Author: Aerugo, Interim Joint Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation
Compiled by: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher
1. Introduction
Vitalik recently wrote about the developmental direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF); Aya supplemented with a commentary explaining how we got to this point, and why. I will write about the execution process.
We now have a clear understanding of the question "What is the purpose of the Ethereum Foundation?" and no longer view it as an open-ended question. Our mission is clear: the existence of the Ethereum Foundation is to ensure that Ethereum is, and will continue to be, a truly permissionless and self-sovereign infrastructure: it can resist censorship (and data theft), is freely open-source, private and secure; and can support the coordination of sovereignty-maintaining efforts on an unprecedented scale.
Here are some key points derived from this mandate, along with some thoughts on how we will translate it into action. But first, a brief review…
2. Situations Where EF Does Not Apply
We are not here to pursue the importance of EF, corporate/political appeal, or ecosystem popularity. We are also not here to please short-term speculators, support "too big to fail" systemically important financial institutions, promote every application on Ethereum, help anyone appear attractive in front of their friends in the cryptocurrency or investment community, or provide on-demand entertainment services at dinners and private gatherings.
3. The Role of EF: Eliminating Weaknesses
We are here to strengthen defenses against places where Ethereum has already become extractive, all-encompassing, or susceptible to cartel or state control, or affected by tools of authoritarian regimes surveilling or pressuring it.
We will take action based on a comprehensive examination of the state and potential of Ethereum at the protocol layer (the "Ethereum" that actually runs), the access layer (the part users interact with the protocol), the user layer (the end users that need and will need Ethereum), and the institutional layer (intermediate paths to expand sovereignty).
The Ethereum Security Framework (EF) aims to reinforce all layers of Ethereum, including those that may formally remain permissionless but may actually be controlled. Some obvious layers include transaction pipelines, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and governance processes at the social level. The main issues these layers face are essentially the same: does the current state and its future trajectory maximize trust minimization, minimize available exploits and avenues of control, default to user privacy, preserve exit mechanisms, and clarify trust assumptions?
This work begins with the Ethereum Foundation (EF) itself. We are shifting our compensation and primary financial relationships to Ethereum (ETH) and compliant Ethereum-native stablecoins, unless legal or unavoidable operational constraints necessitate exceptions. This is not merely a ritual, nor is it asking people to take on unmanaged personal risks, but rather robustness, consistency, and product pressure.
If the goal of the Ethereum Foundation is to enable Ethereum to serve as an infrastructure for achieving sovereign autonomy, then everyone in the foundation will increasingly be constrained by the very systems the foundation aims to improve: wallet user experience, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, reliance risks, and so on. If we cannot use these tools ourselves, we cannot expect others to use them. Ethereum has matured; those who do not rely on user-facing underlying tech stacks, at any level, have no right to attempt to shape its future.
Next is the transaction process. Preventing harmful MEV from being extracted is core work for Ethereum, not a minor market structure issue. The supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement of transactions are all part of Ethereum's neutrality boundaries. Certain MEV may persist as adversarial phenomena contained within the protocol, but must be minimized. To achieve this, we must guard against its beneficiaries gaining undue influence.
If trusted neutral execution is undermined by privileged order flow, monopolistic builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourced to a narrow supply chain, then Ethereum may superficially appear permissionless, but users will feel that value flows through intermediaries. Therefore, the focus of EF protocol work will be on lowering the barriers to block construction and validation, strengthening block inclusion guarantees, reducing the opacity of extraction, building competitive transaction pipelines, improving user understanding of trust assumptions, and more actively exploring open order flow solutions.
All of this is not simple. A solution effective in one area may exacerbate problems in others. FOCIL is beneficial against censorship, but it may introduce more cross-block MEV (maximal extractable value). While ePBS addresses the relay trust issue, we must ensure its implementation does not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to larger problems. For example, if the reinforcement of the builder economy via ePBS ultimately makes it harder to reduce dependency on a depleted public mempool for private order flow, that would be unacceptable. Crypto mempools may not only reduce transparency before execution and the visibility of pending order flow, but also transfer competitive advantages to new privileged participants, including the operators of specialized hardware by design, while adding to the protocol’s complexity.
To avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to addressing resource extraction issues at the whole system level. This requires creativity, courage, and a recognition that failure to address this issue is unacceptable. If we fail, it will not only leave unnecessary barriers to institutional adoption but more importantly, we will abandon Ethereum’s core commitment—to displace extractive intermediaries with permissionless, trusted, neutral infrastructure and competitive markets. This scenario must not happen.
MEV is likely to become the next major battleground of the crypto-punk war. We must be well-prepared to achieve victory here.
Privacy is crucial. A public ledger lacking strict defaults for privacy is, in effect, a surveillance platform with settlement guarantees. This is by no means the end state that the world computer should achieve. Ethereum will provide unconditional privacy protection and, on this basis, offer programmability for selective disclosure, proof, audit, compliance logic, reputation, governance, identity, and other constraints chosen by users and their communities. The temporal order is critical: unconditional privacy must exist first, followed by optional constraints.
Equally important is to avoid forcing users to build a fragile combination of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, applications, compliance providers, and operational habits in order to achieve privacy. Deep privacy must be more secure than this. Privacy is a necessary condition for Ethereum to survive as a coordination infrastructure that respects freedom, and thus it must be robust enough.
Staking must be viewed as infrastructural risk of the protocol. Staking is not merely a yield product; liquid staking is not merely an application-layer market. If staking, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence are concentrated in the hands of a few issuers or operators, the security layer of Ethereum becomes vulnerable to attack, as its surrounding economic layer is controlled. EF will support relevant research, standards, and designs to ensure that staking is permissionless, as private as possible, operates diversely, and prevents intermediaries from becoming permanent control points.
Access interfaces are where users access the protocol directly or through default intermediary interfaces. The primary issue to solve here is not how to get Ethereum directly into more domains, but how to make its users (including both end users and institutions) more self-sovereign, less susceptible to coercion, and avoid normalizing soft coercion in order to expand coverage. EF (the Ethereum Framework) will not enhance its acceptance by undermining Ethereum's unique value. Ethereum does not need to become another permissioned settlement backend with a better brand image. It needs to prove in production that large-scale self-coordination is feasible.
In the Ethereum realm, EF’s defense work aims to ensure that Ethereum infrastructure remains usable by users in the midst of counterparty defaults, platform censorship, government overreach, intermediary fund misappropriation, and coordination issues that trusted systems struggle to manage. The core is to ensure that this infrastructure is secure and reliable at every layer, resisting any potential attack.
4. Another Use of EF: Seizing Opportunities
Laying a solid foundation is not enough. Ethereum's potential has yet to be fully realized, but that does not mean the road ahead will be smooth. Opportunities must be seized at the right moments. Currently, some opportunities have emerged, including:
* Ethereum will become the first global infrastructure resistant to quantum attacks. Ethereum researchers will lead the migration to post-quantum cryptography before quantum threats manifest into a governance crisis. This means fortifying Ethereum's cryptographic foundations while there is still time to design carefully. The same applies to other long-term risks; waiting for market demand means missing the best opportunity for principled design.
* A fully self-sovereign and verifiable protocol stack, from start to finish, either locally or remotely, without any censorship or data extraction faults: browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasting, order flows, inclusion, block construction, proposals, proofs, exits, and recovery. Minimized MEV (maximal extractable value), and no harmful MEV embeds completely within or around the protocol. There are no execution layers that are formally permissionless but controlled by privileged supply chains. If there are channels leading to extractive private conduits, other options must be available to maintain protocol operations. Our goal is not only to prevent data extraction or capture but to ensure trusted neutral execution is competitive enough to attract serious users.
* Building Ethereum into ordinary digital cash: a medium of private, dignity-respecting, anti-devaluation, and anti-surveillance transactions and value storage, as well as a natural asset for individuals and their agents to conduct private computing and private coordination. If Ethereum can enable the privacy-economy and privacy-institution to thrive without users having to re-experience the frictions and potential abuses associated with custodians, surveillance providers, or more benign-looking permissioned ledgers, and provide a platform for a secure and competitive machine economy, it will unleash tremendous value.
* Users can own and run personal wallets on their personal computers, containing user-specific AI agents. Keys do not belong to you, tokens do not belong to you; models do not belong to you, and your thoughts do not belong to you. As agents become the interface for more economic and social activities, the question of who owns the wallet, the models, the memory, the strategies, and the signing privileges is no longer a matter of user experience detail but becomes a fundamental issue of sovereignty—we are all first and foremost users, and only then do we take on other roles; everyone at EF must keep this in mind.
* In institutional and enterprise application scenarios, Ethereum's strength lies in its resistance to fading into an invisible backend, being guarded by intermediaries, offering poor user experiences, or devolving into a compliance fintech platform masquerading as Web3. Instead, we will win by demonstrating that trusted, neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination in an extremely competitive manner, forcing trusted intermediaries to accept the terms of Ethereum.
* Security-based scaling. L2 layers and related infrastructure that can meet institutional-level needs while avoiding reliance on closed operators, opaque processes, custodian user experiences, or upgrade committees where users cannot truly exit. Scalability is not merely about throughput but ensuring the availability of sovereignty under actual load.
We are ensuring that Ethereum always remains the most solid foundation for local and global settlement; not only that, but it is also a time-tested civilizational ledger and execution platform. When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the ancient information age, Ethereum should be the first example they think of.
The lifespan of Ethereum will outlast all of us. Many who pay attention to this matter understand this. Many may not believe it, but the fact is as such. If you do not believe or understand, we have no time to try to convince you, sorry.
5. Handling Departures
Speculation about personnel departures has abounded online both before and after the EF released new regulations. Some resigned voluntarily while others were terminated. Reasons for departures vary from strategic reasons, mismatches with roles, normal organizational adjustments, to some feeling they are better suited to contribute to Ethereum elsewhere. We do not discuss individual personnel matters on Twitter. This is our default position, as it benefits EF, the individuals involved, and Ethereum itself. Everyone who contributes to EF deserves respect upon leaving. They should not let their work experience become fodder for factional battles.
Where conditions allow, we politely allow employees to describe their reasons for departure in their own words rather than through compromise. If public statements seriously mislead public understanding of EF’s direction, decisions, or responsibilities, we may correct at policy, process, and institutional levels. However, we will never make personal records public.
Ethereum is permissionless. People can hold differing opinions, voice criticisms, compete, fork, and develop elsewhere. We are committed to maintaining a dignified exit for the project and hope others will do the same. We sincerely appreciate everything contributors have created; we will continue to advance the necessary work for Ethereum.
6. Addressing EF Derivative Companies Issues
In the coming months, some work will no longer be overseen by EF. We hope and expect this process will promote some fruitful work, thereby expanding the reach of self-sovereign learning. But we must also be cautious to avoid it devolving into abdicating responsibility or seeking excuses for reckless spending. Some work does not align with the foundation's purpose and should not use EF funds or receive EF endorsement to continue, whether internally or externally.
The work carried out by derivative companies will vary widely. Some companies leave EF because other institutions are more suitable for them; some leave because the market should determine their value; some leave because they do not align with the direction set in their articles of incorporation; and others leave because they, while useful, do not fit within EF's work.
Just as derivative companies do not become better simply because they reduce EF’s headcount, having once been part of EF does not mean they have the right to receive EF funding. The question we propose when deciding whether to fund is not "Is this money coming from EF?" but rather the questions that all external funding should raise:
"Is this work critical? If the Ethereum Foundation (EF) had sufficient organization and financial resources, would it undertake this work on its own? Are there more suitable alternatives? Can external institutions accomplish this work without increasing the risk of extraction, privatizing benefits, opacity, or dependence? Can supporting this work gradually reduce Ethereum's dependence on the Ethereum Foundation without prematurely transferring resources and legitimacy to new organizations, thus avoiding operational failures or mission drift?"
EF funds external work when it is a solution for authorized work capability — work that EF should responsibly strive to undertake; work that protects crops; work that promotes and expands autonomy; any essential work that cannot or will not be reliably undertaken without EF funding; and work that can define scope, review, and accountability without causing permanent dependence.
If this funding is to pro forma extend projects, maintain friendships, protect reputations, avoid making tough decisions, or support work that contradicts project goals, then this funding is inappropriate.
EF's funding, legitimacy, and mission are all limited. We will take these three seriously, ensuring they work as they should. When we say "EF is one of many nodes," we mean that we are committed to being one of many nodes collectively maintaining and expanding sovereignty and striving to ensure that CROPS hold an indispensable primary position within the network. This does not mean we will support organizations or projects with different priorities. Diversity that enhances ecosystem resilience, reasonably controls coordination costs, and promotes better decision-making is good, but diversity that leads to mission drift is not.
We are not neutral about the direction of Ethereum's development. CROP is not only something we "believe" in, but characteristics we deeply understand must be seriously considered and prioritized at every fork of Ethereum for it to reach its full potential. We are committed to building a system with extraordinary neutrality that will fundamentally reshape the world we live in; we seek to collaborate with all who are dedicated to achieving this shared goal.
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