Vitalik Buterin has published a detailed defense of the Ethereum Foundation's direction, arriving weeks after at least eight senior researchers exited the nonprofit in 2026. The co-founder's post on X frames the departures as deliberate pruning rather than institutional failure.
The message lands as the EF faces its most concentrated personnel churn since launching. Carl Beekhuizen and Julian Ma announced resignations in May, joining Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, Trent Van Epps, Alex Stokes, and former co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak on the 2026 exit list. Critics have called it a brain drain. Buterin calls it subtraction by design.
Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 24, 2026
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…
A Smaller Ship by Choice
Buterin's post emphasizes that the Foundation holds only around 0.16% of all ETH, far below the 10-50% treasury positions typical of comparable blockchain foundations. That constraint informs the EF's strategic pivot: less breadth, more longevity. "The EF focuses specifically on those activities critical to the success of Ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise," he wrote.
The Foundation's March 2026 EF Mandate codified this philosophy around what it calls CROPS: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. Proposals that trade those properties for convenience now face higher scrutiny. Buterin's post doubles down on that filter, acknowledging that even respected contributors aligned with Ethereum's mission may end up outside the Foundation if their work can attract external capital.
That logic has not convinced skeptics. Community voices including Bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams have argued the EF needs an organization that "wants ETH the asset to win" and "executes hard." The Foundation, Adams wrote, "is not that, never will be."
The Technical Bet
Buterin's post pivots hard toward technical ambition. He argues Ethereum must become "deeply impressive" in the CROPS dimension rather than chasing raw throughput. Three priorities stand out:
Provably bug-free Ethereum. Buterin claims AI-assisted formal verification has made this goal tractable within the past six months. The Foundation intends to be a frontrunner.
Available chain consensus. Ethereum, he argues, is the only chain combining BFT-style safety under asynchrony with Bitcoin's synchrony-based 49% fault tolerance. "Literally no other chain has this or is planning for it," he wrote.
Intermediary minimization. Work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 aims to eliminate reliance on third-party servers for transaction inclusion, covering privacy protocols like Railgun and smart contract wallets.
The post name-drops Kohaku, a wallet framework the EF is building to pull users away from what Buterin calls "the dystopian status quo" where wallets leak data to third-party servers.
Institutional Transition
Aya Miyaguchi, who became EF president in 2025, is credited with executing much of the transition. Buterin described his own input as "largely on technical questions" and said the board is expanding while his influence shrinks. "Which is honestly what I want," he added.
The Foundation's upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade remains on track for mid-2026, with features like enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation. Some anticipated items, including FOCIL and native account abstraction, have slipped to a later release called Hegota.
Buterin closed by noting that nearly 90% of his personal net worth remains in ETH, with the remainder allocated to open-source biotech and software initiatives. The Foundation, he wrote, will be "a more opinionated" ship, "but a longer-lasting one."
Whether the market sees that as conviction or isolation will depend on what the remaining team ships next.
