Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy post on X on Sunday addressing months of turbulence at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), defending the nonprofit's ongoing restructuring and outlining what he sees as its long-term technical direction. Buterin framed the post as his personal perspective rather than an official statement from the board. The announcement comes amid a wave of high-profile departures from the EF that has reignited debate over the foundation's direction, with at least eight senior EF contributors having left or announced plans to leave in 2026, including five in May.
Buterin acknowledged that community members have felt the foundation's actions don't match the rhetoric of decentralization, privacy, and "sanctuary technology" that he and the foundation have publicly championed. In response, he reiterated that the EF should be understood as "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes" rather than the center of Ethereum. "The EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH)," Buterin wrote, arguing the foundation will now focus only on activities critical to Ethereum's resilience that "would not happen otherwise."
Leadership Transition and Departures
Interim co-Executive Director Bastian Aue, who took over from Tomasz Stanczak earlier this year, is executing much of the transition. Buterin noted that the board "is in the process of expanding," and his own influence within the organization will continue to shrink, "which is honestly what I want."
The departure wave has included Tomasz Stanczak stepping down as co-executive director and Alex Stokes, another Protocol Cluster co-lead, going on sabbatical. Former EF developer Dankrad Feist, who left his full-time role at the foundation for Tempo last year, this week proposed raising $1 billion for a separate Ethereum advocacy organization "more economically aligned" with ETH the asset.
Ethereum Foundation's Holdings and Financial Strategy
Buterin noted the foundation holds roughly 0.16% of all ETH, less than many individual holders and well below the 10% to 50% he said is common at other blockchain foundations. Ethereum's sale materials allocated roughly 6 million ETH to the Ethereum Foundation's long-term endowment, equal to about 10% of the roughly 60 million ETH sold in the 2014 crowdsale and about 8.3% of Ethereum's roughly 72 million ETH genesis supply.
The foundation was originally chartered to complete the work outlined in Ethereum's pre-launch documents, a task Buterin said was finished in 2022. Some respected contributors and projects will now sit outside the EF, which Buterin described as "in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital."
This framing echoes the EF's March 13 mandate, which codified the CROPS principles and described the foundation as "one of many stewards" of the network.
Ethereum's Technical Priorities
On the technical side, Buterin laid out three priorities he believes should define Ethereum's next phase. The first is "provably bug-free Ethereum" via AI-assisted formal verification, a goal he said was widely considered impossible until roughly six months ago. The second is "available chain consensus," which he said Ethereum already has and, with lean consensus, would continue to be the only chain offering both traditional BFT-style safety under asynchrony and Bitcoin-style PoW safety against 49% attackers under synchrony. The third is intermediary minimization, citing ongoing work on FOCIL, EIP-8141, EIP-7701, and the EF's Kohaku wallet framework.
Rejecting Speed-Only Competition
Buterin explicitly rejected the argument that Ethereum should compete on speed alone, though he noted that his stated goals are compatible with high TPS. "Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose," Buterin wrote.
He also stated: "It is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash."
ETH as a Product and Future Direction
Buterin called ETH the asset Ethereum's "most high-value 'product,' financially speaking." He said the properties he is pushing for are good for ETH, but acknowledged that some "necessary" work to support ETH falls outside the EF's scope and will require "other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does)" to step in. He said the EF has been thinking about how to relate to and seed such organizations.
Buterin closed by saying the EF will be "a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one, in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend, but a longer-lasting one." The foundation's new long-term form, he said, should stabilize over the next few months.
As of 3:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, ETH was trading at roughly $2,100, up about 2% over the past 24 hours.
