Vitalik finally speaks out: ETH is the most important product of Ethereum

Editor's Note: In the early hours of May 25, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy post on X. In the article, Vitalik re-explained his expectations for Ethereum's future development and the role and functions of the EF from a personal perspective.

Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum should not bow to mainstream trends but must be impressive, and must uphold the CROPS values of censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security. Vitalik also explicitly stated that "Ethereum's most valuable product is ETH" and, breaking his usual pattern, revealed that nearly 90% of his personal net worth is in ETH.

The following is the original text by Vitalik, 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 only one on the board, and I don't have any special powers beyond those of other board members. Aya Miyaguchi is leading much of the execution in this transition, while my involvement is primarily input on technical issues. The board is also expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to decline in the future - frankly, that's what I want to see.

In this phase of 2025, the EF has made many important improvements in execution capability. Many issues have been resolved, and to this day, the EF continues to benefit from higher efficiency and a more focused approach to specific goals. As these issues gradually got resolved, around the beginning of this year, I realized that another thing weighing on my mind had become the biggest remaining problem.

I often see people saying things like, "Vitalik always talks about how Ethereum should stay decentralized, protect privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why doesn't the EF's actual actions reflect these principles?"

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

If that's the case, it likely reflects a real difference between you and me - in terms of which criticism I value most, and whose criticism stings the most.

A Google Analogy

Let me illustrate with an example from another field.

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

My personal view of Google probably lies somewhere in between. But 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" in its ideology (e.g., giving 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, and even the world. The context in which Google was and is situated is that the entire tech industry has generally deviated from early idealism and the "don't be evil" foundation, turning towards greed for economic profit, a full-blown vision of accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and pandering to (or worse, actively participating in) government-imposed thought control, surveillance, and war pressure.

Therefore, if there is "one company" that can buck the trend, becoming the "Unreasonable Man" George Bernard Shaw spoke of, resisting the tides of the era, such an existence is actually more conducive to freedom, the balance of power, and the stability of the entire society than if all large companies bow to the mainstream trend.

This is part of what I understand as "pluralism." This line of thinking 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, how does all this relate to the EF's role?

The EF is not the "center of Ethereum"; rather, it is "a node with a specific function, coexisting with other nodes." We've always said the EF should be the latter, but many people in the Ethereum ecosystem (even within the EF) want 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 organizational capacity. The EF currently holds only about 0.16% of all ETH (less than many individual ETH holders), while many other blockchains' "central foundations" typically hold 10%-50%. Financially, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited scope of work defined in the token sale documents and other pre-launch materials (developing on-chain software; navigating the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity stages), which were fully completed in 2022.

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

The EF specifically focuses on things that are crucial for Ethereum as a censorship-resistant/capture-resistant, open, private, and secure system (i.e., the CROPS dimensions) 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 greatly respect will transition outside the EF. In fact, if we want important tasks to attract external capital, it may be necessary for some people 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 clear cultural stance. None of this is meant to oppose other parts of the Ethereum ecosystem, but rather to synergize. We know that 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 field." For 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 phase, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the coming months. What are the guiding principles of this new form?

To reiterate, I am just one person, but I can provide my answer from a technical perspective (with 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 rapid acceleration of various other technologies. A system that is a "status quo EVM, conducting one or two hard forks a year to optimize short-term user needs" is utterly unattractive.

To some, "impressive" means 250-millisecond latency and 1 million TPS. I believe it would be a mistake for Ethereum to pursue this path. Pursuing maximum speed and scalability while being just a bit 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 think Ethereum should exert its greatest effort in another dimension to become truly awe-inspiring - that is the CROPS dimension (Censorship resistance, Openness, Privacy, Security). This includes the following specific goals.

First, building a provably bug-free Ethereum. Until about six months ago, all network security researchers would have considered this a ridiculous and impossible goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it is on the verge of being realized. Therefore, we should be at the forefront of making this happen.

Second, achieving highly available on-chain consensus. Ethereum was, and after introducing lean consensus will continue to be, the only chain that simultaneously possesses the following characteristics: (i) has traditional BFT-style properties that guarantee safety in an asynchronous environment even with high fault tolerance; (ii) has Bitcoin PoW-style properties that can resist an attacker holding up to 49% in a synchronous environment.

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 might remember that I was once very insistent on this point - I was "stubborn" in my belief that Ethereum could not rely on social consensus and hard forks to handle the case of 34% of nodes going offline. This is unimportant for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, or Tempo. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, it is unacceptable.

Third is "intermediary minimization," minimizing the middle layer. In fact, the current situation where smart contract wallets and protocols like Railgun must still send transactions through intermediaries to be included on-chain is quite awkward and is always a source of system vulnerability.

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

Kohaku is also driving "disintermediation" at the user layer, moving Ethereum away from its current dystopian status quo - where wallets don't even verify the chain itself but send our private data to a dozen third-party servers - and towards a future more aligned with CROPS principles.

Some of these three goals might seem "unreasonable" - perhaps Ethereum could get by "fine" at just 50% - for instance, if we rely on intermediaries but make switching between them very easy. However, achieving only 50% won't make Ethereum truly "awe-inspiring" on the CROPS path. So we must pursue 100%.

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

Looking Ahead

From a financial perspective, the most valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is the asset ETH. Ethereum secures $250 billion worth of ETH. And the Ethereum features I mentioned earlier are actually very beneficial to 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 - work that falls outside the EF's scope. This is where we need other "heroes" to step up (some of whom hold even more ETH than the EF). The EF has also recently started thinking more about how to build relationships with these organizations and provide them with necessary initial support.

The future EF will be more like a "small boat" than it has been in recent years. It will have a stronger stance, some positions might be hard to understand, but it will also be more durable and better suited to ensure Ethereum genuinely 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.