Vitalik: Ethereum Foundation Is Shrinking Its Scope to Focus on Core Protocol Values

Vitalik Buterin has clarified the Ethereum Foundation's role in the broader ecosystem, describing it as one node among many rather than a central authority. Speaking publicly, he said the EF will become smaller, more long-term-oriented, and more opinionated — concentrating its limited resources on Ethereum's foundational priorities: censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security.

Notably, Buterin acknowledged that ETH is Ethereum's most financially valuable product, but drew a clear boundary around what the EF will and won't do. Supporting ETH as an asset, he said, falls partly outside the EF's scope and should be carried by other organizations within the ecosystem — a signal that the Foundation is deliberately stepping back from broad ecosystem-building in favor of protocol-level focus.