Author: Jocy, Founder of IOSG

Ethereum doesn’t need another round of technical evangelism — it needs a Musk-style compromise.

When ETHLabs was announced, everyone’s first reaction was “a second foundation.” I think that’s the wrong question. Five former EF core researchers, funded by BitMine, SharpLink, and Lubin — the former being the world’s largest ETH treasury company, sitting on over 5 million ETH. They didn’t fork the foundation; they filled a gap the EF deliberately left open. The most telling part is that this move wasn’t initiated by Vitalik — the ecosystem did it for him. When an organization starts forming around a founder, it is itself a vote of no confidence from the market in “governing by doing nothing, staying small and decentralized.” Not a forum vote — a capital vote.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between Musk and V.

Musk’s skill was never the rocket itself. It was that he genuinely figured out how business turns, where money comes from, what users want, and then was willing to do the dirtiest, hardest work himself — willing to postpone Mars to secure the Moon first. He digested the real world thoroughly first, then let technology reach for reality. V is the opposite: he starts from the purest technology and values, expecting reality to grow out on its own.

That path worked for the past decade. Because there was no alternative — killer apps like ICOs, DeFi, and NFTs all emerged spontaneously from the community. Ethereum was lucky enough that every cycle someone built something new on it. But today there are too many alternatives. Luck won’t always be on your side.

Today in the Ethereum Rebirth group, I saw two voices. One says Ethereum lacks a Starlink-level killer app and a clear commercial direction; the other says it lacks BD and a willingness to compromise with commercial reality. I think these two arguments aren’t contradictory at all — they’re two sides of the same coin. What Ethereum lacks isn’t another technical roadmap. It lacks someone who will truly step into the arena to understand business and wrestle with real-world applications.

So my expectations for V are very specific. Not for him to write a more elegant white paper. I hope he first seriously studies how Musk started companies, how to read a business, and then focuses the vast majority of his energy on one thing: what applications Ethereum can actually run in the real world. Until that question is figured out, all the technical narratives are suspended in mid-air.

And the real problem with the EF — the harshest criticism comes from insiders. Dankrad Feist’s remark stuck with me — those who left are CROPS believers; the problem isn’t strategy, it’s management. Talent outflow is a genuine negative for Ethereum. The weight of that statement lies in the fact that it shows the cure isn’t direction, but the organization itself. And an organizational disease can’t be cured by a founder who always stands half a step away, unwilling to get his hands dirty.

The new model is a small EF plus a bunch of independent steward nodes — ETHLabs, Etherealize, each making their own calls. This actually validates the direction I’ve been talking about: the single-foundation model can’t hold up anymore; responsibility must be distributed. But the path they’re taking is far more radical than I imagined. It looks more decentralized, but the problems are actually greater. With multiple nodes each making their own decisions, who aligns the agenda, who adjudicates disagreements, where does cohesion come from? Distributing the checkbook is easy. Distributing direction without shattering it — that’s the real challenge.

My own answer is that this cohesion can ultimately only come from the value alignment of ETH as a common reference asset — not from any single organization or any single person.

That’s also why V’s May article said the foundation has never been the center of Ethereum, just an ordinary node in the ecosystem, holding only 0.16% of ETH. The foundation can’t manage the task of maintaining ETH’s value — that has to come from large holders in the ecosystem who hold far more than it does. I agree with that judgment. But money from large holders alone can’t bind cohesion — the prerequisite for binding cohesion is first having a real-world narrative that everyone can understand and is willing to bet on together.

There’s another unavoidable point. So-called independence is currently a declaration, not a fact. Lubin is simultaneously CEO of ConsenSys and chairman of SharpLink; the funders and the beneficiaries are the same group. The research is paid for by people holding billions of dollars in ETH positions, making directional bets. ETHLabs’ response is that an independent grants administrator disburses funds, with quarterly reports, annual audits, and no interference in the research agenda. The design is reasonable. But this kind of trust will take many years to earn — it can’t be granted by a single press release.

Finally, the deepest layer. Scaling L1 itself is extremely difficult. The current roadmap is still stuck at infra — MEV elimination, default privacy, ETH Pay — all necessary, but none of them answer the real threat. Ethereum’s competitor has never been Solana. It’s that attention itself is migrating toward AI. This window is probably only 12 to 18 months. Infra can’t win back attention. What can win it back is a founder who truly focuses on real-world applications and is willing to get into the trenches like Musk, and a decade-long narrative that makes top-tier graduates willing to turn down OpenAI or Anthropic.

I still believe the light of V’s ideals hasn’t gone out. But for that ideal light to shine into reality, what’s needed isn’t another gaze at the stars — it’s bending down to enter the arena.

And the time left for that bending down is running short. Time is the only opponent here that won’t negotiate with you.

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