Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is moving toward a smaller, more focused, and more say-in role, with fewer Ethereum sales and a clearer mandate around Ethereum’s flexibility, privacy, security, and takeover resistance in the long term.
In a long time mail Via X on Sunday, Buterin framed the shift as a deliberate move away from treating EF as an “ethereum hub” and toward a narrower function within a broader ecosystem. He also stressed that the statements reflect his own point of view, and are not a unilateral official directive.
“First of all, this is just my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no additional special powers on the board that other board members do not have,” Buterin wrote. He added that the board was expanding and that his influence within the organization would “continue to decline,” which he said was “frankly what I want.”
A smaller Ethereum Foundation with a narrower mandate
Buterin said that the changes that occurred in the European Fund in the 2025 era led to improved implementation, efficiency and focus on concrete goals. But with those issues partially resolved, he said a different criticism has become harder to ignore: that Ethereum’s general values of decentralization, privacy and “secure technology” have not always been reflected strongly enough in the organization’s actions.
The result, according to Buterin, is a move toward an institution that does less, but does so with more conviction. He described the EF as “a single node with a specific purpose, alongside other nodes,” rather than a central coordinating body for Ethereum.
This distinction is important both financially and culturally. Buterin noted that EF owns only about 0.16% of all ETH, which he said is “less than many other individual ETH holders,” while central institutions in other blockchain ecosystems often own much larger stakes. He also argued that EF’s original financial role was limited: financing on-chain software development through milestones outlined in Ethereum’s pre-launch materials, a scope that he said was “fully completed in 2022.”
“And so today, EF is choosing to use its remaining resources for longevity rather than supply,” Buterin wrote. “Yes, this means we are selling less Ethereum.”
He said the foundation would focus specifically on work “critical to the success of Ethereum as a currency.” A system that is censorship/capture resistant, open, private and secure“It wouldn’t happen otherwise. This means that some respected people and projects may sit out the EF, even when it aligns with Ethereum’s broader mission.”
Ethereum doesn’t have to chase speed alone
Buterin’s technical argument centered on what he called the crop dimension: censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security. Contrast this with the view that Ethereum should define its ambition primarily by ultra-low latency and… Maximum productivity.
“For some, ‘impressive’ means: 250ms response time and 1 million TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go down this path is a mistake.” “Being as fast and scalable as possible, and just being a little epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a path to mediocrity, and if we try that we will lose.”
Buterin said Ethereum should continue to scale, but said its best defensible features should be deeper. He pointed to formal AI-assisted verification as a potential path toward a “bug-free Ethereum,” a goal he said seemed absurd to many cybersecurity researchers until recently. He also highlighted “available chain consensus,” arguing that Ethereum’s trend with lean consensus maintains characteristics that he sees as different from both Bitcoin-style and traditional BFT-style systems.
The third priority is to reduce the middleman. Buterin called it “really embarrassing” that smart contract wallets and privacy protocols often rely on intermediaries to list transactions on-chain. He cited FOCIL, EIP-8141, EIP-7701, and Kohaku As part of the push toward stronger encapsulation properties, access to global memory pool and user layer infrastructure that does not leak private data across multiple external services.
ETH, the asset is still important
Buterin also linked the technical trend to Ethereum’s economic role, describing Ethereum as the most valuable “product” of the Ethereum blockchain, in financial terms. He said that Ethereum secures $250 billion worth of Ethereum and argued that the properties he described are beneficial to the asset.
He added that roughly 90% of his net worth is in ETH, with most of the rest in about $40 million in fiat currencies already allocated to biotech initiatives or open source software or hardware. However, he said that some of the work necessary to support ETH as an asset lies outside the scope of the EF and will require the intervention of other organizations and major ETH holders.
Buterin said the new long-term structure of the foundation is expected to stabilize over the next few months. His concluding description was blunt: EF will be a “smaller ship than in previous years,” more opinionated, longer-term, and better suited to ensuring that “Ethereum brings something meaningful to the world.”
At press time, Ethereum was trading at $2,108.
Featured image created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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