Vitalik is personally "dismantling" the Ethereum Foundation

Original author: Changan I Biteye Content Team

Over the past year, Ethereum has faced a tough time. On one side, it is being challenged by high-performance blockchains; on the other, the community repeatedly questions it for being too slow.

Early this morning, Vitalik published a long article, directly addressing the ultimate anxiety of the entire Web3 industry and revisiting a question that determines Ethereum's survival:

What exactly will Ethereum rely on to win?

Is it higher TPS, faster transactions, stronger marketing, or the harder-to-explain but more long-term aspects like decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, and security?

1. The EF is Not Vitalik's "One-Man Show"

In the eyes of many users and institutions, the EF sounds like the "official body". Coupled with Vitalik's strong personal aura, outsiders easily equate the EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. However, this runs counter to the "decentralization" belief that Ethereum upholds.

In this long article, Vitalik makes it clear that the EF board is not his alone, and he holds no special privileges internally. Currently, much of the transformation work is being executed by Aya Miyaguchi, while he himself focuses more purely on the technical aspects.

The EF board includes more than just Vitalik, and he has no more power within it than other members. Many transformation efforts are carried out by Aya Miyaguchi, while he mainly engages with technical issues.

Therefore, the EF's next step is not to turn itself into a bigger center for Ethereum, but rather to shrink its own power boundaries: delve deeper into the things it should do, and delegate to others in the ecosystem what it shouldn't monopolize.

2. If It Becomes the Next Google, That Would Be a True Failure

Vitalik stated that since 2025, the EF has made many improvements in execution, efficiency, and goal focus.

Recently, external criticism of the EF has mainly focused on being "too slow", "lacking execution", and "not prioritizing applications and business partnerships". So, post-2025, the EF has started to become more efficient and more focused on specific goals.

But Vitalik says that by this year, the nature of the problems he perceives has changed.

He often sees questions raised: Vitalik and the EF always emphasize that Ethereum should be decentralized, protect privacy, and resist censorship, but the EF's actual actions don't reflect these values at all.

Previously, people worried the EF wasn't fast enough. Now, Vitalik's greater concern is: If the EF simply becomes faster, better at marketing, and more like an ordinary tech company, Ethereum might end up prioritizing its original values less.

To illustrate this, Vitalik used Google as an analogy.

Google also had a strong idealistic streak in its early days, like "Don't be evil". But as the company grew, it increasingly became a standard large tech corporation, having to consider business interests, regulatory pressure, platform power, and user data.

3. The EF's New Positioning: Not Ethereum's Center, But a Node in the Ecosystem

Vitalik redefined the EF's positioning: The EF is not the center of Ethereum, but a node within the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the past, many people viewed the EF as the core of Ethereum. When problems arose in the Ethereum ecosystem, people would ask why the EF wasn't solving them.

But this time, Vitalik wants to emphasize: The EF cannot do everything, nor should it do everything.

Vitalik also mentioned that the EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH, even less than many large ETH holders. In contrast, foundations of many other blockchains might control 10% to 50% of their tokens.

This means the EF doesn't have that much funding, nor that much organizational capacity, and certainly shouldn't be the permanent manager of Ethereum.

Therefore, the EF will be more cautious in using its resources, allocating funds and people to the most fundamental, long-term, hardest-to-commercialize, yet critically important matters for Ethereum.

4. The EF's Core Mission: CROPS

Vitalik's article repeatedly mentions a key term: CROPS.

Simply put, CROPS refers to the things Ethereum values most: Censorship resistance, Resistance to control, Openness, Privacy, and Security.

This is also the direction already clarified in the EF's Mandate this year: The EF's task is not to build itself into a larger ecosystem company, nor simply to pursue more users, higher revenue, or a higher coin price, but to help Ethereum uphold these underlying commitments.

So, Vitalik is essentially drawing a clearer boundary here: The EF will not expand around "everything beneficial to Ethereum", but will focus more specifically on CROPS.

The EF is responsible for guarding the most fundamental, long-term, and hardest-to-commercialize parts, while tasks like applications, marketing, ecosystem growth, asset support, and institutional partnerships need to be borne by more external teams, capital, and community organizations.

5. Don't Just Chase TPS, Otherwise It Will Lead to Mediocrity

Vitalik states Ethereum must feel outstanding. But he doesn't believe this prominence is merely about 250ms latency, 1 million TPS, or faster transaction confirmations.

Many new blockchains challenge Ethereum with higher TPS, lower latency, and cheaper fees. Solana, BNB Chain, Hyperliquid, and some new L1s primarily tout being faster, smoother, and better for trading.

Vitalik is not denying the importance of scalability. Ethereum certainly needs to improve performance, and directions like L2s, state scaling, and lower slot times will continue to progress.

But if it's just a battle of speed, Ethereum will find it hard to always be the most extreme. There will always be chains willing to sacrifice more decentralization for higher TPS, lower latency, and better short-term experience.

If Ethereum also walks this path, it might ultimately become just a "slightly more decentralized high-performance chain". This is not Ethereum's goal.

What Vitalik wants to emphasize is that Ethereum's true strength should lie in censorship resistance, resistance to control, openness, privacy, and security.

Speed is important, but speed is not everything for Ethereum.

Ethereum's truly irreplaceable quality should be: while continuing to improve performance, it still holds onto these harder, more long-term, fundamental capabilities.

6. Vitalik Highlights Three Technical Directions

After explaining that Ethereum shouldn't just chase TPS, Vitalik also outlines a few technical directions he considers more important.

1. A Provably Bug-Free Ethereum

The first direction is formal verification.

Simply put, it means using more rigorous methods, closer to mathematical proof, to verify the correctness of the Ethereum protocol, clients, and related code.

In the past, "proving Ethereum has no bugs" sounded nearly impossible, because blockchain systems are too complex, with extensive interactions between code, clients, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts.

But Vitalik believes that with the development of AI-assisted formal verification, this is becoming more realistic.

This also shows he views AI not just as an application-layer trend, but focuses more on whether AI can help make Ethereum's underlying security stronger.

2. Available Chain Consensus

The second direction is consensus security.

Vitalik mentions that Ethereum should possess a rather special capability: Even under poor network conditions or when some nodes have issues, Ethereum should not easily rely on human coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to resolve them.

He believes that for some chains dealing with large-scale node offline situations, relying on project teams, validators, and community coordination to recover might be acceptable. But for systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash that emphasize censorship resistance and neutrality, such dependence is very dangerous.

Because once a system requires coordination by a few people to recover, it exposes centralization risks.

3. Reducing Dependency on Intermediaries

The third direction is reducing dependency on intermediaries.

Currently, many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still rely on intermediary services like RPCs, third-party servers, transaction relays, and bundling services to send transactions to the chain.

These intermediary services can make the user experience smoother, but they also bring problems.

For example, if an intermediary service refuses to process your transaction, it might not get through. If a wallet needs to send data to third-party servers, your privacy could be exposed.

Vitalik believes this state is not in line with the direction Ethereum wants to go.

Therefore, he mentions works like FOCIL, EIP-8141, 7701, and Kohaku, which fundamentally address the same issue: making users closer to directly using Ethereum, rather than relying on a bunch of intermediary services.

7. Assets Put Back in the Spotlight, But Won't Become an ETH Pump Organization

Vitalik also unusually placed the ETH asset in a very important position.

He says, from a financial perspective, Ethereum's most valuable product is ETH. Ethereum currently secures approximately $250 billion worth of ETH.

He also mentions that nearly 90% of his personal net worth is in ETH, with most of the remainder being on-chain fiat, already allocated to open-source biotechnology, software, and hardware projects.

He acknowledges that ETH is Ethereum's most important asset. Ethereum's security, censorship resistance, privacy, and openness ultimately affect the long-term value of ETH.

However, matters related to ETH's value, such as marketing, institutional communication, asset narratives, and ecosystem growth, are better suited for teams and organizations outside the EF.

Final Thoughts

The most noteworthy aspect of Vitalik's long article is not that the EF will become smaller, nor that the EF will sell less ETH, but rather that he has re-answered a more fundamental question:

What does Ethereum ultimately want to become?

The direction he provides is: the EF gets smaller, Ethereum becomes more focused, and others in the ecosystem take on more roles.

This path may not sound exciting enough, nor is it necessarily the most pleasing to short-term markets. However, it also re-explains why Ethereum remains special: it aims to win not just in speed, cost, and transaction experience, but also in the harder-to-censor, harder-to-capture, privacy-focused, more secure, and more open fundamental capabilities.

The EF of the future might be a smaller ship, but what Vitalik hopes it guards is what should never be diluted about Ethereum.