Vitalik Wants a Smaller Ethereum Foundation Focused on Privacy, Security and Decentralization

Vitalik Buterin wants the Ethereum Foundation to get smaller, sharper, and more ruthless about what actually matters: decentralization, privacy, security, and long-term survival.

• Vitalik’s view: smaller EF, narrower scope, less ETH selling
• CROPS over TPS: censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security
• AI-assisted formal verification could make “provably bug-free Ethereum” less insane than it sounds
• Intermediary minimization is the real privacy and censorship-resistance battleground
• Less corporate bloat, more code that actually matters

Buterin stressed that this is only his personal view, not an Ethereum Foundation board decree carved into stone. That distinction matters. He said the board is expanding, and his own influence inside the organization will keep decreasing. So no, this is not Vitalik trying to play protocol monarch. It’s more like the co-founder looking at the EF and saying: if we don’t stay disciplined, we’ll drift into a polite, process-heavy machine that mistakes motion for progress.

That framing cuts to the heart of the debate around Ethereum itself. Is the network supposed to be a broad tech platform chasing scale, throughput, and ecosystem sprawl? Or is it supposed to be a hard, neutral base layer that stays useful because it is difficult to censor, difficult to corrupt, and difficult to break? Vitalik’s answer is obvious.

The Ethereum Foundation, in his view, should not try to do everything. It should focus on work that is critical to Ethereum’s mission but unlikely to be done elsewhere. He described that shift as using the EF’s remaining resources for “longevity over breadth.” That means fewer vanity projects, fewer distractions, and yes, likely less ETH selling. For ETH holders, that part is not exactly rocket science: fewer treasury sales can mean less sell pressure. Not a moon mission, just basic supply dynamics.

There’s also a useful context point here. The Ethereum Foundation reportedly holds only about 0.16% of all ETH, which is tiny compared with many other blockchain foundations that sit on roughly 10% to 50% of their native supply. That makes Ethereum unusual. It is not being propped up by a giant centralized war chest, and that’s a good thing for decentralization. At the same time, it means the EF has less ability to brute-force growth from the top down. That’s the trade-off: less control, less dependency, less room for bureaucratic nonsense.

Vitalik tied this shift back to Ethereum’s original roadmap. The EF’s early mission was to help build Ethereum through the Serenity upgrade, which was completed in 2022. With that milestone done, the foundation’s role changes. It is no longer supposed to behave like a startup trying to win market share. It is supposed to act like a steward of a global, permissionless system.

That’s where his preferred value framework comes in: CROPS. That stands for censorship-resistant, open, private, and secure. Those are the qualities he wants Ethereum to be truly impressive at, not just passably decent. In other words, Ethereum should be a very annoying target for censors and a very boring target for attackers. That’s a compliment in crypto.

He also pushed back on the usual shallow competition metrics. Chasing headlines about 1 million TPS or sub-second finality may sound sexy in marketing decks, but speed alone is a weak victory if it comes at the cost of censorship resistance, decentralization, or trust minimization. Plenty of chains can move fast if you centralize them enough. That’s not some grand blockchain triumph; that’s a performance database with a token attached and a prayer.

A status quo EVM with a couple of hard forks a year is not interesting, he said. The point is not to be merely functional. The point is to be exceptional in the dimensions that actually matter.

“Ethereum should be that Unreasonable Man.”

That line captures the philosophy pretty well. Vitalik wants Ethereum to aim at goals that sound ridiculous until engineering catches up. One of those goals is “provably bug-free Ethereum.” That sounds like sci-fi fluff at first glance, but he believes it could become increasingly realistic thanks to AI-assisted formal verification.

Formal verification means using mathematical methods to prove that code behaves as intended. Instead of hoping an audit catches everything, developers try to prove properties about the system itself. It’s a much higher bar. AI can help by speeding up the creation and checking of those proofs, making it more practical to verify critical code at scale.

Why does that matter? Because bugs in smart contract systems are not harmless little hiccups. They can freeze assets, break bridges, mess with consensus-critical software, or trigger failures that spread across the ecosystem like a virus with a grudge. The whole point of formal verification is to stop relying on “we tested it and it seems fine” as a security strategy. Crypto has already paid enough tuition to the school of expensive mistakes.

“Provably bug-free Ethereum.”

Vitalik also made a deeper point about Ethereum’s design that many readers may miss if they only follow gas fees and price charts. He described Ethereum as uniquely combining BFT-style safety under asynchrony with Bitcoin-like liveness under synchrony.

Plain English version: safety means the network avoids doing the wrong thing, while liveness means the network keeps making progress. Byzantine Fault Tolerance, or BFT, refers to systems that can keep working even if some participants are malicious, broken, or just acting like complete idiots. Bitcoin is often praised for strong liveness in a simpler model. Ethereum is trying to achieve both strong correctness and the ability to keep moving. That’s hard. That’s also why serious decentralization is hard.

He was especially clear on one point: it is not OK for Ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue the chain whenever something goes badly wrong. A hard fork is a coordinated protocol upgrade that the network has to adopt together. Sometimes they’re necessary. But if the whole system’s last line of defense is “we’ll just coordinate human drama and push a fork,” then the architecture is too dependent on social theater and not enough on robust engineering.

Social consensus is powerful, but it should not be a routine escape hatch for deep technical problems. If Ethereum wants to be credible as a neutral settlement layer, it needs to earn that credibility with code, not just with ceremonial agreement and a lot of group chat energy.

That leads directly to one of the most practical parts of Vitalik’s vision: intermediary minimization. In simple terms, this means reducing dependence on third parties that sit between users and the chain. That matters a lot for smart contract wallets and privacy systems such as Railgun, where users may currently depend on relays, servers, or other infrastructure to get transactions included.

The less a user has to rely on someone else’s pipe to reach Ethereum, the stronger the censorship resistance. It also makes privacy harder to undermine. Intermediaries are where censorship, surveillance, and fee extraction tend to creep in. They are also where “permissionless” systems quietly become permissioned with better branding.

Vitalik pointed to FOCIL, EIP-8141, and Kohaku as relevant work in this area. For readers not deep in Ethereum governance weeds, these are part of the broader push to improve transaction inclusion, wallet design, and privacy-preserving access. The details are technical, but the goal is easy to understand: make Ethereum less dependent on middlemen and more usable without handing your autonomy to some random infrastructure provider.

That matters because the real censorship battle is often not some dramatic government takedown. More often it’s soft pressure, invisible filtering, or reliance on a few key service providers who can quietly decide what gets included, delayed, or excluded. A blockchain that cannot resist those pressures is missing the point.

There’s also a personal detail worth noting. Vitalik said nearly 90% of his net worth is in ETH. That gives his comments a bit more weight than the usual detached founder grandstanding. He is heavily exposed to Ethereum’s future, and he also noted that ETH is the largest financially significant product secured by Ethereum, with around $250 billion in value secured by the network.

So when he talks about security and privacy, this is not abstract philosophy. It is a direct statement about the thing securing a massive chunk of value and financial activity. If Ethereum gets sloppy, the downside is not theoretical. If it gets strong, the upside is not just price speculation, but a genuinely usable decentralized financial base layer.

Still, there’s a fair counterpoint here, because decentralization purists sometimes act like “smaller” automatically means “better” and that’s not always true. A leaner Ethereum Foundation may be healthier philosophically, but there is a real risk of under-supporting work that still needs coordination and funding. Ecosystems do not magically self-organize into excellence just because the foundation steps back. Sometimes you need a bit of structure, a bit of cash, and yes, a bit of boring adult supervision.

And while less ETH selling can reduce market pressure, it should not be overstated as some miracle price catalyst. Treasury sales are one factor among many. The bigger issue is whether Ethereum can keep building infrastructure that is genuinely harder to censor, harder to exploit, and easier to verify without collapsing into complexity soup.

That’s the real tension in Vitalik’s vision: Ethereum has to stay useful without becoming centralized, and it has to become more secure without becoming unusably complicated. The easy path is to chase throughput and call it progress. The hard path is to optimize for the CROPS dimensions and accept that real decentralization is messy, expensive, and sometimes slow.

Words are good. Code is better.

“The EF is choosing to use its remaining resources for longevity over breadth.”

“Ethereum must be ‘impressive.’”

“Intermediary minimization.”

What is Vitalik’s vision for the Ethereum Foundation?

A smaller, more opinionated EF focused on longevity, core protocol work, privacy, security, and decentralization rather than broad ecosystem sprawl.

Why does Vitalik want the EF to shrink in scope?

Because he believes the foundation should not become the center of Ethereum. Its resources are better spent on work that is critical to the network and unlikely to be done elsewhere.

How much ETH does the Ethereum Foundation hold?

About 0.16% of total ETH supply, which is tiny compared with many other blockchain foundations.

What does CROPS mean?

Censorship-resistant, open, private, and secure.

Is Ethereum supposed to compete on TPS alone?

No. Vitalik argues that raw speed and low latency are shallow metrics if they come at the expense of decentralization, privacy, and security.

What is “provably bug-free Ethereum”?

A long-term goal of using AI-assisted formal verification to mathematically prove critical code is correct and reduce the risk of major bugs.

What is intermediary minimization?

A design goal that reduces reliance on third parties such as relays, servers, or other middlemen for transaction inclusion and wallet interaction.

Why does intermediary minimization matter?

Because intermediaries are where censorship, surveillance, and hidden control often creep in. Fewer intermediaries means stronger self-custody and better privacy.

What’s the biggest risk in this vision?

Formal verification at scale is hard, Ethereum’s complexity can still bite, and a smaller EF may leave support gaps if the rest of the ecosystem does not step up.

Does Vitalik think Ethereum should be “good enough”?

No. He wants Ethereum to be exceptional in the areas that define a serious decentralized base layer: censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security.