In the future, the Ethereum Foundation will “strategically intervene and consciously withdraw.”
Written by: Ethereum Foundation
Compiled by: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
Editor’s note: The Ethereum Foundation (EF) published three articles last night. The three articles are: “The Vision of the Ethereum Foundation,” written by Vitalik Buterin himself and EF Chair Aya Miyaguchi; “The Next Chapter of the Ethereum Foundation,” written by the two newly appointed executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak; and “The Governance and Board Structure of the Ethereum Foundation,” released by the board of the Ethereum Foundation.
The three articles are not very long, but they reiterate the vision and work direction of the EF from a higher level, emphasizing EF’s plans for decentralization in certain areas, which can be seen as a landmark node on EF’s path of self-reform.
The following is the full text of three articles, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily.
“The Vision of the Ethereum Foundation” — Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi
The power of Ethereum lies in its decentralized characteristics— not only on a technical level but also in social and structural dimensions. This article outlines the vision, role, and focus of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) as one of the guardians of the ecosystem. At the onset of a new management team, we reaffirm the vision, principles, and values that we have always upheld. These focal points are not rigid plans but have been reflected in the strategies articulated by the two co-executive directors of EF. By clarifying our methods and priorities, we aim to not only elucidate our direction of effort but also indicate our intention to deliberately withdraw from certain areas— to ensure that the ecosystem can continue to thrive with the participation of all.
Vision
Guarding the “Infinite Garden” — an ecosystem composed of projects, communities, and infrastructure built around Ethereum, enabling it to maintain resilience in a changing environment. We view Ethereum as a world computer shared by humanity, an open and permissionless platform that has brought stability, freedom, and technological empowerment to millions of people worldwide. We cherish the real value that Ethereum is creating.
Therefore, we use the metaphor of “infinite garden” to describe the Ethereum ecosystem: a space that is ever-growing and continuously evolving, where builders, dreamers, and guardians from around the world sow creativity, support each other, and collaboratively create tools that will reshape the foundations of civilization in finance, identity, and more for decades to come.
Role positioning
The greatest advantage of Ethereum lies in its unparalleled ecosystem. Beyond the EF, numerous teams are driving the continuous expansion of boundaries through technological innovation, educational activities, and public goods funding. The mission of the EF is to strengthen this advantage and safeguard core values: we fill gaps, correct imbalances, and support key initiatives, always ensuring that no single entity (including the EF) can dominate the evolution of Ethereum. We strategically intervene, consciously withdraw, and continuously adjust our focus as Ethereum matures and the environment evolves.
Through “purposeful subtraction,” we empower ecosystem members to take on primary responsibility. Our role today is dual:
- We do what no one can do today;
- We will also help others do what only we can do tomorrow.
This means focusing on high-leverage areas, where EF’s unique position allows us to support the ecosystem in ways that are difficult for other organizations to reach, while building capacity and infrastructure for others to ultimately take the lead. Here are some practical examples:
We are doing what no one can do today:
- Fund and maintain critical Ethereum infrastructure, such as client diversity.
- Coordinate core protocol upgrades (e.g., Merge, Dencun), where neutral governance is crucial in these key initiatives – including projects to be completed within the next 12 months and long-term efforts that define Ethereum’s role for the next decade.
- Support zero-knowledge research and open-source tools to promote cutting-edge privacy protection technology.
- Hold ecosystem-wide gatherings (such as Devcon) to bring together diverse contributors from around the world.
- Operate ethereum.org as a neutral public knowledge hub for new users and builders.
We are also helping others grow to take on the roles we once had:
- By funding early public goods projects until they can become self-sustaining or funded by the community.
- Open source educational content, developer tools, and research for others to continue development.
- Help new coordination mechanisms emerge and guide them towards independent management (e.g., MACI pilot, protocol guilds, retrospective public goods funding).
- Support geographical decentralization and local leadership through the following ways: Next Billion Scholarship, empowering local builders in underserved areas; grassroots community funding to strengthen the local Ethereum ecosystem; Devcon Path, attracting and growing regional communities before Devcon; Devcon Scholar Program, providing support and opportunities for participants from underrepresented communities.
Working Method
Adaptive Evolution: We evolve alongside the ecosystem, continuously reassessing our role and impact. Our structure and initiatives adapt to the ever-changing demands of Ethereum while upholding our core principles.
Thoughtful Complexity: We embrace the complexity required for decentralized systems while pursuing elegant solutions. Our goal is not to simplify for the sake of simplicity, but to achieve balance through thoughtful design.
Community Empowerment: We support and encourage community-led initiatives, helping to create conditions that allow independent teams to succeed without relying on the foundation.
Core Principles
Long-termism: Focus on the long-term success of Ethereum rather than short-term gains, assess the sustainability and multi-generational impact of each decision, and recognize that enduring resilience requires continuous learning, adaptation, and evolution.
Value Protection: Defending the core values of Ethereum - censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security, while empowering ecological autonomous development. Making these qualities the cornerstone of lasting innovation.
Purposeful subtraction, rather than accumulating power, strengthens resilience by:
- Maintain diversity in methods, solutions, and teams.
- Facilitate widespread participation.
- Promote collaboration.
- Reduce centralization.
Strengthening resilience does not mean doing less; it often requires adding new mechanisms or complexity — but always with the goal of creating an antifragile ecosystem that broadly distributes power and ownership.
Future Goals
At this critical moment and in the coming years, our direction is shaped by a clear vision. The team is deeply engaged, and existing projects are driving the ongoing evolution of Ethereum. Future work is not aimed at reaching certain benchmarks but rather focusing our energy on the most important matters. To guide our collective attention, we have outlined some areas of impact - specific outcomes that any participant in the Ethereum ecosystem can contribute to.
These goals are not set in stone; they will evolve continuously with the needs of the ecosystem and the surrounding world.
The role of EF is to identify high-leverage gaps - those areas where it can effectively fill the void - and concentrate its efforts to create the greatest impact.
Goal 1: Maximize the user base benefiting from the underlying value of Ethereum
Meaningful scenarios include:
- Internet-native finance: In regions where fiat currency infrastructure is limited or may become unreliable in the future, using tokenized assets / DeFi for payments, savings, and wealth accumulation;
- Internet-native organizations: Participate in DAOs with programmable incentive structures to achieve collaboration, decision-making, and capital formation beyond traditional methods;
- Decentralized Social: Use an Ethereum-based social platform where content is stored on a decentralized network, allowing users to switch clients without losing their social graph;
- Decentralized AI: Collective training of AI models with verifiable security guarantees based on Ethereum, creating an economic framework for AI agents to coordinate with humans (e.g., micro prediction markets);
- Enterprise Applications: Institutional applications using Ethereum on the backend can still provide auditability, privacy, interoperability, and a “lifeboat” mechanism even when interacting through a non-wallet interface.
Non-target scenarios include:
- Only supports custodial solutions for transfers between custodial wallets;
- Institutional applications that only put event hashes on the blockchain without providing additional security attributes.
Goal 2: Maximize the resilience of Ethereum technology and social infrastructure.
Resilience is reflected as:
- Ecological autonomy: does not rely on EF or any single organization;
- Value consistency: Adhering to values even in the face of strong temptation;
- Team Diversity: A strong and diverse independent development team;
- Network robustness: Maintain activity, resistance to censorship, and security during severe impacts on infrastructure;
- Decentralization: Eliminate single points of control or failure;
- Proactive Risk Management: Capable of identifying and mitigating centralized failure points that arise over time.
Non-resilient performance:
- Although there are many teams in education, client development, or event organization, they rely entirely on EF for funding;
- The bottleneck formed by high toughness in some areas and low toughness in other areas (such as wallets, ZK provers, social single points of failure);
- Covering the surface diversity of common vulnerabilities (e.g., 20 clients sharing the same codebase, activities in 100 countries operated by the same central institution).
As we pursue these goals, we always maintain a long-term perspective - viewing Ethereum not just as a technology, but as a living ecosystem with the potential to serve humanity for generations.
We envision a future where Ethereum serves as a resilient, neutral global coordination platform. Decentralization must be maintained in both development and governance, and innovation will thrive at every layer of the protocol, allowing communities around the world to build and sustain their adaptive solutions. We believe that the technological and social resilience of the network will continue to strengthen, and the foundation will do its utmost to ensure our collective success.
“The Next Chapter of the Ethereum Foundation” - Hsiao-Wei Wang, Tomasz Stańczak
Hello! This article is co-authored by Hsiao-Wei and Tomasz. We have been the co-executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) for nearly a month. The honeymoon period is over, and it’s time to take action.
The moment where transformation and opportunities coexist
Ethereum has always been a journey: this ever-evolving ecosystem is driven by a group of builders who firmly believe in an open and decentralized world. Although EF has been established for ten years, we have always maintained the courage for self-renewal.
This year, EF adopted a new leadership model with dual executive directors. This design brings multiple and complementary perspectives and strengthens our ability to tackle complex challenges. We will embrace the opportunities and challenges of the future with a strong commitment to Ethereum’s core values, guided by a guardian spirit, coordination skills, and a long-term vision.
It is important to emphasize that EF is not a two-headed horse going its own way. Our partnership is built on mutual respect, trust, and shared values. We collaborate closely, constructively challenge each other, and ultimately move forward as a unified team with a common goal.
Working Principles and Key Areas
Looking ahead, we will work around two main pillars: guiding principles (core values) and goals (pursuit of impact and resilience). Excellent technology is the foundation of all our work and the fundamental guarantee for achieving our mission.
As executive directors, our responsibility is to implement the vision of EF in a rapidly changing world. This includes strategic planning, ecological guardianship, team leadership, and operational oversight — all serving the long-term success of Ethereum.
The core values we advocate:
- Censorship Resistance: Ensures that Ethereum is always an open network where anyone, anywhere can trade and build without external control.
- Open Source Innovation: Promote collaborative transparency and community-driven development through the open sharing of knowledge tools.
- Privacy Protection: Achieving privacy interactions without sacrificing security to uphold personal freedom and autonomy in the digital age.
- Security: Maintain the trust, robustness, and resilience of the entire Ethereum ecosystem through secure design and ongoing research.
These values guide our technology choices, ecosystem support, and the long-term vision of making Ethereum a public good.
While adhering to these values, we have set our main direction for the next 12 months:
- Expand the Ethereum mainnet;
- Expand Blob transactions;
- Enhance user experience (including L2 interoperability and application layer).
This means that it is necessary to improve the interoperability and coordination mechanisms between the mainnet and L2, user experience, and developer experience. More opportunities should be given to showcase application layers and L2 at the Devcon conference, and their voices should be amplified through communication channels.
In addition, we recognize the need to accelerate the journey of developers, entrepreneurs, and institutions in adopting Ethereum. EF has the knowledge reservoir and leaders capable of guiding, leading, attracting, and nurturing talent.
Tomasz’s supplement
Ethereum will embark on a new chapter. The core values remain unchanged — open source, anti-censorship, privacy, and security, but the EF is changing — it will become an organization that communicates more openly and is willing to engage in difficult conversations without delay.
We will focus on execution speed, accountability, clear objectives, and measurable indicators. Attention to the success of the Ethereum mainnet protocol — it will continue to serve as a globally neutral network, a protocol that is trustworthy due to its “trustless” nature. We care about the success of the mainnet as well as the prosperity of the entire ecosystem: L2, which brings large-scale adoption, creates multiple values for users, while the mainnet serves as a solid yet flexible cornerstone behind all transactions and coordination mechanisms. We look forward to this journey — experiencing the most inspiring technological and social transformations, walking alongside visionaries and pragmatic builders.
The next year will be a year of expansion: expanding the mainnet (L1), successfully expanding L2 by providing optimal architecture support, ensuring network security, and winning user trust. We are committed to achieving a seamless chain ecosystem through excellent engineering and cutting-edge research, providing the best user experience, design, and interoperability.
Hsiao-Wei’s supplement
In the coming months, my focus will be on strengthening EF operations to support ecological growth. A flexible and efficient foundation can better serve Ethereum’s long-term mission.
While focusing on the core, one of our goals is to provide better support for the application layer. By improving the developer experience, clarifying standards, strengthening the ecosystem, and facilitating the implementation of ideas, we assist builders and users.
We are improving the planning, prioritization, and coordination mechanisms within EF and across the ecosystem to ensure that our work aligns with community needs and the Ethereum cypherpunk spirit. However, the transformation of EF is just the beginning; the real power comes from the energy and creativity of the global Ethereum ecosystem.
Build the future together
Ethereum is not a monolith; it is a living network made up of community members, builders, researchers, artists, educators, and dreamers. It is global, diverse, and proud of its decentralization. We are continually inspired by the creativity and resilience of the ecosystem. The foundation will continue to show up where it is most needed, but will also make space as the ecosystem thrives on its own. This is a community-led future.
The road ahead is full of possibilities. Ethereum has changed the boundaries of imagination in technology, finance, governance, and more. Sincere thanks to all builders, educators, researchers, experimenters, and future visionaries. What we are building together is a great cause that transcends any team, project, or generation. It is an honor to walk alongside you, and I look forward to the new chapter that is about to unfold.
“Management and Board Structure of the Ethereum Foundation” - Board of Directors of the Ethereum Foundation
The recent appointment of two co-executive directors and a chairperson by the Ethereum Foundation is an important part of its organizational restructuring plan. This new governance structure aims to ensure the realization of the foundation’s vision, balanced strategy execution, clear technological direction, and sustainable ecosystem development. This article will clarify the specific structure of the management team and the board of directors.
New Management (Strategy and Operations Execution)
The co-executive directors will lead and execute work together with other management team members. In the future, you will stay informed about the progress of the management team in various plans, decisions, and new changes through regular updates:
Joint Executive Director:
- Hsiao-Wei Wang；
- Tomasz K. Stańczak.
Core management team members and their roles:
- Bastian Aue: Organizational Strategy, Talent Acquisition and Training, Collaborative Guardian Program;
- Josh Stark: Project execution, communication and marketing, collaborative guardian program.
Board of Directors (Supervision and Vision Guidance)
The board of the Ethereum Foundation acts as a “security committee” that protects the core values of the organization while ensuring that the Foundation operates in compliance as a Swiss entity. The board is responsible for setting the vision, overseeing whether the strategic decisions of the management align with the Foundation’s values, and exercising the authority to appoint and dismiss executive directors. The current board members include:
- Vitalik Buterin (Founder): Continuously providing technical and intellectual guidance for the broader Ethereum ecosystem;
- Aya Miyaguchi (Chairperson): Develop the foundation’s vision in collaboration with other board members and manage key external relationships;
- Patrick Storchenegger (Swiss legal advisor): Swiss representative responsible for legal compliance matters;
- Hsiao-Wei Wang (Co-Executive Director): Acts as a bridge between the board of directors and the executive management.
The board has communicated its vision, guiding principles, and objectives for the coming years to the management team. We expect to gradually enhance the functions of the board to better fulfill its mission.
Architectural Design Considerations
The appointment of Tomasz and Hsiao-Wei Wang as joint executive directors may not be a traditional decision, but in the current critical development stage of both the Ethereum ecosystem and the foundation, this complementary leadership structure holds special value.
Tomasz, while retaining other corporate positions (associated with Nethermind and venture capital firms), will drive the foundation to implement comprehensive and strong reforms based on a deep understanding of community needs and technological trends. The board and Tomasz have reached a consensus that his term as co-executive director is expected to be two years — which is precisely a critical window period for Ethereum to face significant opportunities, during which he will fully leverage his proven strategic execution capabilities and industry experience.
Hsiao-Wei Wang holds dual roles as a board member and an executive director. His research background and thorough understanding of the foundation’s historical context enable him to accurately grasp organizational needs and effectively bridge the gap between board decisions and executive management.
