Vitalik has finally spoken clearly: ETH is the most important product of Ethereum

Editor's Note: In the early hours of May 25th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a long post on X. In it, Vitalik reinterpreted his expectations for Ethereum's future development and the role and strategic planning of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) from a personal perspective.

Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum should not bow to mainstream trends but must remain impressive, while consistently upholding the CROPS values of censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security. Vitalik also explicitly stated that "Ethereum's highest-value product is ETH" and, breaking his usual practice, revealed that nearly 90% of his personal net worth is in ETH.

The following is the full text of Vitalik's post, compiled by Odaily.

Sharing some of my personal views on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation (EF).

First, this is just my personal opinion. I am not the sole member of the board, nor do I possess any special powers beyond those of the other board members. Aya Miyaguchi is leading much of the execution work in this transition, while my main involvement is providing input on technical issues. The board is also being expanded, and my influence within the organization will continue to decline in the future – frankly, this is exactly what I want to see.

During this phase in 2025, the EF has seen many important improvements in its execution capabilities. Many problems have been solved, and to this day, the EF continues to benefit from higher efficiency and a more focused, goal-oriented way of working. As these issues were gradually resolved, around the beginning of this year, I realized that another thing that had been bothering me had become the biggest remaining problem.

I often see people saying things like, "Vitalik is always talking about how Ethereum should remain decentralized, protect privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why don't the EF's actual actions reflect these ideals?"

Of course, the voices you hear might be completely different. You might not feel any sense of crisis at all, and you might even hear people saying we are finally taking execution and business development (BD) seriously. Our main task now is to maintain this momentum, doing things better and faster.

If that's the case, it likely means there's a real disagreement between us – specifically, about which criticism I value most and whose critique cuts me the deepest.

A Google Analogy

Let me use an example from another field to illustrate.

Regarding Google, one belief you can hold is that it is a success story, bringing immense benefits to humanity by organizing the world's information. But you can also hold another belief: they had a beautiful, idealistic beginning, but were gradually corrupted by mainstream corporate culture, slowly and step-by-step completely betraying their "Don't be evil" motto.

My specific view of Google probably lies somewhere between these two. However, if you could take me back to around 2008 and give me a button that, when pressed, would make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic" on ideology (for example, granting Richard Stallman a permanent veto over certain key policies), I would press it without hesitation.

Why? Because a company's choices are not just the company's choices; they affect the entire national system, even the whole world. The context in which Google existed and exists is that the entire tech industry generally deviated from its early idealism and "don't be evil" roots, shifting towards greed for economic profit, an all-encompassing vision of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and groveling (or worse, active participation) before government-imposed thought control, surveillance, and war pressures.

Therefore, if there is "one company" that can buck the trend and become what George Bernard Shaw called an "Unreasonable Man," resisting the era's direction, its existence is actually more conducive to freedom, power balance, and overall social stability, compared to all large companies bowing to the mainstream trend.

This is part of what I understand as "pluralism." This line of thought isn't just my own; it's actually not far from the direction Aya and others are thinking when formulating the EF's mission framework.

What Does This Mean for the Ethereum Foundation?

So, what does all this have to do with the EF's role?

The EF is not the "center of Ethereum"; instead, the EF is "a node with a specific function, coexisting alongside other nodes." We have always said the EF should be the latter, but many people in the Ethereum ecosystem (even within the EF) have wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure we become the latter.

This is particularly important because the EF itself is an organization with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH (even less than many individual ETH holders), while the "central foundations" of many other blockchains typically hold 10%-50%. Financially, the EF was initially designed to fulfill the limited scope of work defined in the token offering documents and other pre-launch materials (developing on-chain software; navigating through the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity stages), work that was fully completed in 2022.

The EF was not designed to be an eternal steward. Therefore, today's EF chooses to allocate its remaining resources towards "long-term existence" rather than "infinite expansion" (yes, this also means we will sell less ETH).

The EF focuses specifically on things that are critical for Ethereum as a censorship-resistant/capture-resistant, open, private, and secure system (i.e., the CROPS dimension) and that no one else would do if the EF didn't. This means making difficult choices, and in some cases, even activities we highly appreciate and people we highly respect will be moved outside the EF. In fact, if we want important tasks to attract external capital, it's necessary for some individuals with extremely high technical ability, public reputation, and even strong alignment with the CROPS values to remain outside the EF.

This also means the EF will take a distinct cultural stance. None of this is to oppose other parts of the Ethereum ecosystem, but to be synergistic. We know many other organizations in the Ethereum world also highly identify with CROPS and related values, but "highly identifying" is not the same as "choosing to specialize and fully commit to a specific area." As another example, I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but I am not a strict vegan myself.

The EF is still in a transitional period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize in the coming months. What is the guiding principle for this new form?

Again, I am just one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (though there are crucial non-technical aspects as well).

Technical Core: Ethereum Must Be Impressive

The core is that Ethereum must be impressive. We live in an era of highly intelligent AI and the accelerating development of various other technologies. A system that is just "the status quo EVM, doing one or two hard forks a year to optimize short-term user needs" is completely unattractive.

For some, "impressive" means 250ms latency and 1 million TPS. I think it would be a mistake for Ethereum to try this path. Pursuing the fastest, most scalable route possible, while being only slightly more decentralized than other public chains, is a path to mediocrity. If we try this path, we will inevitably lose.

I believe Ethereum should scale, but I believe Ethereum should make its greatest effort in another dimension to be truly deeply impressive – the CROPS dimension (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security). This includes the following specific goals.

First is to build a provably bug-free Ethereum. Until about six months ago, all cybersecurity researchers would have considered this a ridiculous and impossible goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, this is on the verge of becoming achievable. Therefore, we should be at the forefront of driving this forward.

Second is to achieve highly available on-chain consensus. Ethereum was, and after introducing lean consensus will continue to be, the only chain that simultaneously possesses the following properties: (i) traditional BFT-style properties guaranteeing safety under high levels of fault tolerance, even in asynchronous environments; (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties ensuring resistance against up to 49% attackers in synchronous environments.

To my knowledge, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it. Bitcoin only pursues (ii), and most other chains only pursue (i). Some may remember that I was once very insistent on this point – I was "stubborn" that Ethereum should not rely on social consensus and hard forks to handle a 34% node outage. This doesn't matter for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, or Tempo. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, it's unacceptable.

Third is "intermediary minimization." In fact, the current necessity for smart contract wallets and protocols like Railgun to send transactions through intermediaries to be included on-chain is quite awkward and remains a source of systemic vulnerability.

Therefore, we are pushing forward with FOCIL, EIP-8141 (and 7701, and related work over the past years), aiming to establish a truly universal transaction submission mechanism that minimizes reliance on intermediaries, characterized by a public mempool and strong inclusion properties. This applies not only to secp256r1, but also to privacy protocols and many more scenarios.

Kohaku is also pushing for "disintermediation" at the user layer, moving Ethereum away from today's dystopian status quo – where wallets don't even verify the chain itself, yet send our private data to dozens of third-party servers – towards a future more aligned with CROPS principles.

Among the three goals above, some might seem "unreasonable" – perhaps Ethereum could "do fine" by only achieving 50%, like if we rely on intermediaries but make it easy to switch between them. However, only reaching 50% wouldn't make Ethereum "deeply and truly impressive" on the CROPS path. So we must aim for 100%.

Fortunately, all these goals are compatible with high TPS, which is a major focus of research (especially on state scaling). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially those optimized for specific applications (e.g., high-frequency trading, privacy). Thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P and many other optimizations, these goals can even be compatible with significantly reduced slot times.

Looking Ahead

From a financial perspective, the highest-value "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is the ETH asset itself. Ethereum secures $250 billion worth of ETH. And the Ethereum characteristics I mentioned earlier are extremely beneficial for the value of ETH as an asset.

Personally, nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the rest is about $40 million in on-chain fiat currency, every dollar of which has already been allocated to certain open-source biotechnology, software, or hardware projects.

But at the same time, there is work necessary to support the value of the ETH asset that does not fall within the EF's scope of responsibility. This is when we need other "heroes" to step up (some of whom hold even more ETH than the EF). The EF has recently also started thinking more about how to build relationships with these organizations and provide them with the necessary initial support.

The future EF will be more like a "small boat" than it has been in recent years. It will have more distinct stances, some of which might be difficult to understand, but it will also be more enduring and better suited to ensuring that Ethereum truly brings something meaningful to the world.

We are grateful to everyone, both inside and outside the EF, who is helping to make all this happen.