Vitalik cuối cùng cũng đã mở lời, ETH mới là sản phẩm quan trọng nhất của Ethereum

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

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

The following is the original text by Vitalik, compiled and translated 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 mainly providing input on technical issues. The board is also expanding, and my influence within the organization will continue to decline in the future – frankly, this is what I want to see.

In the 2025 phase, 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 way of working towards specific goals. 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 always talks about Ethereum needing to be decentralized, protect privacy, and act as a sanctuary technology, but why don't the EF's actual actions reflect these principles?"

Of course, what you hear might be completely different. 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, doing it better and faster.

If that's the case, it likely points to a real difference between you and me – in what kind of criticism I value most, and whose criticism stings me the most.

A Google Analogy

Let me illustrate with an example from another field.

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

My personal view on Google might be somewhere in between. 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" in its ideology (e.g., giving Richard Stallman a permanent veto on certain key policies), I would press it without hesitation.

Why? Because a company's choices aren't just its own; they affect the entire national system, even the whole world. The context Google was and is in is that the entire tech industry is generally deviating from its early idealism and "Don't be evil" foundation, turning instead toward a greed for economic profit, an all-encompassing vision for accelerating superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and a bowing down to (or worse, active participation in) the pressures of thought control, surveillance, and war imposed by governments.

Therefore, if there is "one company" that could go against the grain and become what George Bernard Shaw called the "Unreasonable Man," resisting the trends of the times, its existence would actually be more beneficial for freedom, the balance of power, and the stability of the entire society, compared to all large companies bowing 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 going 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, the EF is "a node with a clear 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 limited organizational capacity. The EF currently holds only about 0.16% of all ETH (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 sale documents and other pre-launch materials (developing on-chain software; navigating the Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, 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 use its remaining resources to pursue "long-term existence" rather than "infinite 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 dimension), things that simply wouldn't get done if we didn't do them. This means making tough choices, and in some cases, moving even activities we highly appreciate and people we greatly respect outside the EF. In fact, if we want important tasks to attract external capital, it is necessary for some people with extremely high technical ability, public reputation, and even strong alignment with the mission and CROPS values to remain outside the EF.

This also means the EF will take a clear position culturally. This is not about being adversarial to the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem, but synergistic. We know many other organizations in the Ethereum world also strongly identify with CROPS and related values, but "strong identification" is not the same as "choosing to specialize and fully commit to a specific field." To give 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 are the guiding principles of this new form?

To reiterate, I am just one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (though there are also key non-technical aspects).

Technical Core: Ethereum Must Be Impressive

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

For some, "impressive" means 250-millisecond latency and 1 million TPS. I think it would be a mistake for Ethereum to take this path. Pursuing being as fast and scalable as possible, with only a little more decentralization than other public chains, is a path to mediocrity. If we try this path, we will surely lose.

I believe Ethereum should scale, but I think Ethereum should put its maximum effort into being deeply impressive on another dimension – 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 an absurd and impossible goal. Now, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification, it's on the verge of being achievable. Therefore, we should be at the forefront of making this happen.

Second, achieving highly available on-chain consensus. Ethereum was, and with the introduction of lean consensus will continue to be, the only chain that simultaneously possesses the following characteristics: (i) traditional BFT-style properties guaranteeing safety in an asynchronous environment even against high levels of fault tolerance; and (ii) Bitcoin PoW-style properties resisting up to 49% attackers in a synchronous environment.

To the best of 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 very insistent on this point – I "stubbornly" believed that Ethereum cannot rely on social consensus and hard forks to handle a situation where 34% of nodes are offline. It doesn't matter for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, Solana, Tempo. But for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash, it's unacceptable.

Third, "intermediary minimization," reducing the reliance on intermediaries. In fact, the current situation where smart contract wallets and protocols like Railgun still have to send transactions through intermediaries to be included on-chain is quite awkward, and it's always been a source of system vulnerability.

Therefore, we are advancing FOCIL, EIP-8141 (and 7701, and related work from previous years), aiming to establish a truly universal transaction submission mechanism that minimizes intermediary dependence, with properties of a public mempool and strong inclusion. This applies not just to secp256r1, but also to privacy protocols and more scenarios.

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

Among the three goals above, some might seem "unreasonable" – perhaps Ethereum could get by just fine achieving only 50% – for instance, what if we rely on intermediaries but make it very easy to switch intermediaries? However, achieving only 50% wouldn't make Ethereum "deeply impressive" on the CROPS path. So we must pursue 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 L2s 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 most valuable "product" of the Ethereum blockchain is the ETH asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion worth of ETH. And the characteristics of Ethereum I mentioned above are actually very 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 – work that does not fall within the EF's scope. This is where we need other "heroes" to step up and help (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF). The EF has recently 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 clearer positions, some of which may be hard to understand, but it will also be more durable and better suited to ensure Ethereum truly brings something meaningful to the world.

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