Vitalik is personally "dismantling" the Ethereum Foundation

Original author: Changan, Biteye content team

Over the past year, Ethereum has had a tough time. On one hand, it's being challenged by high-performance blockchains; on the other, the community has repeatedly questioned its slow pace of progress.

Early this morning, Vitalik published a lengthy article directly addressing the ultimate anxiety of the entire Web3 industry, 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 more difficult-to-articulate but longer-term qualities like decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, and security?

1. The EF Is Not Vitalik's One-Person Show

In the eyes of many users and institutions, the EF sounds like "the official entity." Coupled with Vitalik's own immense influence, outsiders easily equate the EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. But this runs counter to the "decentralization" belief that Ethereum upholds.

In this article, Vitalik clearly states that the EF board is not solely controlled by him, and he holds no special privileges within it. Currently, a large part of the transformation work is carried out by Aya Miyaguchi, while he focuses more purely on technical aspects.

The EF board includes more than just Vitalik, and he has no more power than other members. Much of the transition work is handled by Aya Miyaguchi, with his involvement primarily in technical issues.

Therefore, the EF's next step is not to turn itself into a larger center of Ethereum, but rather to shrink its own power boundaries: to go deep into what it should do itself, and delegate what it shouldn't handle to others within the ecosystem.

2. If It Becomes the Next Google, That's a True Failure

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

Previously, external criticism of the EF mainly centered on "being too slow," "lacking execution," and "not paying enough attention to applications and business cooperation." So, after 2025, the EF began to become more efficient and more focused on specific objectives.

But Vitalik says that by this year, the problems he perceives have changed.

He often sees people questioning: Vitalik and the EF keep emphasizing that Ethereum should be decentralized, protect privacy, and resist censorship, but the EF's actual actions fail to reflect these values.

In the past, people worried that the EF wasn't moving fast enough. Now, Vitalik's greater concern is: if the EF merely becomes faster, better at marketing, and more like a typical tech company, Ethereum might ultimately sideline its original values.

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

Google was also highly idealistic in its early days, with principles like "Don't be evil." But as the company grew, it increasingly resembled a standard large tech corporation, prioritizing business 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 a node within the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the past, many people viewed the EF as the core of Ethereum. Whenever problems arose in the ecosystem, the question was why the EF didn't solve them.

But this time, Vitalik emphasizes: The EF cannot do everything, nor should it do everything.

Vitalik also mentioned: 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 native tokens.

This means the EF lacks the financial resources and organizational capacity, and should not become the permanent manager of Ethereum.

Therefore, the EF will be more cautious in using its resources, channeling funds and talent towards the most fundamental, long-term, and hardest-to-commercialize tasks that are nevertheless crucial for Ethereum.

4. The EF's Core Mission: CROPS

Vitalik repeatedly mentions a key term in this article: CROPS.

Simply put, CROPS refers to Ethereum's most valued aspects: Censorship resistance, Resist control, Open source, Privacy, and Security.

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

So, Vitalik is essentially drawing clearer lines: The EF will not expand into everything beneficial for Ethereum, but will focus more narrowly 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 should be undertaken by more external teams, capital, and community organizations.

5. Chasing Only TPS Leads to Mediocrity

Vitalik says Ethereum must be impressive. But he doesn't believe this prominence comes merely 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 compete on speed, smoothness, and suitability for trading.

Vitalik isn't denying the importance of scalability. Ethereum will certainly continue to improve performance through L2s, state scaling, and lower slot times.

Because if it's just about speed, Ethereum may not always be the most extreme. There will always be chains willing to sacrifice more decentralization for higher TPS, lower latency, and better short-term user experience.

If Ethereum follows this same path, it might end up as just a "slightly more decentralized high-performance chain," which is not its goal.

What Vitalik emphasizes is that Ethereum's true strengths should be censorship resistance, resist control, openness, privacy, and security.

Speed is important, but it's not everything for Ethereum.

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

6. Vitalik Points to Three Key Technical Directions

After explaining that Ethereum cannot solely chase TPS, Vitalik outlines several technical directions he considers more important.

1. A Provably Bug-Free Ethereum

The first direction is formal verification.

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

In the past, "proving Ethereum has no bugs" seemed almost impossible due to the complexity of blockchain systems, involving 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 merely as a hot application layer topic, but as a tool to enhance Ethereum's foundational security.

2. Available Chain Consensus

The second direction is consensus security.

Vitalik mentions that Ethereum needs a special capability: even in poor network conditions or when some nodes fail, Ethereum should not easily rely on manual coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to resolve issues.

He believes that for some chains, significant node outages might be recoverable through project teams, validators, and community coordination. But for systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash that emphasize censorship resistance and neutrality, such reliance is dangerous.

Because if a system requires coordination by a few to recover, it exposes 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 intermediary services like RPCs, third-party servers, transaction relays, and bundling services to submit transactions to the chain.

These intermediaries can improve user experience, but they also introduce problems.

For instance, if an intermediary refuses to process your transaction, it may not go through. If a wallet sends data to a third-party server, your privacy could be compromised.

Vitalik believes this state contradicts Ethereum's intended direction.

Therefore, he points to efforts like FOCIL, EIP-8141, 7701, and Kohaku. These essentially address the same problem: bringing users closer to directly interacting with Ethereum, without relying on a host of intermediary services.

7. ETH Asset Brought to the Forefront, But Won't Become an ETH Price Pump Organization

Vitalik also, unusually, places 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 currency 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 ETH's long-term value.

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

Final Thoughts

The most notable takeaway from Vitalik's article is not that the EF will shrink or that it will sell less ETH, but that he has reframed a more fundamental question:

What does Ethereum ultimately want to become?

The direction he provides is: A smaller EF, a more focused Ethereum, with others in the ecosystem taking on more roles.

This path may not sound exciting or necessarily please the short-term market. But it re-explains why Ethereum remains special: it aims to win not just on speed, cost, and transaction experience, but on the harder-to-censor, harder-to-capture, more privacy-focused, more secure, and more open foundational capabilities.

The EF may become a smaller ship in the future, but Vitalik hopes it guards what Ethereum should never let be diluted.