Author: Nancy, PANews

While leading public chains such as Solana and Base are going all out to attract developers, traffic, and expand their ecosystems, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has chosen to take a back seat.

The continued loss of key talent, coupled with multiple rounds of ETH selling pressure, has fueled increasing FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Demand) sentiment surrounding EF. This passive approach is steadily eroding market trust in EF.

On May 25, Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy article responding to the recent controversy, stating that EF is just an ordinary node with a special mission, clarifying EF's next streamlining strategy and future technology roadmap, and stating bluntly that maintaining the price of ETH is not within the scope of EF's responsibilities.

After losing its "leader," how will Ethereum continue to move forward in the post-foundation era?

From executive-oriented to long-term-oriented, public blockchain foundations are showing a divergence in style.

Recently, the loss of core members of the foundation, frequent ETH sales, and ongoing controversies surrounding the ecosystem's execution capabilities have led to increasing skepticism about EF, and even calls for it to start afresh.

Meanwhile, Vitalik recently disclosed that EF currently holds only about 0.16% of the total ETH supply, far lower than the 10%-50% range commonly seen in many public blockchain foundations.

In other words, of the initial 6 million ETH allocated to EF (representing 8.3% of the initial total supply), approximately 100,000 ETH have been consumed over the past decade. Currently, EF, in terms of both financial reserves and personnel size and organizational execution capabilities, is finding it increasingly difficult to continue supporting the rapid operation of its massive ecosystem.

As one of the most representative pure foundations in the industry, EF has long focused on protocol research, public goods development, and open-source ecosystem support. Although EF does not directly control the Ethereum network, it has long been regarded as an important coordinating and driving force in the Ethereum ecosystem due to its early accumulated ETH reserves and the continued influence of key developers such as Vitalik.

However, as the Ethereum ecosystem matures, EF and Vitalik are intentionally downplaying their centralized influence and shifting towards a more low-profile, behind-the-scenes support role . This shift stems partly from their commitment to neutrality and long-termism, and partly from practical pressures.

As EF's role in Ethereum weakens, the single growth path that relied heavily on foundation resources for ecosystem projects is gradually becoming ineffective, and ecosystem expansion is shifting towards community-driven innovation and diverse external collaborations.

In fact, the foundation models of different public blockchains not only shape their respective governance cultures, but also determine the maturity of their ecosystems, the degree of decentralization, and their long-term evolution path.

In contrast, other emerging public blockchains are still in a phase of rapid expansion, with foundations playing a more aggressive and dominant role. For example, emerging public blockchains such as Solana, Aptos, and TON adopt a more flexible foundation-driven model, holding a high proportion of token reserves in the early stages, implementing high-intensity resource investment, continuous incentive programs, and support from DAT company, and even having the founding team directly involved in driving the process, maintaining high execution efficiency and growth rate.

Base represents a different path. As an L2 platform supported by Coinbase, it does not rely on a traditional independent foundation structure. Instead, it drives ecosystem development through its parent company's resources and business network, supplemented by an ecosystem fund to promote developer and application integration. The advantage of this model lies in its extremely high resource integration efficiency, enabling rapid user growth and product launch.

Polygon and Avalanche, among others, adopt a hybrid architecture that combines a foundation and labs. The foundation is responsible for governance transparency and community affairs, while the labs focus on product development and business execution. This avoids excessive centralization by a single entity and improves the speed of decision-making and implementation. The Hyperliquid Foundation takes a more financially native governance approach, deeply binding governance rights, economic incentives, and ecosystem development funds through a token mechanism. It also allocates some resources to policy research and external communication, enhancing the ecosystem's self-sustaining and adaptability.

More importantly, as emerging public blockchains are still in a phase of fierce expansion and competition, they generally employ high cash salaries and generous token incentives to attract developer resources, giving them a clear advantage in the short-term talent war. In contrast, Ethereum is not competitive in terms of compensation and relies more on developers' idealism, commitment to open-source culture, and long-term ecosystem reputation to sustain their contributions . Meanwhile, most of the core developers who joined the Ethereum ecosystem early on have already reaped substantial financial rewards in the last bull market. Some members are gradually leaving frontline development and maintenance positions, resulting in a significant shortage of manpower for the ecosystem's continued operation.

It can be said that the transformation of ETFs is both a result of the development and evolution of Ethereum and a long-term survival choice after being constrained by funding and execution capabilities.

The foundation will reduce coin sales; more large holders are needed for ETH's value to grow.

"The Ethereum Foundation does a lot of technical work, but the market sees it as a company, so this gap in expectations leads to dissatisfaction. In fact, it's all because of the price," crypto KOL Blue Fox Notes succinctly pointed out.

For the Ethereum community, almost all controversies ultimately revolve around the issue of ETH's low price.

Crypto journalist Laura Shin points out that since the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum's various policy choices have consistently lacked sufficient consideration of token economics, overemphasizing ideology while neglecting capital markets and price performance, leading to dissatisfaction among the community and investors. Involving external organizations can only help with business expansion, not fundamentally solve the market problems at the ETH asset level.

More importantly, the competition has only just begun. Laura Shin believes we are currently at a critical stage of real-world adoption. However, compared to competitors actively seizing market share and attracting developers and capital, the Ethereum Foundation increasingly seems to be relying on past successes. Especially as the most competitive talent within the ecosystem continues to leave, this laissez-faire attitude may ultimately help competitors grow stronger and even give rise to new challengers.

In his lengthy post, Vitalik also addressed market concerns. He emphasized that ETH is the most valuable product on the Ethereum blockchain, with the Ethereum network currently holding and protecting approximately $250 billion worth of ETH. He stated that over 90% of his personal net worth is invested in ETH, with the remainder consisting primarily of approximately $40 million in on-chain fiat currency assets, all of which have been invested in open-source biotechnology, software, and hardware projects.

However, Vitalik also stated that while the foundation will reduce ETH sales in the future, maintaining the ETH price is not within EF's purview. In his view, there are already many individuals and institutions in the Ethereum ecosystem with financial resources far exceeding EF's; truly driving the growth of ETH's value requires the combined efforts of more ecosystem "heroes." EF is also planning to establish connections with such organizations and provide them with necessary initial support.

Blockchain researcher William Mougayar expressed a similar view. He believes that ETH is essentially an asset, Ethereum is a shared computing infrastructure, and the Ethereum Foundation is merely a non-profit organization responsible for driving the protocol's development. One of its long-term goals is even to "gradually make the founders themselves less important."

As EF takes a backseat, Ethereum is entering a new phase that relies more on ecosystem self-driving .

While the community is anxious about the price of ETH, the mainstreaming process of Ethereum is accelerating. Two Ethereum DAT companies, BitMine and Sharplink, are expected to be included in the US Russell indices on June 29th. Specifically, BMNR will be included in the Russell 1000 Index and the Russell 3000 Index, while SBET will be included in the Russell 2000 Index and the Russell 3000 Index.

According to BitMine Chairman Tom Lee, based on BitMine's current market capitalization of $10.75 billion, if the acquisition is successful, BitMine will receive at least $2.15 billion in buy orders.

Blue Fox Notes further points out that the global funds tracking the Russell 2000 and Russell 3000 indices amount to trillions of dollars. Once officially included, related index funds must allocate corresponding stocks, which is equivalent to opening the floodgates for passive funds to SBET and BMNR, allowing a large number of ordinary investors who were not previously involved in the crypto market to automatically hold them, pushing Ethereum into the mainstream of traditional finance. The purchases by passive funds will create real demand, especially before and after the inclusion takes effect, often providing short-term support for the stock price, and in the long run, it will also increase the stock's liquidity and the proportion of institutional holdings. It should be noted that although these funds are buying stocks, not ETH itself, it may indirectly strengthen the market demand for ETH.

In the post-Foundation era, who might be the next leader of the Ethereum community? Tom Lee has volunteered, and his Fundstrat and BitMine are considered the best candidates by the community. BitMine holds approximately 5.28 million ETH, accounting for 4.37% of the total supply, making it the world's largest ETH treasury.

Reject performance wars and uphold CROPS values

In addition to the Ethereum Foundation's new positioning, Vitalik also shared his personal thoughts on Ethereum's future technological roadmap.

In Vitalik's view, Ethereum must build a unique and difficult-to-replicate competitive advantage. With AI technology rapidly iterating and the entire tech industry experiencing explosive growth, if Ethereum merely adheres to its existing EVM architecture and only meets short-term user needs through periodic hard forks each year, it will gradually lose its appeal.

He believes that simply pursuing rapid scaling, while offering only a slight advantage in decentralization compared to other public chains, will ultimately reduce Ethereum to mediocrity. Ethereum needs scaling, but it also needs to focus on CROPS, namely censorship resistance, anti-piracy, openness, privacy, and security.

In fact, over the past few years, the market's focus on public blockchain competition has been almost entirely on performance, cost, and user growth. Whether it's Solana, Sui, or various modular narratives, they are all essentially competing on "faster, cheaper, and easier to use."

However, Vitalik clearly does not want Ethereum to continue being bogged down in this performance race. Realistically, Ethereum is unlikely to completely outperform the next generation of high-performance public chains in terms of performance, and if it continues to sacrifice its own characteristics for performance, it will gradually lose its core value foundation.

Vitalik emphasized that for underlying infrastructure-level public chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin, even if 34% of nodes go offline, social consensus or hard forks should never be relied upon to "save the day." This might be acceptable for chains like Hyperledger, BNB, and Solana, but it is unacceptable for Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash.

Meanwhile, state scaling is also a key research area for Ethereum. A well-designed L2 network can continue to provide value to the ecosystem. Especially in vertical scenarios such as transactions and privacy, dedicated L2 networks remain crucial. Furthermore, with the advancement of erasure coding P2P technology and other optimization solutions, the future block interval of Ethereum is expected to be further shortened.

Compared to ecosystem prosperity, Vitalik seems to be more focused on Ethereum maintaining its non-fungibility, a technological path that embodies Vitalik's values.

According to Vitalik, if a company becomes overly dogmatic in its adherence to principles, the worst outcome is merely a slowdown in its own development, while technological progress will still be driven by other companies. The best outcome, however, is that a company truly aligned with the community's values ​​will gain spontaneous support, talent, and marketing resources—support that is difficult to obtain solely through monetary means. He believes that some AI companies have previously attempted to achieve similar results through effective altruism, but due to the susceptibility of consequentialism to corruption, the final results have been limited.

In the post-Foundation era, although EF has gradually faded from the center stage of Ethereum under the banner of neutrality and long-termism, whether it can truly quell negative market sentiment remains to be seen. A more crucial question is how Ethereum, currently in a downtrend, can initiate an upward trajectory through policy reforms—a topic of greater market concern.