Author: Changan I Biteye Content Team

In the past year, Ethereum has not had an easy time. On one hand, it has been chased by high-performance public chains, and on the other hand, it has faced repeated doubts from the community: actions are too slow.

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

What does Ethereum rely on to win?

Is it higher TPS, faster transactions, stronger marketing, or is it the more difficult but long-term aspects like decentralization, privacy, anti-censorship, and security?

1. EF is not a "one-man show" by Vitalik

To many users and institutions, EF sounds like "official." Coupled with Vitalik's personal aura, the outside world easily equates EF, Vitalik, and Ethereum itself. But this is precisely contrary to the "decentralization" belief that Ethereum upholds.

In this long article, Vitalik clearly stated that the EF board is not solely decided by him, and he has no privileges internally. A lot of the transformation work is being executed by Aya Miyaguchi, while he himself has returned more purely to the technology itself.

The EF board is not 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, EF's next step is not to make itself a larger Ethereum center, but to shrink its own power boundaries: to deepen what it should do and hand over what it should not handle 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 goal focus.

Recently, external criticism of EF has mainly focused on "too slow," "insufficient execution," and "not enough emphasis on applications and business cooperation." So after 2025, EF began to become more efficient and more focused on specific goals.

But Vitalik said that by this year, the issues he felt had changed.

He often sees people questioning: Vitalik and EF have always emphasized that Ethereum should be decentralized, protect privacy, and resist censorship, but what EF actually does does not reflect these values at all.

In the past, people were worried that EF was not fast enough, but now Vitalik is more concerned that if EF only becomes faster, better at marketing, and more like an ordinary tech company, then Ethereum might ultimately place its original values in a secondary position.

To illustrate this point, Vitalik made an analogy with Google.

In its early days, Google also had a strong idealistic tone, such as "Don't be evil." But as the company grew, it increasingly resembled a standard large tech company: needing to consider commercial interests, regulatory pressures, 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 within the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the past, many people actually viewed EF as the core of Ethereum. When something went wrong in the Ethereum ecosystem, people would ask why EF did not solve it.

But this time, Vitalik wants to emphasize that 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 control 10% to 50% of the tokens.

This means that EF does not have that much funding, nor that much organizational capability, and it should not become the eternal manager of Ethereum.

Therefore, EF will be more cautious in using its resources, investing money and people in the most foundational, long-term, and hardest to commercialize matters that are very important to Ethereum.

4. EF's core mission: CROPS

In this article, Vitalik repeatedly mentioned a key term: CROPS.

In simple terms, CROPS refers to the few things that Ethereum values most: anti-censorship, anti-control, open-source, privacy, and security.

This is also the direction that EF has already clarified in this year's Mandate: EF's mission is not to make itself a larger ecological company, nor to simply pursue more users, higher revenue, or higher token prices, but to help Ethereum uphold these foundational commitments.

So Vitalik is actually further clarifying the boundaries: EF will not expand around "everything beneficial to Ethereum," but will focus more on CROPS.

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

5. Cannot just pursue TPS, or it will lead to mediocrity

Vitalik said that Ethereum must feel impressive. But he does not believe that this prominence is merely about 250ms 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 L1s all emphasize being faster, smoother, and more suitable for trading.

Vitalik does not deny the importance of scalability. Ethereum certainly needs to improve performance, and directions like L2, state scalability, and lower slot time will continue to be pursued.

Because if it only competes on speed, Ethereum will find it hard 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 goes down this path, it may ultimately only become "a slightly more decentralized high-performance chain," which is not Ethereum's goal.

Vitalik wants to emphasize that the real strengths of Ethereum should be in anti-censorship, anti-control, open-source, privacy, and security.

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

The truly irreplaceable aspect of Ethereum should be: while performance continues to improve, it still upholds these more difficult, long-term foundational capabilities.

6. Vitalik highlights three technical directions

After discussing that Ethereum cannot just pursue TPS, Vitalik also provided several technical directions he considers more important.

1. Provably Bug-Free Ethereum

The first direction is formal verification.

In simple terms, it means using stricter, more mathematically rigorous methods to verify the correctness of the Ethereum protocol, clients, and related code.

In the past, "proving that 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 indicates that he is not viewing AI merely as a hot topic at the application layer, but is more concerned with whether AI can help Ethereum strengthen its foundational security.

2. Available chain consensus

The second direction is consensus security.

Vitalik mentioned that Ethereum wants to possess a rather unique capability: even in a poor network environment, or if some nodes have issues, Ethereum should not easily rely on human coordination, social consensus, or hard forks to resolve problems.

He believes that for some chains, if a large number of nodes go offline, relying on project parties, validators, or community coordination to recover might be acceptable. But for systems like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Zcash that emphasize anti-censorship and neutrality, such reliance is very dangerous.

Because once a system needs to rely on a few people to coordinate for recovery, it exposes centralization risks.

3. Reducing reliance on intermediaries

The third direction is to reduce reliance on intermediaries.

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

These intermediary services can make the user experience smoother, but they also bring problems.

For example, if a certain intermediary service refuses to process your transaction, your transaction may not go through. If a wallet needs to send data to a third-party server, your privacy may be exposed.

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

So he mentioned works like FOCIL, EIP-8141, 7701, Kohaku, etc., which are essentially addressing the same problem: allowing users to get closer to directly using Ethereum without having to rely on a bunch of intermediary services.

7. Assets are brought back to the forefront, but will not 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 about $250 billion worth of ETH.

He also mentioned that nearly 90% of his net worth is in ETH, with the remaining majority in on-chain fiat currencies, which have already been allocated to open-source biotechnology, software, and hardware projects.

He acknowledged that ETH is the most important asset for Ethereum. The security, anti-censorship, privacy, and openness of Ethereum will ultimately affect the long-term value of ETH.

However, matters related to the value of ETH, such as marketing, institutional communication, asset narratives, 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 long 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 does Ethereum ultimately want to become?

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

This path may not sound very appealing and may not necessarily please the short-term market. But it also re-explains why Ethereum remains special: it wants to win not just in speed, cost, and transaction experience, but in foundational capabilities that are harder to censor, harder to capture, more privacy-focused, more secure, and more open.

EF may become a smaller ship in the future, but Vitalik hopes it will safeguard what should not be diluted in Ethereum.