Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published one of the most candid public statements yet about where the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is heading. In a long-form post, Vitalik lays out a new operating thesis for the EF: not as the "center" of Ethereum, but as one specialized node with a deliberately narrow mandate — preserving Ethereum's identity as a censorship-resistant, open, private, and secure (CROPS) system.
The post is partly a personal philosophical statement, partly an architectural roadmap. Both halves matter for anyone who holds, builds on, or trades ETH.
Vitalik's Headline Framing: A Personal View, Not a Decree
Vitalik opens with an unusual disclaimer for someone of his stature: "This is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not." He credits Aya Miyaguchi (referenced in the original post as the one "executing much of this transition") for leading the operational shift, and explicitly notes that his own influence inside the organization is intentionally decreasing — "which is honestly what I want."
This framing isn't false modesty. It's the foundation of the entire thesis: the EF is moving away from being centralized around any single founder or "center of Ethereum" narrative.
The Core Tension: "Why Don't the EF's Actions Match Vitalik's Words?"
Vitalik identifies the specific criticism that triggered this strategic pivot. He had been hearing variations of:
"Vitalik says these beautiful things about Ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"
He acknowledges that other observers were saying the opposite — that the EF was finally taking execution and business development seriously and should keep going faster. The fact that Vitalik chose to weight the first critique more heavily reveals his priorities: alignment with stated values matters more than acceleration.
The "Unreasonable Man" Argument — and Why It Frames Everything
Vitalik builds his case with a striking analogy to Google. He concedes Google has done real good organizing the world's information, but he argues that if he had been given a button in 2008 to make Google one or two standard deviations more dogmatic — even granting Richard Stallman veto power on key policies — he would have pressed it immediately.
The reasoning:
"One company doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than all large companies bending to dominant trends."
The point isn't that Google is bad. The point is that pluralism requires unreasonable holdouts. In a tech industry drifting toward surveillance, accelerated superintelligence, and capitulation to government pressure, the existence of organizations that stubbornly refuse to drift is itself a public good.
Applied to Ethereum: the EF should be that unreasonable holdout for CROPS values.
The New Operating Model: EF as "One Node, Not the Center"
Several constraints make this redefinition both necessary and pragmatic:
- The EF holds only ~0.16% of all ETH — less than many individual ETH whales. Most other major blockchains have foundations holding 10–50% of native supply.
- The EF's original fiscal mandate was finite, defined in the token sale documents to cover the chain's launch and the milestones through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. That mandate was fully completed in 2022.
- The EF was never designed to be an eternal steward.
With those facts in view, Vitalik makes a sharp choice: longevity over breadth. The EF will sell less ETH, focus more narrowly, and use its remaining resources only on activities that are critical to CROPS-style Ethereum and that would not happen otherwise.
That has consequences. People of "great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission" may end up working outside the EF — and that is described as necessary, because it's how important work attracts outside capital rather than being trapped inside a single organization.
"Ethereum Must Be Impressive" — But Not by Chasing TPS
Here is where Vitalik draws the cleanest technical line.
"At the core, Ethereum must be impressive. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. 'Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users' is not interesting."
But he explicitly rejects the route most other chains have taken:
"To some, 'impressive' means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose."
Ethereum's "impressive" axis is CROPS depth, not TPS records.
Three Technical Pillars for the Next Era
Vitalik names three specific goals that, in his view, make Ethereum deeply impressive in the CROPS dimension.
1. Provably Bug-Free Ethereum
A goal cybersecurity researchers would have called "absurd and impossible" until roughly six months ago. AI-assisted formal verification has changed the math. Vitalik wants Ethereum to be a frontrunner in achieving formally proved correctness of the core protocol.
2. Available Chain Consensus
Ethereum is — and with lean consensus will continue to be — the only chain that combines:
- Traditional BFT-style safety under asynchrony, up to a high fault-tolerance threshold, AND
- Bitcoin PoW-style safety under synchrony, up to 49% attackers.
In Vitalik's reading, no other chain has both properties or is planning for them: Bitcoin targets only the second, most others target only the first. He recalls fighting "unreasonably" for this — insisting that it's not OK for Ethereum to rely on social consensus and emergency hard forks to recover if 34% of nodes go offline. That standard is acceptable for many other chains. It is not acceptable for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash.
3. Intermediary Minimization
The current reality that smart contract wallets and privacy protocols like Railgun must route transactions through intermediaries to get on-chain is, in Vitalik's words, "honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility."
Hence the work on FOCIL, EIP-8141, EIP-7701, and years of prior protocol research — designed to make transaction submission intermediary-minimized with a strong public mempool and inclusion guarantees, covering not just secp256r1 but privacy protocols and far broader use cases. The Kohaku initiative pushes the same principle at the user-wallet layer: wallets that actually verify the chain instead of trusting third-party RPC providers with private data.
Speed Is Not Off the Table — Just Not the Identity
Vitalik is careful to note that CROPS depth and high throughput are not opposed. Major research effort is going into scaling state, L2s optimized for specific applications (high-volume trading, privacy), and lower slot times through Raul's work on erasure-coded peer-to-peer networking. The point is hierarchy of priorities: CROPS first, scaling within those constraints.
What This Means for ETH the Asset
This is the section many traders will read most carefully. Vitalik states it plainly:
"The most high-value 'product' of the Ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset."
He also discloses that nearly 90% of his net worth is in ETH, with most of the remainder allocated to open-source biotech, software, and hardware initiatives. But he flags that some necessary work to support ETH the asset falls outside the EF's scope — and that's where "other heroes" (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) need to step in. The EF is now actively thinking about how to relate to and seed those external organizations.
The Closing Picture: A Smaller, More Opinionated, Longer-Lasting Ship
Vitalik ends the post with a sentence that summarizes the entire strategy:
"EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one — in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend — but a longer-lasting one."
Read alongside the rest of the post, the implications are clear:
- Expect less EF sprawl, fewer initiatives, less ETH sold.
- Expect more "unreasonable" technical stances, especially on consensus, formal verification, and intermediary removal.
- Expect more delegation to outside organizations, including for activities the EF itself approves of but won't lead.
For ETH holders and Ethereum developers, the message is that the EF is choosing identity over scope — and that decision is intended to make ETH the asset more durable, not less.
