Author: Changan I Biteye Content Team

The past year has been difficult for Ethereum. It has been relentlessly pursued by high-performance public chains while facing repeated criticism from the community for its slow pace.

Early this morning, Vitalik published a lengthy article directly addressing the ultimate anxiety of the entire Web3 industry, and re-answering a question that determines the life or death of Ethereum:

What exactly will Ethereum rely on to win?

Is it higher TPS, faster transactions, and stronger marketing, or is it things like decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, and security—things that are harder to define but have a longer-term impact?

1. EF is not Vitalik's "one-man show".

To many users and organizations, EF sounds like "official." Coupled with Vitalik Buterin's immense personal aura, it's easy for outsiders to equate EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. But this directly contradicts Ethereum's core belief in "decentralization."

In this lengthy article, Vitalik clearly stated that the EF board is not solely under his control, and he has no special privileges within the organization. Currently, much of the transformation work is being carried out by Aya Miyaguchi, while he himself is focusing more purely on the technology itself.

The EF board is not solely composed of Vitalik Buterin, nor does he possess any special power over other members. Much of the transformation work is carried out by Aya Miyaguchi, who primarily focuses on technical issues.

Therefore, EF's next step is not to make itself a larger Ethereum hub, but to shrink its power boundaries: to do the things it should do in depth, and to delegate the things it shouldn't do to others in the ecosystem.

Second, if we end up like the next Google, then we've truly lost.

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

In the past, criticisms of EF mainly focused on its "slow pace," "insufficient execution," and "lack of emphasis on application and business partnerships." Therefore, after 2025, EF began to become more efficient and focused more on specific goals.

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

He often sees people questioning: Vitalik and EF have always emphasized that Ethereum should be decentralized, protect privacy, and resist censorship, but what EF actually does does not reflect these values ​​at all.

In the past, people were worried that EF wasn't moving fast enough, but Vitalik is now more worried that if EF just gets faster, becomes better at marketing, and becomes more like a regular tech company, then Ethereum might eventually put its original values ​​in a secondary position.

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

Google had a strong idealistic spirit in its early days, such as "Don't be evil." But as the company grew, it increasingly resembled a typical large tech company: considering business interests, regulatory pressures, platform power, and user data.

III. EF's New Positioning: Not the Center of Ethereum, but a Node in the Ecosystem

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

In the past, many people actually regarded EF as the core of Ethereum. When problems arose in the Ethereum ecosystem, people would ask why EF didn't solve them.

But what Vitalik wants to emphasize this time is that EF cannot do everything, nor should it do everything.

Vitalik also mentioned that EF currently holds only about 0.16% of ETH, even less than many large ETH holders. In contrast, many other blockchain foundations may hold 10% to 50% of the tokens.

This means that EF does not have enough funds or organizational capacity, and should not become the permanent manager of Ethereum.

Therefore, EF will be more cautious in using its resources, investing money and people in the most fundamental, long-term, and difficult-to-commercialize things that are very important to Ethereum.

IV. EF's core mission: CROPS

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

Simply put, CROPS refers to the things Ethereum values ​​most: censorship resistance, control resistance, open source, privacy, and security.

This is also the direction that EF has clearly stated in its Mandate this year: EF's mission is not to make itself a larger ecosystem company, nor to simply pursue more users, higher revenue, or higher coin prices, but to help Ethereum uphold these underlying promises.

So Vitalik is actually drawing a clearer line this time: EF will not expand around "everything that is good for Ethereum", but will focus more on CROPS.

EF is responsible for safeguarding the most fundamental, long-term, and difficult-to-commercialize parts, while other tasks such as applications, markets, ecosystem growth, asset support, and institutional cooperation require more external teams, capital, and community organizations to undertake.

Fifth, don't just focus on TPS (transactions per second), otherwise you'll end up mediocre.

Vitalik said Ethereum has to feel impressive. But he doesn't think that prowess is just about 250ms latency, 1 million TPS, or faster transaction confirmations.

Many new public blockchains are challenging Ethereum by offering higher TPS, lower latency, and cheaper transaction fees. Solana, BNB Chain, Hyperliquid, and some new L1 blockchains all emphasize faster speeds, smoother performance, and greater suitability for transactions.

Vitalik did not deny the importance of scaling. Ethereum certainly needs to improve performance, and efforts will continue in areas such as L2, state scaling, and lower slot times.

Because if we only consider speed, Ethereum can hardly remain the absolute best forever. There will always be chains willing to sacrifice more decentralization in exchange for higher TPS, lower latency, and a better short-term experience.

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

Vitalik wanted to emphasize that Ethereum's true strengths lie in its resistance to censorship and control, its open-source nature, privacy, and security.

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

Ethereum's truly irreplaceable aspect is that, while continuing to improve performance, it still preserves these more difficult and long-term underlying capabilities.

VI. Vitalik personally selected three technical directions

After explaining that Ethereum shouldn't just focus on TPS, Vitalik also outlined several technical directions that he considers more important.

1. A Ethereum that can be proven to be bug-free.

The first direction is formal verification.

Simply put, it involves using a more rigorous, mathematically closer approach to verify the correctness of the Ethereum protocol, clients, and related code.

In the past, proving that Ethereum has no bugs seemed almost impossible. This was because blockchain systems are so complex, with extensive interactions between code, clients, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts.

But Vitalik believes that this is becoming more realistic as AI-assisted formal verification develops.

This also shows that he doesn't see AI as an application-layer hot topic, but rather focuses on whether AI can help Ethereum strengthen its underlying security.

2. Available chain consensus

The second direction is consensus security.

Vitalik mentioned that Ethereum wants to have a rather special ability: even if the network environment is poor, or some nodes have problems, Ethereum cannot easily rely on human coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to solve the problem.

He believes that while it might be acceptable for some blockchains to recover from large-scale node outages through coordination by project teams, validators, and the community, such reliance is dangerous for systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash, which place greater emphasis on censorship resistance and neutrality.

Because once a system requires coordination from a small number of people to recover, it exposes the risk of centralization.

3. Reduce reliance on intermediaries

The third direction is to reduce reliance on intermediaries.

Many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still rely on intermediary services, such as RPC, third-party servers, transaction relays, and packaging services, when they want to send transactions on the blockchain.

These intermediary services can make the user experience smoother, but they can also bring problems.

For example, if an intermediary service is unwilling to process your transaction, it may fail to be sent. If your wallet needs to send data to a third-party server, your privacy may be exposed.

Vitalik believes that this state is not in line with the direction Ethereum wants to take.

Therefore, he mentioned that the work of FOCIL, EIP-8141, 7701, Kohaku, etc., is essentially solving the same problem: making it easier for users to use Ethereum directly, rather than having to rely on a bunch of intermediate services.

7. Assets are brought back to the forefront, but they will not become part of an ETH pump-and-dump scheme.

Vitalik also unusually placed ETH assets in a very important position.

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

He also mentioned that nearly 90% of his net worth is in ETH, with the remainder mostly in on-chain fiat currency, which has already been allocated to open-source biotechnology, software, and hardware projects.

He acknowledged 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 the value of ETH, such as marketing, institutional communication, asset narrative, and ecosystem growth, are more suitable for teams and organizations outside of EF to undertake.

In conclusion

The most noteworthy aspect of Vitalik's long post is not that EF will become smaller, nor that EF will sell fewer ETH, but rather that he has revisited a more fundamental question:

What exactly does Ethereum want to become?

His proposed direction is: EF should be smaller, Ethereum should be more focused, and other people in the ecosystem should take on more roles.

This path may not sound sexy, nor is it necessarily the most appealing to the short-term market. But it also reinterprets why Ethereum remains special: what it wants to win is not just speed, cost, and transaction experience, but its underlying capabilities that are more difficult to censor, more difficult to capture, more privacy-conscious, more secure, and more open.

EF may be a smaller ship in the future, but Vitalik hopes it will protect what Ethereum least should be diluted.