Author: Vitalik Buterin
Translated by: Yuliya, PANews
On May 25, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a personal lengthy article about the future development direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF). In the article, he elaborated on the organizational transformation the foundation is undergoing, the strategic adjustments in resource allocation, and how Ethereum can maintain its uniqueness in an increasingly competitive technological wave. He emphasized that Ethereum's core competitiveness does not lie in merely pursuing extreme TPS but in excelling in areas such as censorship resistance, decentralization, and security (CROPS). The following is the translated original content.
I want to talk about some of my personal views on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF).
First of all, I need to clarify that this is just my personal opinion. The foundation is not solely determined by me, and I have no privileges on the board. This transformation is primarily carried out by Aerugo, and I mainly provide some technical ideas. Currently, the board is recruiting new members, and my power within the foundation will become smaller and smaller, to be honest, that's exactly what I hope for.
By 2025, the foundation has significantly improved its efficiency and solved many old problems. However, at the beginning of this year, I had a new concern. I often hear people complaining: “Vitalik goes out every day praising Ethereum's decentralization, privacy protection, and security to the sky, but how come when the foundation itself gets to work, it's completely different?”
You might have heard different opinions. Perhaps you feel everything is fine now, there is no crisis, and even think the foundation is finally taking execution and business expansion seriously, and as long as we maintain this, everything will be fine. If this is really the case, then there might be a divergence between you and me on questions like “what kind of criticism do I value most” and “what kind of critics cause me the most pain with their criticism.”
To clarify, I will use an example from another circle.
Regarding Google, you could think of it as a successful company that has helped humanity organize information, with immense merit. But you could also see it this way: it started with the slogan “don’t be evil,” and while the ideals were grand, later it fell into the bad habits of big corporations and gradually lost its original intention.
My view of Google lies somewhere between the two perspectives. However, if there were a button that could take me back to 2008 and forcefully inject a bit of “idealism” (like giving open-source leader Richard Stallman a permanent veto over Google policies), I would not hesitate to press it.
Why? Because the choices made by a company can affect the whole world. The general environment of the technology industry that Google was in and is currently in has largely deviated from the early idealistic foundation of "don’t be evil," as everyone looks at money, engaging in authoritarian super AI, permeated by a group of antisocial characters, even bowing to government surveillance and power for profit. While everyone is going with the flow, if a large company can stand up and be a “thorn,” firmly adhering to its principles, it would be a great benefit for the freedom and stability of society. This is my understanding of diversity.
This notion is not mine alone; people like Aya from the foundation also think this way when formulating our “mission.”
So what does this have to do with the Ethereum Foundation?
The foundation has never been the “center” of Ethereum; it is just one of countless nodes in the ecosystem, fulfilling specific tasks. We have always said this, but many people in the circle (even within the foundation) insist on treating us as the “big boss.” Now, we need to prove through our actions: we are truly just an ordinary node.
This is very important because the foundation has limited capabilities and limited funds. We only hold about 0.16% of ETH (less than many large Ethereum holders), while other blockchain projects often hold 10% to 50% of their tokens. Financially, the Ethereum Foundation was initially defined based on the token sale documents and other launch materials to accomplish a limited scope of work (including building chain software and completing phases like Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity), all of which were entirely completed by 2022. It was never meant to exist to rule Ethereum forever.
So today, the foundation chooses to use its remaining resources to pursue long-term development rather than blind expansion (yes, this also means we will reduce the sale of ETH). The foundation will only do one thing in the future: focus on those critically important tasks for Ethereum that can maintain Ethereum's censorship resistance/capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security (which we refer to as CROPS), and those tasks that cannot be accomplished without our assistance.
This means making difficult choices; in some cases, even activities we highly recognize and individuals we deeply respect may be excluded from EF. If we want important tasks to attract external capital, it is actually necessary to leave talents with outstanding technical abilities, who are publicly respected, and who align closely with our mission and CROPS (censorship resistance/capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security) outside of EF. This also means the EF must culturally take a principled stance.
All of this is to collaborate with all other parts of Ethereum. We recognize that many other aspects of the Ethereum world also highly respect CROPS and related values. However, high respect does not equate to choosing specialization and fully committing to a specific area (just like I feel protecting animals is important, I love being vegetarian, but I cannot make every meal completely vegetarian).
The foundation is still in a transitional phase, and it is expected to take a few more months to be fully defined. What will the future foundation look like? From a technical perspective, my core requirement is:
Ethereum must be awe-inspiring.
We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and the rapid advancement of various other technologies. The approach of “maintaining the current state of EVM and conducting a hard fork once or twice a year to optimize short-term user needs” is no longer attractive enough.
For some people, “awe-inspiring” means: 250 milliseconds of latency and 1 million TPS. I think it is a mistake for Ethereum to try to go this route. Pursuing speed and scalability as much as possible, with only slightly more decentralization than other chains, is a path to mediocrity, and if we attempt to do this, we are bound to fail.
Ethereum should indeed expand, but we should strive for excellence in another dimension, which is CROPS (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security). Specifically:
Absolutely bug-free Ethereum. Six months ago, security experts would likely think this is a pipe dream. But now, with AI-assisted verification, this is fast becoming a reality. We must be the first in this regard.
An indestructible consensus mechanism. Ethereum is currently (and will continue to be under lean consensus) the only chain that can simultaneously achieve two points: first, the traditional BFT-style feature, which is secure up to a very high level of fault tolerance under asynchronous conditions; second, the Bitcoin PoW-style feature, which is secure up to 49% attacker under synchronous conditions. As far as I know, it is not an exaggeration to say that no other chain possesses or is planning to possess this. Other chains can only achieve either the first point or the second point. I have argued about this with people many times before; I hold a firm belief that chains at the level of Ethereum and Bitcoin must not rely on “unplugging network cables” or social consensus to rescue them if they face 34% node dropout. This is acceptable for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, this is unacceptable.
Reduce intermediaries. Many current smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still rely on third-party intermediaries to send transactions to the chain, which is indeed embarrassing and poses a continuous security risk. Therefore, FOCIL and EIP-8141 (as well as previous 7701 and years of work) aim to genuinely minimize intermediaries in the transaction sending process through public mempool and robust on-chain inclusion features, covering not just secp256r1 but also privacy protocols, etc. Kohaku is promoting the reduction of intermediaries at the user level, leading Ethereum away from a dystopian state where wallets do not even verify the chain and send our private data to dozens of third-party servers, towards a brighter CROPS future.
Some goals are not reasonable, and achieving 50% might be good enough if we rely on intermediaries, but what would happen if switching became easy? However, just going 50% of the way will not make Ethereum truly awe-inspiring in terms of CROPS. Therefore, we aim to achieve 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 L2s optimized for specific applications (such as high-frequency trading, privacy, etc.). Thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P and many other optimizations, these goals are even compatible with significantly shortened block times (slot times).
In short, the most valuable “product” of the Ethereum blockchain is the ETH asset itself. Ethereum currently protects $250 billion in assets. The various characteristics of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very beneficial to the ETH asset.
I personally hold nearly 90% of my wealth in ETH, and the remaining $40 million has been donated to certain open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware projects.
However, maintaining the value of ETH is something the foundation cannot control. This will require other big players in the ecosystem (some of whom hold more ETH than the foundation) to step up to help. The foundation is also exploring how to provide some early support for these new organizations.
In summary, the future Ethereum Foundation will have fewer people, will take more principled stances (which might be hard to understand at times), but it will live longer. Its existence is to ensure that Ethereum can truly leave something meaningful for this world. Thanks to everyone inside and outside the foundation who helps to achieve this goal.
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