Original author: Changan I Biteye content team

In the past year, Ethereum has not had an easy time. On one hand, it is being chased by high-performance public chains, and on the other hand, it is repeatedly questioned by the community: moving too slowly.

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

What exactly should Ethereum rely on to win?

Is it higher TPS, faster transactions, stronger market promotion, or decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, and security—these harder to articulate but longer-term aspects?

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

To many users and institutions, EF sounds like "the official." Adding to this is the immense halo around Vitalik, making it easy for outsiders to equate EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. But this is precisely contrary to the "decentralization" belief that Ethereum respects.

In this lengthy article, Vitalik clearly stated that the EF board does not operate solely at his discretion; he does not hold any special privileges internally. A lot of the transformation work is being executed by Aya Miyaguchi, while he himself is more purely returning to the technology itself.

The EF board includes more than just Vitalik; he does not have more special powers than other members. Many transformation tasks are handled by Aya Miyaguchi, while he mainly participates in technical issues.

Therefore, the EF will not aim to become a larger Ethereum center but will instead shrink its power boundaries: deepening what it needs to do itself and handing over what should not be solely managed by it to others in the ecosystem.

2. If it becomes the next Google, that would be a real loss

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

In recent times, external criticism of EF has been mainly focused on "moving too slowly," "lack of execution," and "not enough emphasis on applications and commercial cooperation." So after 2025, EF began to become more efficient and also pay more attention to specific objectives.

But Vitalik mentioned that this year, the problems he perceives have changed.

He often sees people questioning: Vitalik and EF have always emphasized that Ethereum should be decentralized, should protect privacy, and should resist censorship, but the actual work EF is doing does not reflect these values.

Previously, people were worried that EF was not moving fast enough, but now Vitalik is more concerned that if EF only becomes faster and better at marketing, becoming more like an ordinary tech company, then Ethereum may ultimately place its original values as secondary.

To illustrate this, Vitalik draws a comparison with Google.

In its early days, Google also had a strong idealistic color, such as "Don’t be evil." But as the company grew larger, it became more like a standard large tech company: having to consider business interests, regulatory pressure, platform power, and user data.

3. 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 viewed EF as the core of Ethereum. When there were issues in the Ethereum ecosystem, people would ask why EF didn't resolve them.

But Vitalik wants to emphasize this time: 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 that much funding, nor that much organizational capacity, and should not become the eternal manager of Ethereum.

Therefore, EF will use its resources more cautiously in the future, investing money and people into those foundational, long-term, harder to commercialize matters that are very important to Ethereum.

4. EF's core task: CROPS

Vitalik repeatedly mentioned a key term in this article: CROPS.

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

This is also the direction that has already been clarified in EF's mandate this year: EF's task is not to turn itself into a larger ecology company, nor to purely pursue more users, higher income, or higher token prices, but to help Ethereum maintain these foundational commitments.

So Vitalik is actually drawing clearer boundaries this time: EF will not expand around "everything that benefits Ethereum" but will focus more on CROPS.

EF is responsible for safeguarding the most foundational, long-term, hardest to commercialize aspects, while tasks such as applications, markets, ecosystem growth, asset support, and institutional cooperation should be handled by more external teams, capital, and community organizations.

5. Can't just chase TPS, or it will lead to mediocrity

Vitalik stated that Ethereum must make people feel it is impressive. But he does not believe that this prominence is solely about 250 ms latency, 1 million TPS, or faster transaction confirmations.

Many new public chains are challenging Ethereum with higher TPS, lower latency, and cheaper fees. Solana, BNB Chain, Hyperliquid, and some new L1 chains focus on being faster, smoother, and more suitable for transactions.

Vitalik is not denying the importance of scalability. Ethereum certainly needs to improve performance, and areas such as L2, state scaling, and lower slot times will continue to be pursued.

Because if it's merely a race for speed, it will be challenging for Ethereum to always be the most extreme one. There will always be chains willing to sacrifice more decentralization for higher TPS, lower latency, and better short-term experiences.

If Ethereum also follows this path, it may ultimately become "a slightly more decentralized high-performance chain," which is not Ethereum's goal.

Vitalik wants to emphasize that where Ethereum should truly excel are censorship resistance, control resistance, open source, privacy, and security.

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

What makes Ethereum truly irreplaceable should be: while performance continues to improve, it still upholds these harder, longer-term foundational capabilities.

6. Vitalik highlights three technical directions

After discussing that Ethereum cannot just chase TPS, Vitalik also provided a few technical directions he considers more important.

1. Bug-free verifiable Ethereum

The first direction is formal verification.

Simply put, it is about using a stricter, more mathematically precise way to verify the correctness of the Ethereum protocol, client, and related code.

In the past, "proving Ethereum has no bugs" sounded almost impossible. Because blockchain systems are too complex, there are numerous interactions between code, clients, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts.

But Vitalik believes that with the development of AI-assisted formal verification, this is becoming more realistic.

This also shows that he is not viewing AI merely as an application layer hotspot, but is more focused on whether AI can help Ethereum strengthen underlying security.

2. Available chain consensus

The second direction is consensus security.

Vitalik mentioned that Ethereum aims to possess a distinctive capability: even in poor network environments, or if a portion of nodes encounters issues, Ethereum should not easily rely on human coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to resolve problems.

He believes that for some chains, if there are massive node outages, relying on project parties, validators, or community coordination for recovery might be acceptable. But for systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash that emphasize censorship resistance and neutrality, such reliance is very dangerous.

Because once a system requires coordination by a few individuals to recover, it exposes centralization risks.

3. Reduce intermediary dependence

The third direction is to reduce dependence on intermediaries.

Now, many smart contract wallets and privacy protocols still need to rely on certain intermediary services when sending transactions to the chain, such as RPC, third-party servers, transaction relayers, packaging services, etc.

These intermediary services can smooth out user experience but also bring issues.

For example, if a certain intermediary service is unwilling to process your transaction, your transaction might not be sent. If a wallet needs to send data to third-party servers, your privacy could be exposed.

Vitalik believes this state does not align with the direction Ethereum wants.

So he referenced works like FOCIL, EIP-8141, 7701, Kohaku, which essentially all solve the same problem: allowing users to more directly use Ethereum without relying on a slew of intermediary services.

7. Assets are back in the spotlight, but won't become an ETH pump organization

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

He said that from a financial perspective, the most valuable product of Ethereum is ETH. Ethereum currently protects around $250 billion of ETH.

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

He acknowledges that ETH is Ethereum's most important asset. The security, censorship resistance, privacy, and openness of Ethereum will ultimately affect the long-term value of ETH.

But matters related to the value of ETH, such as market promotion, institutional communication, asset narrative, and ecosystem growth, are more suitable to be undertaken by teams and organizations outside of EF.

In conclusion

The most noteworthy aspect of Vitalik's lengthy article is not that EF will become smaller, nor that EF will sell less ETH, but that he re-answered a more foundational question:

What exactly should Ethereum become?

The direction he provided is: EF becoming smaller, Ethereum becoming more focused, with others in the ecosystem taking on more roles.

This path may not sound as appealing, nor is it necessarily the most agreeable to the short-term market. But it also re-explains why Ethereum remains special: it wants to win not just on speed, cost, and transaction experience, but on foundational capabilities that are harder to censor, harder to capture, and place greater emphasis on privacy, security, and openness.

In the future, EF may be a smaller ship, but Vitalik hopes what it protects is the essence of Ethereum that should not be diluted.

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