Author: Vitalik Buterin

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: The Ethereum Foundation holds only 0.16% of all ETH, while other public chains' "central foundations" often hold between 10-50%. The resource-limited EF is making a tough choice: to abandon "big and comprehensive" and focus on things that others won't do, but are crucial to Ethereum's resistance to censorship, privacy, and security—even if that means letting talented people leave the EF to attract external funding. Vitalik believes that in an era accelerated by AI and technology, Ethereum should not pursue the mediocre path of "being slightly faster and a bit more decentralized" compared to others, but should achieve something truly shocking in the CROPS dimensions (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security).

Here are my thoughts on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn).

First, I want to state that these are just my personal views. The board is not made up of just me, and I do not have any more special powers in the board than other directors. @aerugoettinea has done most of the work executing this transition. My contributions are mainly focused on technical issues. The board is expanding, and my power in the organization will continue to decrease; honestly, that’s exactly what I want.

The year 2025 brings many significant improvements to EF and its execution capabilities. Many issues have been resolved, and EF continues to benefit from efficiency gains and a stronger focus on specific goals. After those issues were resolved earlier this year, the biggest legacy problem I perceived turned into another matter that has always troubled me: I often see people saying, "Vitalik says Ethereum needs to be decentralized, needs privacy, needs to be a sanctuary technology, which all sounds great, but why can’t EF’s actions reflect that?"

Now, you might be hearing different voices. You may not feel a sense of crisis at all, but instead hear people saying that we are finally taking execution and business development seriously, and that our main task is to maintain this direction and do it better and faster. So, there may indeed be a real difference between you and me—regarding which criticism I value the most, and which critics can cause me pain through their criticism.

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

Regarding Google, you can have one belief that it is a success story that has brought many benefits to humanity in organizing the world's information. You can also have another belief that they had a beautiful idealistic start, but at some point, the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they gradually abandoned their "don’t be evil" slogan.

My specific view of Google probably falls somewhere in between. However, if you took me back to around 2008, and gave me a button to shift Google away from its "dogma" by one or two standard deviations—like giving Richard Stallman permanent veto power over certain key policies—I would press it immediately.

Why? Because the choices of one company are not the choices of the entire world, nor even those of a single country. Google existed then and exists now within a technological industry context, an industry that, overall, is diverging from the early idealistic roots of "don’t be evil" towards a greed for economic interests, an extremist vision of accelerating superintelligence, and a surrender to social pathological pressures concerning government ideological control, surveillance, and war (or worse, active participation). Therefore, if one company does something different and positions itself as "the unreasonable one," resisting the tide of the times, it would be better for freedom, power balance, and overall social stability than if every major corporation yielded to mainstream trends. This is part of my version of pluralism.

This line of thought is not just mine; it is also not far from what Aya and others think in Mandate.

So how does all this relate to EF's role?

EF is not "the center of Ethereum," but rather "a clearly defined node coexisting with other nodes." We have always said that EF should be the latter, but many people in the Ethereum ecosystem (even within EF) want us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure we will become the latter.

This is especially important because EF is a limited organization with limited resources and organizational capacity. EF only holds about 0.16% of ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), while in other blockchains, it is customary for "central foundations" to hold 10-50%. Financially, EF was originally designed to complete the limited scope of work defined in the token sale document and other pre-launch materials (building chain software; completing Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), all of which was completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal caretaker.

Therefore, today, EF chooses to pursue longevity with its remaining resources rather than breadth (yes, this means we will sell less ETH). EF focuses on those activities that are crucial to Ethereum's success as a censorship-resistant/capture-resistant, open, private, and secure system—those activities that would not happen otherwise. This means making tough choices, and in some cases, even highly respected activities and individuals will leave EF. Having exceptional technical talent, public respect, or alignment with the mission and CROPS values leave EF is actually necessary if we want important tasks to attract external funding. This also means that EF culturally needs to take a position.

All this is intended to collaborate with all other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the Ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. However, high respect is not the same as choosing to focus and fully commit to a particular area (to compare with another field: I think reducing animal cruelty is important; I also like vegetarianism, but I am not an unconditional vegan myself).

EF is still in a transitional period, and we anticipate that its new long-term form will stabilize in the coming months. What are the guiding principles for this new form? Again, I want to state that I am just one person, but I can provide my answer from a technical perspective (as well as some equally critical non-technical aspects).

The core is that Ethereum must be shocking. We live in a highly intelligent age accelerated by AI and various other technologies. "Maintaining the status quo EVM with hard forks once or twice a year to optimize short-term user needs" is not interesting enough.

For some, "shocking" means: 250 milliseconds of latency and 1 million TPS. I believe that taking Ethereum down that path is a mistake. Being as fast as possible and scalable while being only slightly more decentralized than other chains is a path to mediocrity, and if we try this path, we will lose.

I believe Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive hardest to be profoundly shocking in another dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means:

Provably bug-free Ethereum. This was a goal that all network security researchers would have considered absurd and impossible about 6 months ago. Now, due to AI-assisted formal verification, it is approaching possibility. So we should be pioneers in this area.

Usable chain consensus. Ethereum is, and under streamlined consensus will continue to be, the only chain that has (i) traditional BFT-style attributes—security with the highest fault tolerance level in asynchronous circumstances—and (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style attributes—security against 49% attackers in synchronous circumstances. To my knowledge, hardly any other chains have or plan to do this; Bitcoin only pursues (ii), while most other chains only pursue (i). Some might remember that I fought hard for this, unreasonably insisting that Ethereum could not rely on social consensus and hard forks to save Ethereum from the impact of 34% of nodes being offline. This may work for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc. But it does not work for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or, say, Zcash.

Minimization of intermediaries. Protocols like smart contract wallets, railgun, etc. must send transactions to be on-chain via intermediaries, which is frankly awkward and an ongoing vulnerability. So, we are working on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (as well as 7701 and years of prior work) to achieve true minimization of intermediaries in a universally applicable way with public memory pools and strong inclusivity properties—not just covering, say, secp256r1, but also covering privacy protocols, and so on. Kohaku is pushing for minimization of intermediaries at the user layer to pull Ethereum out of the dystopian state of the world—where our wallets don’t even verify the chain, but send our private data to dozens of third-party servers—towards a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are unreasonable—perhaps achieving just 50% on these would be "okay"—if we rely on intermediaries but make switching easy? But only going 50% won’t shock Ethereum in a CROPS way. So we push toward 100%.

Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is a major focus of research (especially in state expansion). Well-designed L2 can also help, especially L2 optimized for specific applications (like high volume transactions, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly reducing slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure coding in P2P and many other optimizations.

The financially most valuable “product” of the Ethereum blockchain is the asset ETH. Ethereum protects 250 billion dollars' worth of ETH. The attributes of Ethereum I mentioned above are highly beneficial to the asset ETH. Nearly 90% of my net worth is ETH, and the remaining large portion is about 40 million dollars in on-chain fiat, each dollar of which has already been allocated to some open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware project. That is to say, some aspects of supporting the asset ETH—even necessary aspects—extend beyond the scope of EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than EF) to step in and help. EF has been thinking about how it will relate to other such organizations and provide them with the initial support they need.

EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a ship that is more assertive—in some cases, in ways that may be difficult to understand—but a more lasting ship, a ship well-suited to ensuring that Ethereum brings meaningful things to the world. We appreciate everyone inside and outside EF who helps realize this goal.