My view on where the Ethereum Foundation is headed

Here's my take on the direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF). This reflects only my personal view. The EF board is not just me, and I do not have any special authority beyond other board members. Much of the transition work is being executed by @aerugoettinea; my contributions have largely been on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding. Over time my influence in the organization will keep declining, which is what I want. The 2025 era delivered major improvements in EF's ability to execute. A number of long-standing issues were addressed. EF is still benefiting from higher efficiency and sharper focus on concrete goals. With those operational problems largely resolved, one remaining gap stood out to me earlier this year: I kept seeing people ask why the EF's actions don't seem to match ideals often associated with Ethereum—decentralization, privacy, and being a sanctuary technology. You may have heard a different set of critiques: that EF was finally taking execution and business development seriously, and the priority should be to keep pushing faster. That difference matters because we all react to different criticisms. Some critiques hit me harder than others. An analogy: Google can be viewed as a major success that helped organize the world's information. It can also be viewed as a company that started with idealism and gradually abandoned the "don't be evil" ethos as mainstream corporate incentives took over. My own view sits somewhere between those two. If you took me back to around 2008 and offered a button to make Google one or two standard deviations more dogmatic—for example, giving Richard Stallman permanent veto power over key policies—I'd press it immediately. Not because one company should define the world, but because the tech industry as a whole was drifting away from early idealism and toward financial greed, totalizing superintelligence narratives, infiltration by sociopaths, and capitulation to (or participation in) state pressure for ideological control, surveillance, and war. In that environment, one major player choosing a different posture—what George Bernard Shaw called the "Unreasonable Man"—would have helped freedom, balance of power, and social stability more than having every large company conform. That pluralist framing is close to how I think about EF's role. EF is not "the center of Ethereum". EF is one node with a defined purpose alongside many other nodes. We've said this for years, but parts of the ecosystem (and even some inside EF) have wanted EF to function as the center. We're now taking concrete steps to ensure EF operates as a node. This matters because EF is constrained: limited resources, limited organizational capacity. EF holds about 0.16% of all ETH—less than many individual holders. In many other blockchain ecosystems, a "central foundation" commonly holds 10–50%. EF was also fiscally designed for a bounded scope described in the token sale and pre-launch materials: building the chain software and delivering Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. That mission was completed in 2022. EF was not designed to be an eternal steward. Today EF is choosing longevity over breadth. Yes, that implies selling less ETH. The focus is on activities that are critical to Ethereum's success as a censorship- and capture-resistant, open, private, secure system—especially the work that would not happen otherwise. This forces difficult choices. In some cases, even projects we strongly support, and people we deeply respect, will fall outside EF. Having technically excellent, highly respected people aligned with the mission and CROPS outside EF is necessary if important tasks are to attract external capital. This also implies EF taking clearer cultural positions. The intent is to do this in cooperation with the rest of the Ethereum world. Many parts of the ecosystem respect CROPS and related values. Respecting a value is not the same as specializing and dedicating fully to it (in another domain: I care about reducing animal cruelty and enjoy vegan food, but I am not unconditionally vegan). EF is still in transition. We expect its long-term structure to stabilize over the next few months. From my technical perspective, the guiding principle is simple: Ethereum must be impressive. We're in an era of highly capable AI and accelerating technology. "Status quo EVM, plus one or two hard forks a year to optimize for short-term user needs" will not stand out. Some interpret "impressive" as 250ms latency and 1 million TPS. I think Ethereum trying to win on that axis is a mistake. If the goal is to be the fastest and most scalable while being only marginally more decentralized than others, that path leads to mediocrity—and we will lose. Ethereum should scale, but it should aim to be deeply impressive along a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. Concretely: - Provably bug-free Ethereum. Until roughly six months ago, most security researchers would have called this absurd and impossible. AI-assisted formal verification is making it close to achievable. Ethereum should lead. - Available-chain consensus. Ethereum is—and with lean consensus will remain—the only chain that combines: (i) traditional BFT-style safety under asynchrony with high fault tolerance, and (ii) the Bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it remains safe up to 49% attackers. I see no other chain offering or planning for this. Bitcoin aims for (ii) only; most other chains aim for (i) only. Some may remember I argued strongly for this, insisting it is not acceptable for Ethereum to depend on social consensus and hard forks to recover from 34% of nodes going offline. That may be acceptable for Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo, etc. It is not acceptable for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash. - Intermediary minimization. It's embarrassing that smart contract wallets and protocols like Railgun often must route transactions through intermediaries to get included on-chain. This is a persistent fragility. That's why we're working on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of prior work): to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with a public mempool and strong inclusion guarantees in a general-purpose way that covers not only secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and more. Kohaku is pushing this at the user layer, moving Ethereum away from a dystopian status quo where wallets don't even verify the chain and leak private data to dozens of third-party servers, and toward a stronger CROPS future. Some of these goals may look "unreasonable." Maybe Ethereum would be "fine" at 50%: relying on intermediaries but making it easy to switch. That would not make Ethereum deeply impressive on CROPS. So the target is 100%. The upside is that these goals are compatible with high TPS. Scaling research (especially state scaling) is focused on this. Well-designed L2s can help, particularly L2s optimized for specific applications (high-volume trading, privacy, and more). These goals are also compatible with meaningfully lower slot times thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P and other optimizations. Financially, Ethereum's highest-value "product" is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures about $250 billion of ETH. The properties described above materially support ETH. Around 90% of my net worth is in ETH. Most of the remainder is about $40 million in on-chain fiat, already allocated to open-source biotech, software, or hardware initiatives. Supporting ETH as an asset also includes necessary work that sits outside EF's scope. That's where other actors—including some who hold more ETH than EF—need to step up. EF has been thinking more about how it should relate to such organizations and how it can provide initial support. Going forward, EF will be a smaller ship than in prior years. In some areas it will be more opinionated—sometimes in ways that may be hard to understand at first. The goal is durability and a structure suited to ensuring Ethereum contributes something meaningful to the world. We're grateful to everyone inside and outside EF helping make this transition work.