Vitalik Reveals: Ethereum Foundation Won’t Act as a “Parent”—ETH Will Grow Up on Its Own
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Vitalik Reveals: Ethereum Foundation Won’t Act as a “Parent”—ETH Will Grow Up on Its Own
In an era where everyone surrenders to short cycles, long cycles themselves are the scarcest resource.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: TechFlow
In the early hours of May 25, Vitalik published a lengthy post on X.
The tone is restrained—not a visionary manifesto, but rather a memo addressed internally to the Ethereum Foundation (EF), to the broader community, and even to himself.
The preceding five months had been the most turbulent period in EF’s history. By 2026, at least eight senior contributors had already left—or announced their departure—from EF; five departed in May alone. Co-Executive Director Tomasz Stanczak stepped down, and protocol researcher Alex Stokes also exited. Community criticism, which began intensifying at the start of the year, has not let up: What exactly *is* the Foundation doing? Why does it preach decentralization, privacy, and censorship resistance while acting increasingly like a Silicon Valley company obsessed with execution efficiency?
Vitalik’s response was distinctive: he used an entire long-form essay to accomplish something profoundly underappreciated—downgrading the Ethereum Foundation’s role from “central bank of the Ethereum ecosystem” to “constitutional court of Ethereum values.”
What did he actually say?
Stripping away diplomatic language, Vitalik made five concrete points.
First, EF is no longer Ethereum’s center—it is merely one node among many. He deliberately disclosed the Foundation’s ETH holdings: approximately 0.16% of all ETH in circulation. By contrast, central foundations of other blockchains typically hold 10%–50% of their native tokens. This figure reflects a qualitative judgment: EF no longer possesses the financial firepower to unilaterally steer the ecosystem. It must accept its status as just one node—not the command-and-control center.
Second, EF’s mission has been sharply narrowed. Going forward, it will focus exclusively on three areas: censorship resistance, privacy, and open infrastructure—and only on those aspects that “nobody else would do if EF didn’t.” All other tasks—including market capitalization management for ETH, ecosystem expansion, and commercial partnerships—will be outsourced to external organizations. Vitalik added a pointed remark: certain “necessary” functions supporting ETH as an asset fall outside EF’s scope—and must instead be shouldered by “other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than EF itself).”
A light but precise punch—whose target insiders instantly recognized.
Third, EF firmly rejects the “high-TPS path.” The sharpest sentence in the entire piece reads: “Going as fast and scalable as possible—while preserving only an epsilon (a mathematical symbol meaning ‘infinitesimally small’) more decentralization than others—is a path to mediocrity. If we take it, we lose.” He named his opponents directly: “Ethereum cannot rely on social consensus and hard forks to save itself—if 34% of nodes go offline and the network collapses, that’s acceptable for Hyperledger, BNB Chain, Solana, or Tempo—but unacceptable for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Zcash.”
Fourth, on the technical front, he unveiled an ambitious new goal: using AI-assisted formal verification to render Ethereum “provably bug-free” within months. Six months ago, he himself considered this impossible; now he says it’s within reach.
Fifth, he is personally stepping back. Ninety percent of his net worth is held in ETH; the remaining ~$40 million in on-chain stablecoins has been pledged to open-source biotech, software, and hardware projects. With EF’s board expanding, his own influence will “continue declining—precisely what I want.”
From Central Bank to Constitutional Court
For the past decade, EF has effectively functioned as Ethereum’s “central bank”: holding large ETH reserves, setting research priorities, incubating critical projects, coordinating upgrade timelines, and serving as the ecosystem’s public brand ambassador. Its influence stemmed from its “presence”—as long as it held substantial ETH, employed top-tier researchers, and had Vitalik himself at the helm, it naturally remained the gravitational center.
But the side effects of this “central bank model” have erupted over the past two years.
Last year, a leaked letter from Geth core developer Péter Szilágyi laid the tensions bare: “Ethereum may be decentralized, but Vitalik holds absolute, indirect control over it.”
Szilágyi’s critique was biting—centered on Buterin’s “small ruling elite of 5–10 people” steering the network’s direction. Harsh as it sounded, it struck a real nerve: a network that loudly champions decentralization remains, at the operational level, highly dependent on one person’s attention allocation.
Compounded by the wave of researcher departures since May, ETH’s persistent underperformance against BTC, and community frustration over the Foundation’s “have-it-all” posture, the “central bank model” has now hit diminishing returns.
Vitalik’s new design effectively transforms EF from “central bank” into “constitutional court”:
- It no longer holds large reserve assets: shifting from central-bank balance-sheet logic to a model that fundamentally avoids deploying financial tools;
- It abandons ecosystem development and commercial expansion: offloading “industrial policy” functions entirely;
- It safeguards only a few non-negotiable core principles: censorship resistance, privacy, and anti-centralization;
- It intervenes only at pivotal moments—for example, vetoing paths that sacrifice decentralization for TPS;
- Its leadership’s personal imprint continues to fade: board expansion, Vitalik’s retreat.
A constitutional court’s power isn’t measured by how much it governs—but by whether it remains indispensable on the few most critical issues. What Vitalik seeks is precisely this “small yet irreplaceable” stature.
Why is this inevitable?
Zoom out slightly, and Vitalik’s act of “self-demotion” finds historical precedent.
The Linux Foundation never defined what the Linux ecosystem should look like—it only maintains the kernel. The Apache Software Foundation never charted the web’s evolution—it only safeguards protocol neutrality. The W3C doesn’t build browsers—it only sets standards. All truly enduring open-source governance bodies—those surviving over 20 years—converge inevitably on the “gatekeeper” role, distancing themselves decisively from the “builder” role.
Organizations that fail to converge face two outcomes.
One is self-corruption. Vitalik cites Google as a cautionary counterexample—a comparison striking in its sharpness. He notes Google launched with strong idealistic foundations but gradually drifted from its original mission under pressure from mainstream enterprises. “If I could press a button in 2008 to make Google two standard deviations more principled,” he writes, “I’d press it immediately.” The other outcome is being voted out by the ecosystem itself.
EF reaching this inflection point was always inevitable. The Bitcoin Foundation disbanded in 2015; Satoshi Nakamoto vanished a decade ago. Bitcoin endures today precisely because there is no central entity to attack, corrupt, or acquire. What Vitalik is doing now is giving Ethereum that same lesson—albeit two years later than ideal.
How will markets price this?
In my view, this long post is not bullish for ETH’s short-term price.
The reasoning is simple. “The Foundation sells less ETH” sounds like reduced sell-side pressure—but what markets truly care about is another question: Who bears responsibility for ETH as an asset? For years, EF may not have been an efficient market-cap manager, but it at least served as a “visible accountability anchor.” Now Vitalik declares: “This responsibility falls outside EF’s mandate—and rests instead with ‘other heroes holding more ETH.’”
In plain terms: ETH has officially entered the “parentless era.”
Whether this is bullish or bearish depends entirely on whether those “other heroes” actually emerge, when they appear, and whether they can coordinate effectively. In the short term, markets cannot price uncertainty—they can only price ambiguity. So don’t be surprised if you’ve seen little movement in the ETH/BTC ratio recently.
Yet over a three-year horizon, this direction is correct. An asset that stands on its own merits—needing no Foundation endorsement, no founder tweets—deserves the label “digital commodity” or “internet-native currency.” ETH is being forcibly squeezed from “project token” into “protocol asset.” That process is painful—but necessary.
Vitalik’s repeatedly emphasized technical goals—usable consensus, provably bug-free code, minimal intermediaries—can be understood as the foundational attributes of a true “protocol asset.” A system that continues producing blocks even when 34% of nodes go offline, whose code can be mathematically proven free of vulnerabilities, and through which users can connect directly to the mainnet without any third-party intermediaries—that system qualifies as next-generation “neutral infrastructure.”
Over the past three years, crypto has been dominated by the “narrative industry”: meme coins, political concept coins, AI agents, RWAs, stablecoin legislation—wave after wave, each brief, loud, and lucrative. Against that backdrop, Ethereum’s refusal to chase fads and insistence on building infrastructure sounds almost clumsy.
That very clumsiness is precisely what Vitalik recalibrates throughout this essay. He sees Solana’s TPS numbers, knows BNB Chain’s cash flows, and understands Hyperliquid’s valuation. Yet he has settled on one conviction: In an era where everyone surrenders to short cycles, long cycles themselves are the scarcest resource.
This is a market judgment—not a moral high ground.
Short-cycle narratives yield extremely high returns—but with half-lives measured in weeks. Long-cycle construction yields seemingly low returns, with compounding effects only materializing a decade later. Bitcoin took ten years for “digital gold” to evolve from a joke into a Wall Street asset-allocation option. If Ethereum can spend the next decade transforming “neutral world computer” from a geeky ideal into infrastructural common sense, then every ounce of price pressure, every community doubt, and every researcher departure it endures today will have been worth it.
The precondition for that “if” is clear: EF must first retreat from the ecosystem’s center to its periphery—and Vitalik must step back from leader to guardian.
That transition is already underway.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
深潮TechFlow
