Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder and a member of the Ethereum Foundation’s board, said the organization is moving toward a narrower, more durable role in the ecosystem, with a sharper focus on Ethereum’s long-term technical and cultural priorities rather than a broad institutional mandate.
Buterin Says Ethereum Foundation Will Narrow Focus
In an X post, Buterin framed the remarks as his personal view of where the Ethereum Foundation is heading, while stressing that the board is not controlled by him alone. “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,” he wrote. “My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.”
Buterin said the Foundation’s internal execution improved during what he called the “2025 era,” resolving several issues around efficiency and focus. But he said a different concern remained: whether the Foundation’s actions sufficiently reflected Ethereum’s stated ideals around decentralization, privacy and resistance to capture. He contrasted that concern with feedback from others who believed the Foundation had finally become more execution-oriented and should continue in that direction.
The Ethereum co-founder used Google as an analogy for what he sees as the risk of institutions drifting away from their founding principles. “One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world’s information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in,” he wrote. Buterin said that, in a technology industry shaped by commercial incentives and political pressures, one organization choosing to resist the dominant trend can serve a useful role for “freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole.”
EF to Prioritize Longevity Over Breadth
Buterin said the Ethereum Foundation should not be treated as the “center of Ethereum,” but as “one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes.” He linked that narrower role to the Foundation’s limited resources, noting that EF holds about 0.16% of all ETH, which he said is less than many individual ETH holders and far below the 10% to 50% allocations often seen at foundations tied to other blockchains. He also said EF’s original fiscal design was tied to a limited pre-launch work scope, including building the chain software and getting through major roadmap phases that he said were completed in 2022.
That resource position, Buterin wrote, is leading EF to prioritize “longevity over breadth,” including selling less ETH. “The EF focuses specifically on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise,” he wrote. “This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF.” He added that some technically strong and mission-aligned people being outside EF is necessary if important work is to attract outside capital.
Buterin said the Foundation remains in a transition period and expects its longer-term form to stabilize over the next few months. From a technical perspective, he argued that Ethereum should be “impressive” not by chasing the highest possible throughput alone, but by advancing what he described as the CROPS dimension: censorship resistance, openness, privacy and security. He pointed to goals such as AI-assisted formal verification for “provably bug-free Ethereum,” stronger consensus properties, intermediary minimization through work including FOCIL and EIP-8141, and user-layer efforts such as Kohaku. He also said these priorities can still coexist with high throughput, layer-2 specialization and lower slot times.
Buterin’s post presents the Ethereum Foundation’s next phase as smaller, more opinionated and more focused on work that other ecosystem actors may not fund or prioritize. He also said EF cannot cover every function needed to support ETH as an asset, writing that “other heroes” will need to step in where activities fall outside the Foundation’s scope.
AI Transparency Note: This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI system based on the sources listed and was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication. All quotes, data points, and factual claims are intended to be grounded in the cited source material; however, errors cannot be ruled out entirely.
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