Vitalik is personally "dismantling" the Ethereum Foundation

Original Author: Changan I Biteye Content Team

Over the past year, Ethereum has faced a difficult period. Under pressure from high-performance blockchains on one side and facing repeated community criticism for being "too slow" on the other, its position has been challenged.

Early this morning, Vitalik published a lengthy article directly addressing the ultimate anxiety of the entire Web3 industry, revisiting a question that is critical to 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 durable qualities of 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 immense personal influence, the outside world easily equates the EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. However, this runs exactly counter to Ethereum's cherished belief in "decentralization."

In this article, Vitalik clearly states that the EF board is not his sole decision-making body and that he holds no special privileges internally. Currently, much of the transformation work is being executed by Aya Miyaguchi, allowing him to return more purely to focusing on the technology itself.

The EF board includes more members than just Vitalik, and he holds no more power within it than other members. Many transformation tasks are handled by Aya Miyaguchi, while he primarily engages with technical issues.

Therefore, the EF's goal moving forward is not to turn itself into a larger Ethereum center, but rather to shrink its own power boundaries: diving deep into matters it should handle itself, and leaving tasks it shouldn't monopolize to others within the ecosystem.

2. If Ethereum 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 focused on being "too slow," "lacking execution," and "not prioritizing applications and business partnerships." Therefore, since 2025, the EF has become more efficient and more focused on specific objectives.

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

He often sees people questioning: Vitalik and the EF consistently emphasize that Ethereum should be decentralized, protect privacy, and resist censorship, yet the actual actions of the EF fail to reflect these values.

Previously, the concern was that the EF wasn't fast enough. Now, Vitalik's greater worry is this: If the EF only gets faster, gets better at marketing, and becomes more like an ordinary tech company, Ethereum might ultimately deprioritize its original core values.

To illustrate this point, Vitalik used Google as an analogy.

Early Google also had strong idealistic traits, like "Don't be evil." But as the company grew, it increasingly resembled a standard large tech corporation, needing to consider commercial interests, regulatory pressures, platform power, and user data.

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

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

Previously, 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 attempt to do everything.

Vitalik also mentioned that the EF currently holds only about 0.16% of all 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 lacks the financial resources and organizational capacity to become Ethereum's permanent manager.

Therefore, the EF will be more cautious in deploying its resources, directing funds and talent towards the most foundational, long-term, and hardest-to-commercialize matters that are crucial for Ethereum.

4. The EF's Core Mission: CROPS

Throughout the article, Vitalik repeatedly mentions a key term: CROPS.

Simply put, CROPS refers to the most valued aspects of Ethereum: Censorship resistance, Resistance to control, Open source, Privacy, and Security.

This is also the direction already clarified in the EF's Mandate for this year: The EF's mission is not to build itself into a larger ecosystem company, nor merely to pursue more users, higher revenue, or a higher token price. Its task is to help Ethereum uphold these foundational promises.

So, Vitalik is essentially drawing a clearer boundary here: The EF will not expand into every area beneficial to Ethereum, but will instead focus more specifically on CROPS.

The EF is responsible for guarding the most foundational, long-term, and hardest-to-commercialize parts. Other tasks like applications, marketing, ecosystem growth, asset support, and institutional partnerships should increasingly be undertaken by external teams, capital, and community organizations.

5. Chasing Only TPS Leads to Mediocrity

Vitalik states that Ethereum must feel "impressive." However, he doesn't believe this impressiveness comes solely from 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 emphasize being faster, smoother, and more suited for trading.

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

Because if it's just a comparison of speed, Ethereum will find it difficult to remain the ultimate winner indefinitely. There will always be a chain willing to sacrifice more decentralization in exchange for higher TPS, lower latency, and better short-term user experience.

If Ethereum also follows this path, it might end up merely as a "slightly more decentralized high-performance chain," which is not Ethereum's goal.

What Vitalik wants to emphasize is that Ethereum's true strengths should be censorship resistance, resistance to control, open source principles, privacy, and security.

Speed is certainly important, but it is not everything for Ethereum.

Ethereum's true irreplaceable quality should be this: while continuously improving performance, it simultaneously defends these harder, longer-term foundational capabilities.

6. Vitalik Highlights Three Technical Directions

After explaining that Ethereum cannot only chase TPS, Vitalik outlined several technological directions he considers more important.

1. A Provably Bug-Free Ethereum

The first direction is formal verification.

Simply put, it means using more rigorous, mathematically-proven methods to verify the correctness of the Ethereum protocol, clients, and related code.

In the past, "proving Ethereum has no bugs" seemed nearly impossible. Blockchain systems are incredibly 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 that he views AI not just as a hot application-layer topic, but more importantly as a tool to enhance Ethereum's underlying security.

2. Available Chain Consensus

The second direction is consensus security.

Vitalik mentioned that Ethereum needs to possess a specific capability: even under poor network conditions or when some nodes fail, Ethereum should not easily rely on human coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to recover.

He believes that for some chains, if a large number of nodes go offline, recovery via project teams, validators, and community coordination might be acceptable. However, 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 small group to recover, it exposes itself to centralization risks.

### 3. Reducing Reliance on Intermediaries

The third direction is reducing reliance on intermediaries.

Currently, many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still depend on intermediate services—like RPCs, third-party servers, transaction relayers, and bundling services—to submit transactions to the chain.

These intermediary services can smooth the user experience, but they also introduce problems.

For example, if an intermediary service refuses to process your transaction, your transaction might fail to be sent. If a wallet needs to send data to a third-party server, your privacy could be exposed.

Vitalik believes this situation does not align with Ethereum's desired direction.

Therefore, he mentions efforts like FOCIL, EIP-8141, 7701, and Kohaku, which all essentially solve the same problem: enabling users to interact more directly with Ethereum, without necessarily relying on a stack of intermediate services.

7. ETH Asset Takes Center Stage, But Won't Become a "Pump ETH" Organization

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

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

He also mentioned that nearly 90% of his personal net worth is in ETH, with most of the remainder being on-chain fiat 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 will ultimately affect ETH's long-term value.

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 lengthy article is not that the EF will become smaller, nor that the EF will sell less ETH. Rather, it is his revisiting of a more fundamental question:

What does Ethereum ultimately want to become?

The direction he provides is: The EF becomes smaller, Ethereum becomes more focused, and other participants within the ecosystem take on more responsibilities.

This path may sound less exciting and may not be the most favorable for short-term markets. However, it also re-explains why Ethereum remains special: its ambition to win extends beyond just speed, cost, and transaction experience. It aims for harder-to-censor, harder-to-capture, more privacy-focused, more secure, and more open foundational capabilities.

The EF of the future might be a smaller ship, but what Vitalik hopes it will guard is the most indispensable part of Ethereum that should never be diluted.