Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum Foundation will choose “longevity over breadth”, reduce ETH sales and narrow its focus to CROPS: censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy and security.
In a lengthy post on X, Buterin stated that the Ethereum Foundation holds about 0.16% of all ETH, well below the 10% to 50% he said it is common for the core foundations of other blockchains to hold.
Nearly 90% of his own net worth sits in ETH, while the remaining roughly $40 million in onchain fiat is already earmarked for open source biotech, software and hardware initiatives, Buterin added.
His influence within the EC will continue to decline as the board expands, consistent with his desire to be less influential there. However, he also stood by his words, saying: “This is just my own point of view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members don’t have.”
He framed the EC as “one node, with a defined purpose, together with other nodes,” not the center of Ethereum. Regarding throughput, Buterin said it would be a mistake for Ethereum to maximize it.
“Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and just one tiny epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a path to mediocrity, and if we try that, we will lose.”
Buterin instead pointed to Ethereum striving to be “profoundly impressive” in what he called the “CROPS dimension.” It involves making Ethereum provably error-free, which is claimed to be within reach given AI-powered verification.
The post landed after at least 8 senior EC contributors left or announced departures in 2026, 5 in May alone, reigniting debate about the fund’s direction.
The crypto community is responding
Prominent Ethereum voices supported Buterin.
Anthony Sassano, an independent Ethereum educator, angel investor and advisor, responded directly to the post and thanked Buterin. A separate quote tweet from Sassano focused on Buterin’s framing of ETH as the most valuable “product” of the Ethereum blockchain.
Author and early Ethereum advisor William Mougayar quoted the post: “Basically Ethereum just got its own Clarity Act over the weekend. It was a crystal clear message and the way forward is super clear. Ethereum is untouchable.”
Developer Suhail Kakar also responded directly, calling the post “bullish”. “A foundation that voluntarily shrinks its own power is the rarest thing in crypto. Truly the most cypherpunk thing I’ve read in a long time.”
Meanwhile, core developers chose the CROPS framework.
Go-Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden responded that security was under-discussed: “When people talk about CROPS, they seem to focus on the CR, OS and Privacy part. The security part is the most important in my opinion! Without a secure L1, none of this makes any sense, and we’ve taken Ethereum’s base layer security for granted now.”
Consensus team developer Potuz followed up on the thread, noting that “one of Ethereum’s biggest selling points is zero downtime since creation,” and that record made each fork a concentrated risk.
Laura Shin, host of Unchained, asked the question about leadership that the post left open: “What is the process for adding new members to the board?” Buterin did not respond publicly at the time of writing. DeFiPrime founder Nick Sawinyh noted that EF now sounded “less like a cathedral and more like a protocol commons operator.”
Others criticized the cryptocurrency’s performance. Ether has fallen almost 60% against bitcoin over the past five years, to 0.02738 BTC. During that period, bitcoin’s price nearly doubled from $35,600 to $77,500 at the time of writing.
Read more: Ethereum’s identity crisis deepens after high-profile ‘brain drain’ frustrates community
