Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has addressed months of growing community criticism and organizational turbulence by outlining a major strategic shift for the Ethereum Foundation (EF). In a detailed personal update published on X, Buterin revealed that the nonprofit is actively restructuring into a leaner, more tightly focused entity.
Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.
First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 24, 2026
Rather than continuing to act as the centralized coordinator for the entire ecosystem, the foundation will deliberately downsize, scale back its asset sales, and hand over broader ecosystem responsibilities to independent third-party organizations.
‘Smaller Ship’ Committed to Longevity
Buterin framed the transition as a conscious choice of longevity over breadth. To alleviate long-standing community anxiety surrounding market pressure and financial neutrality, Buterin explicitly pledged that the foundation will significantly reduce its routine sales of ETH.
According to Buterin, the EF’s financial dominance has been historically overstated. The foundation currently holds roughly 0.16% of the circulating ETH supply, which is a massive contrast to other prominent layer-1 blockchain foundations that often retain 10% to 50% of their native token supply. Furthermore, Buterin noted that the EF’s original foundational mandate, established ahead of the network’s 2014 crowdsale to deliver early roadmap milestones, was officially completed in 2022.
Going forward, the EF will operate as “one node among many” rather than the center of the network. Buterin also emphasized that his personal influence within the organization will continue to diminish, noting that decentralized leadership is precisely what he wants for the long-term health of the network.
Prioritizing ‘CROPS’ Over Pure Throughput
On the technical front, Buterin rejected the notion that Ethereum should abandon its core values to compete solely on transaction metrics. He argued that matching rival networks on extreme performance metrics like 250-millisecond latency or 1 million transactions per second (TPS) at the expense of decentralization would backfire. “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 warned.
Instead, the downsized foundation will strictly fund projects that uphold Ethereum’s core “CROPS” architecture (censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security).
To achieve this, the EF will prioritize three main pillars: pioneering AI-assisted formal verification to build a “provably bug-free” execution environment; reinforcing Ethereum’s unique, highly resilient available chain consensus; and aggressive intermediary minimization through active upgrades like FOCIL and EIP-7701.
Navigating an Unprecedented Talent Drain
This strategic pivot coincides with the most significant talent drain in the foundation’s history. At least eight senior contributors have exited the EF so far in 2026, with five high-profile departures occurring in May alone, including researchers like Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, and former co-Executive Director Tomasz Stanczak.
While critics view the exodus as a sign of internal fragmentation, Buterin and independent analysts argue that this diaspora is a necessary evolution. As the EF narrows its scope, veteran developers are migrating into the broader private sector to launch capital-aligned advocacy groups and secondary scaling ecosystems, effectively shielding the core network from centralized points of failure.
