Foundation?

So, what does all this have to do with the role of EF?

EF is not “the center of Ethereum”; rather, EF is “a node with a clear function coexisting with other nodes.” We have always said that EF should be the latter, but many people in the Ethereum ecosystem (including some within EF) hope we become the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure we become the latter.

This is especially important because EF itself is an organization with limited resources and organizational capabilities. EF currently holds approximately 0.16% of ETH (even less than many individual ETH holders), while many other “central foundations” in other blockchains typically hold 10%-50%. Financially, EF was originally designed to fulfill the limited scope of work defined in the token sale documents and other pre-launch materials (developing on-chain software; going through the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity phases), and these works have been fully completed by 2022.

The original intention of EF was not to become an eternal steward. Therefore, today’s EF chooses to use the remaining resources to pursue “long-term existence” rather than “infinite expansion” (yes, this also means we will sell less ETH).

EF will specifically focus on those things that are crucial for Ethereum as an anti-censorship/capture, open, privacy, and secure system (i.e., the CROPS dimensions) and that no one else would do if we don’t. This means making difficult choices, and in some cases, even activities we highly appreciate and people we highly respect will be shifted outside of EF. In fact, if we want important tasks to attract external capital, it is even necessary for some individuals with high technical ability, public reputation, and high alignment with the mission and CROPS values to remain outside of EF.

This also means that EF will take a distinct cultural stance. All of this is not for opposition to other parts of the Ethereum ecosystem, but for collaboration. We know that many other organizations in the Ethereum world also highly resonate with CROPS and the related values, but “high resonance” is not the same as “choosing specialization and fully committing to a certain area.” To give another example, I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I also like vegan food, but I am not a thorough vegan myself.

EF is still in a period of transformation, and we expect its brand-new long-term form to stabilize in the coming months. What are the guiding principles of this new form?

Reiterating, I am just one person, but I can provide my answer from a technical perspective (of course, there are also key non-technical aspects).

Technical Core: Ethereum Must Be Impressive

The core is that Ethereum must be impressive. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and various other technological accelerations. A “status quo EVM that performs a hard fork once or twice a year to optimize short-term user needs” is unattractive.

For some, “impressive” means 250 milliseconds of latency and 1 million TPS. I believe pursuing this path is a mistake for Ethereum. Pursuing the fastest possible speed, the greatest scalability, while being just a little more decentralized than other public chains, is a path to mediocrity; if we try to take this path, we are bound to fail.

I believe Ethereum should scale, but I think Ethereum should make the greatest efforts in another dimension, to be truly stunning — that is the CROPS dimension (anti-censorship, open, privacy, secure). This includes the following specific goals.

First is to create a provably bulletproof Ethereum. Until about six months ago, all cybersecurity researchers would consider this an absurd and unachievable goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, this is on the verge of being realized. Therefore, we should be pioneers in advancing this.

Second is to achieve highly available on-chain consensus. Ethereum has been and will continue to be the only chain that possesses the following characteristics after introducing lean consensus: (i) attributes of traditional BFT style, ensuring security even in asynchronous environments facing a high level of fault tolerance; (ii) attributes of Bitcoin’s PoW style, able to resist attackers of up to 49% in synchronous environments.

As far as I know, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it. Bitcoin only pursues (ii), while most other chains only pursue (i). Some may remember that I have been very insistent on this — I “stubbornly” believe that Ethereum cannot rely on social consensus and hard forks to deal with 34% of nodes going offline. This doesn’t matter for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, it is unacceptable.

Third is “intermediary minimization,” trying to reduce the middle layer as much as possible. In fact, smart contract wallets and protocols like Railgun still have to go through intermediaries to send transactions and be included on-chain, which is quite embarrassing and is always a source of system vulnerability.

This is why we will promote FOCIL, EIP-8141 (and 7701 and related work from previous years), with the goal of establishing a truly universal transaction sending mechanism that minimizes reliance on intermediaries, with a public mempool and strong inclusion properties. This applies not only to secp256r1, but also to privacy protocols and more scenarios.

Kohaku is also pushing “de-intermediation” at the user level, moving Ethereum away from the current dystopian state — wallets that don’t even verify the chain itself but send our private data to dozens of third-party servers — and toward a future more in line with the CROPS philosophy.

Among the three goals mentioned above, some may seem “irrational” — perhaps Ethereum could do fine with just achieving 50% — for instance, what if we rely on intermediaries but make switching intermediaries easy? However, achieving only 50% will not allow Ethereum to be “truly stunning” on the path of CROPS. So we must aim for 100%.

Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is also a major focus of research (especially in state scalability). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially those optimized for specific applications (such as high-frequency trading, privacy, etc.). Thanks to Raul's work in erasure-coded P2P and many other optimizations, these goals can even be compatible with significantly reduced Slot Time (block time).

Looking Ahead

From a financial perspective, the highest value “product” of the Ethereum blockchain is the asset ETH. Ethereum protects ETH worth $250 billion. And those Ethereum characteristics I mentioned earlier are actually very beneficial for the value of ETH as an asset.

Personally, nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, with the rest being around $40 million in on-chain fiat, every dollar of which has been allocated to certain open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware projects.

But at the same time, there are some necessary works to support the value of the ETH asset — and these do not fall within the scope of EF’s responsibilities. At this time, we need other “heroes” to step up and help (some of whom hold more ETH than EF itself). EF has recently begun to think more about how to establish relationships with these organizations and provide them with necessary initial support.

The future EF will resemble a “small boat” more than in the past few years. It will take a firmer stance, and some stances may even be difficult to understand, but it will also last longer and be more suitable to ensure that Ethereum truly brings something meaningful to the world.

We are grateful to all those inside and outside EF who have helped make all this happen.

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