Vitalik Buterin Says Ethereum Foundation Will Be a “Smaller Ship” That Sells Less ETH

Vitalik addressed the EF exodus Sunday, defending the foundation’s narrower focus on CROPS values and disclosing that 90% of his net worth sits in ETH.

Vitalik Buterin published a long X post Sunday addressing months of turbulence at the Ethereum Foundation, defending the nonprofit’s ongoing restructuring and outlining what he sees as its long-term direction. Buterin framed the post as his personal view rather than an official board statement.

“The EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth,” Buterin wrote. “Yes, this means we sell less ETH.” The foundation will focus only on activities critical to Ethereum’s censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security, the CROPS framework codified in the EF’s mandate published in March. Interim co-executive director Bastian Aue, who took over from Tomasz Stańczak in February, is executing the transition. Buterin said his own influence within the organization will continue to shrink, “which is honestly what I want.”

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The post lands amid the deepest talent drain in the foundation’s history with at least nine senior contributors departing in 2026, including Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, Carl Beek, Julian Ma, and Trent Van Epps.

The frustration crystallized Thursday when former EF researcher Dankrad Feist proposed a new $1 billion organization to “save Ethereum” with a mandate explicitly tied to ETH’s price.

ETH has fallen roughly 57% from near $5,000 last summer to around $2,100, and has been hugging the $2,000 level closely, with four failed recovery attempts to retest or overcome the $5,000 psychological level.

“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,” he wrote, pushing back on the speed-as-strategy thesis.

The EF instead will pursue what he called the CROPS dimension of impressiveness: provably bug-free Ethereum via AI-assisted formal verification, available chain consensus combining BFT properties with bitcoin-style synchrony assumptions, and intermediary minimization through FOCIL, EIP-8141, and the Kohaku privacy toolkit.

On the question of ETH the asset, which Buterin called Ethereum’s “most high-value ‘product,’ financially speaking,” he made an unusual personal disclosure: “Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH.” The remainder, he said, is roughly $40 million in onchain fiat, “every dollar” of which is already allocated to open-source biotech, software, or hardware initiatives. He said supporting ETH the asset requires “other heroes” outside the EF to step in, some of whom hold more ETH than the foundation does.

The post acknowledged that the foundation holds only 0.16% of all ETH, far below the 10% to 50% common at other blockchain foundations. The EF, Buterin wrote, was designed to fulfill a limited scope completed in 2022, “not designed to be an eternal steward.” The new long-term form is expected to stabilize over the next few months.