Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is moving toward a smaller, more focused and more opinionated role, with fewer ETH sales and a sharper mandate around Ethereum’s long-term resilience, privacy, security and capture resistance.
In a lengthy post via X on Sunday, Buterin framed the shift as a deliberate move away from treating the EF as the “center of Ethereum” and toward a narrower function inside a broader ecosystem. He also stressed that the remarks reflected his own view, not an official unilateral directive.
“First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not,” Buterin wrote. He added that the board is expanding and that his own influence within the organization “will continue to decrease,” which he said is “honestly what I want.”
A Smaller Ethereum Foundation With A Narrower Mandate
Buterin said the EF’s 2025-era changes had improved execution, efficiency and focus on concrete goals. But with those issues partly resolved, he argued that a different criticism became harder to ignore: that Ethereum’s public values around decentralization, privacy and “sanctuary technology” were not always reflected strongly enough in the foundation’s actions.
The result, according to Buterin, is a transition toward a foundation that does less, but does it with more conviction. He described the EF as “one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes,” rather than Ethereum’s central coordinating body.
That distinction matters financially as well as culturally. Buterin noted that the EF holds only around 0.16% of all ETH, which he said is “less than many other individual ETH holders,” while central foundations in other blockchain ecosystems often hold much larger shares. He also argued that the EF’s original fiscal role was limited: to fund the development of the chain software through the milestones described in Ethereum’s pre-launch materials, a scope he said was “fully completed in 2022.”
“And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth,” Buterin wrote. “Yes, this means we sell less ETH.”
The foundation, he said, will focus specifically on work “critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system” that would not happen otherwise. That means some respected people and projects may sit outside the EF, even when they are aligned with Ethereum’s broader mission.
Ethereum Should Not Chase Speed Alone
Buterin’s technical argument centered on what he called the CROPS dimension: censorship resistance, openness, privacy and security. He contrasted that with the view that Ethereum should define its ambition mainly through ultra-low latency and extreme throughput.
“To some, ‘impressive’ means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake,” he wrote. “Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.”
Buterin said Ethereum should still scale, but argued that its most defensible edge should be deeper. He pointed to AI-assisted formal verification as a potential path toward a “provably bug-free Ethereum,” a goal he said would have seemed absurd to many cybersecurity researchers until recently. He also highlighted “available chain consensus,” arguing that Ethereum’s direction with lean consensus preserves properties he sees as distinct from both Bitcoin-style and traditional BFT-style systems.
A third priority is intermediary minimization. Buterin called it “honestly embarrassing” that smart contract wallets and privacy protocols often depend on intermediaries to get transactions included onchain. He cited FOCIL, EIP-8141, EIP-7701 and Kohaku as part of the push toward stronger inclusion properties, public mempool access and user-layer infrastructure that does not leak private data across multiple third-party services.
ETH The Asset Still Matters
Buterin also linked the technical direction to ETH’s economic role, calling ETH “the most high-value ‘product’ of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking.” He said Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH and argued that the properties he described are beneficial for the asset.
He added that nearly 90% of his net worth is in ETH, with most of the remainder in about $40 million of onchain fiat already allocated to open-source biotech, software or hardware initiatives. Still, he said some necessary work to support ETH as an asset sits outside the EF’s scope and will require other organizations and major ETH holders to step in.
The foundation’s new long-term structure, Buterin said, is expected to stabilize over the next few months. His closing description was blunt: EF will be “a smaller ship than in previous years,” more opinionated, longer-lasting and more narrowly suited to ensuring Ethereum “brings something meaningful to the world.”
At press time, ETH traded at $2,108.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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