Ethereum Foundation's "Three Pillars" Manifesto: From Core Vision to Decentralization Reform, Vitalik Reaffirms Mission

Original Title: The Ethereum Foundation's Vision, The Ethereum Foundation's Next Chapter, Ethereum Foundation's Management and Board Structure

Original Source: Ethereum Foundation

Translation: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

Editor's Note: Last night, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) released three articles. The three articles are: "The Ethereum Foundation's Vision" written by Vitalik Buterin himself and EF Chair Aya Miyaguchi; "The Ethereum Foundation's Next Chapter" written by the two newly appointed executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak; and the "Ethereum Foundation's Management and Board Structure" released by the Ethereum Foundation Board.

All three articles are not too long but restate EF's vision and work direction at a higher level, emphasizing EF's planned empowerment in certain areas, which may be seen as a landmark point in EF's self-reform path. Below is the full content of the three articles, translated by Odaily Planet Daily.

《The Ethereum Foundation's Vision》 — Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi

Ethereum's strength lies in its decentralized nature — not only technically but also socially and structurally. This article elaborates on the Ethereum Foundation's (EF) vision, role, and work focus as one of the ecosystem's guardians. At this moment when a new management team takes office, we reaffirm the vision, principles, and values we have always held. These focuses are not rigid plans but are already reflected in the strategies outlined by the two co-executive directors of EF. By clarifying our working methods and focus, we hope to both clarify the direction of effort and indicate a deliberate exit in certain areas to ensure the ecosystem's continued prosperity through everyone's participation.

Vision

Guarding the "Infinite Garden" - an ecosystem consisting of projects, communities, and infrastructure built around Ethereum, maintaining its resilience in a changing environment. We see Ethereum as a shared world computer for humanity, and this open, permissionless platform has brought stability, freedom, and technological empowerment through collaboration to millions of people worldwide. We cherish the real value Ethereum is creating.

Therefore, we use the metaphor of the "Infinite Garden" to describe the Ethereum ecosystem: a space of perpetual growth and continuous evolution, where global builders, dreamers, and guardians sow their creativity, support each other, and collaborate to build tools that will reshape the foundational elements of future decades such as finance and identity.

Role Positioning

Ethereum's greatest strength lies in its unparalleled ecosystem. Beyond the EF, numerous teams are continuously expanding the boundaries through technical innovation, educational activities, and public goods funding. The EF's mission is to strengthen this advantage and safeguard the core values: we fill gaps, correct imbalances, support key initiatives, and always ensure that no single entity, including the EF, can dominate Ethereum's evolution. We strategically intervene, consciously exit, and continually adjust our focus as Ethereum matures and the environment evolves.

Through "purposeful subtraction," we empower ecosystem members to take on primary responsibilities. Our role is dual-fold: we do what no one else can do today, and we help others do tomorrow what only we can do today. This means focusing on high-leverage areas where the EF's unique position allows us to support the ecosystem in ways other organizations find challenging, while also building capabilities and infrastructure so that others can eventually take the lead. Here are some practical examples:

We are doing what no one else can do today:  

· Funding and maintaining key Ethereum infrastructure, such as client diversity.

· Coordinating core protocol upgrades (e.g., Merge, Dencun), where neutral governance is crucial—in these critical initiatives, including projects to be completed in the next 12 months and the long-term efforts to define Ethereum's role over the next decade.

· Supporting zero-knowledge research and open-source tools, advancing the frontier of privacy-preserving technologies.

· Hosting ecosystem-wide gatherings (like Devcon) to bring together a globally diverse set of contributors.

· Operating ethereum.org as a neutral public knowledge hub for new users and builders.

We are also helping others grow to take on roles we once had:  

· Funding early-stage public goods projects until they can sustain themselves or are community-funded.

· Open-sourcing educational content, developer tools, and research for others to continue the development.

· Assisting new coordination mechanisms in emerging and guiding them towards independent management (e.g., MACI pilots, protocol DAOs, retrospective public goods funding).

Supporting Decentralization and Local Leadership through the following initiatives:

· Next Billion Scholarship, empowering local builders in underserved regions;

· Grassroots Community Grants, strengthening the local Ethereum ecosystem;

· Devcon Roadshows, pre-Devcon events to engage and uplift regional communities;

· Devcon Scholars Program, offering support and opportunities to participants from underrepresented communities.

Approach

· Adaptive Evolution: We coevolve with the ecosystem, continuously reassessing our roles and impact. Our structure and initiatives adapt to Ethereum's evolving needs while upholding our core principles.

· Deliberate Complexity: We embrace the complexity required by decentralized systems while seeking elegant solutions. Our goal is not simplification for simplification's sake but rather achieving balance through thoughtful design.

· Community Empowerment: We support and encourage community-led initiatives, helping create conditions for independent teams to succeed without relying on the foundation.

Core Principles

· Long-Termism: Focus on Ethereum's long-term success over short-term gains, evaluating the sustainability and multi-generational impact of every decision, and recognizing that enduring resilience requires continuous learning, adaptation, and evolution.

· Values Protection: Uphold Ethereum's core values—censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security—while empowering the ecosystem's self-sovereignty. These qualities serve as the cornerstone of sustained innovation.

Intentional subtraction to strengthen resilience, rather than accumulate power through the following:

· Maintaining diversity in approaches, solutions, and teams.

· Facilitating broad participation.

· Fostering collaboration.

· Reducing centralization.

Strengthening resilience does not mean doing less; it often requires adding new mechanisms or complexity—but always with the aim of creating an antifragile ecosystem, widely distributing power and ownership.

Future Goals

At this critical juncture and in the years ahead, our direction is shaped by a clear vision. The team is deeply engaged, with existing projects driving Ethereum's ongoing evolution. The future work is not about meeting certain benchmarks but rather focusing energy on the most critical areas. To guide our collective attention, we have outlined some impact areas—specific outcomes that any participant in the Ethereum ecosystem can contribute to.

These goals are not set in stone; they will evolve with the needs of the ecosystem and the wider world. The EF's role is to identify high-leverage gaps—areas where its intervention can uniquely make a difference—and focus its efforts to create the greatest impact.

Goal One: Maximize User Scale Benefiting from Ethereum's Foundational Value

Meaningful scenarios include:

· Internet-Native Finance: Using tokenized assets/DeFi for payments, savings, and wealth accumulation in regions where fiat infrastructure is limited or potentially unreliable in the future;

· Internet-Native Organizations: Engaging in DAOs with programmable incentive structures to facilitate collaboration, decision-making, and capital formation beyond traditional means;

· Decentralized Social: Leveraging Ethereum-based social platforms where content is stored on a decentralized network, allowing users to switch clients without losing their social graph;

· Decentralized AI: Collaboratively training AI models on Ethereum with verifiable security guarantees to create an economic framework where AI agents coordinate with humans (e.g., micro prediction markets);

· Enterprise Use: Utilizing Ethereum in backend institutional applications to offer auditability, privacy, interoperability, and "escape hatch" mechanisms even through non-wallet interfaces.

Non-goal scenarios include:

· Custodial schemes supporting only transfers between hosted wallets;

· Enterprise applications that only timestamp events on-chain without providing additional security properties.

Goal Two: Maximize the Resilience of Ethereum's Technical and Social Infrastructure

Resilience is demonstrated by:

· Ecosystem Sovereignty: Being independent of the EF or any single organization;

· Value Consistency: Adhering to core values despite strong incentives to deviate;

· Team Diversity: A robust and diverse set of independent development teams;

· Network Antifragility: Maintaining liveness, censorship resistance, and security when infrastructure faces severe stress;

· Decentralization: Removing single points of control or failure;

· Proactive Risk Management: Identifying and mitigating emerging centralization vulnerabilities over time.

Non-resilience is evident when:

· Educational, client development, or event organizing teams are plentiful but entirely reliant on EF for funding;

· Bottlenecks form due to discrepancies in resilience levels across different areas (e.g., wallets, ZK provers, social single points of failure).

· Surface diversity to mask shared vulnerabilities (e.g., 20 clients sharing the same codebase, 100-country activities operated by one central agency).

As we pursue these goals, we also maintain a long-term perspective, seeing Ethereum not just as a technology but as a dynamic ecosystem with the potential to serve generations of humankind.

We envision a future where Ethereum stands as a resilient, neutral global coordination platform. Decentralization must be maintained in development and governance, innovation will thrive at every layer of the protocol, and communities around the world will be able to build and sustain their adaptive solutions. We believe in the continual strengthening of the network's technological and social resilience, and the Foundation will do its part to ensure our collective success in line with its vision and capabilities.

“The Next Chapter of the Ethereum Foundation” — Hsiao-Wei Wang, Tomasz Stańczak

Hello! This article is co-written by Hsiao-Wei and Tomasz. We have been serving as Co-Executive Directors of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) for almost a month now. The honeymoon period is over, and it's time to act.

A Moment of Transition with Opportunities

Ethereum has always been a journey: this ever-evolving ecosystem is driven by a group of builders who believe in an open and decentralized world. While EF has been around for a decade, we have always had the courage to reinvent ourselves.

This year, EF has adopted a new leadership model with dual executive directors. This design brings diverse complementary perspectives and enhances our ability to tackle complex challenges. With a steadfast commitment to Ethereum's core values, guided by a stewardship mentality, coordination, and a long-term view, we are ready to embrace future opportunities and challenges.

It is important to emphasize that EF is not a case of two heads butting heads. Our partnership is built on mutual respect, trust, and shared values. We collaborate closely, challenge each other constructively, and ultimately move forward as a unified team with a common goal.

Working Principles and Key Focus Areas

Looking ahead, we will focus our work around two main pillars: guiding principles (core values) and goals (impact and resilience pursuits). Excellence in technology underpins all our work and is the fundamental guarantee of fulfilling our mission. As executive directors, our responsibility is to embody EF's vision in a rapidly changing world. This includes strategic planning, ecosystem stewardship, team leadership, and operational oversight — all aimed at the long-term success of Ethereum.

Core values we advocate:

· Anti-censorship: Ensure that Ethereum remains an open network, where anyone, anywhere can transact and build without barriers, free from external control.

· Open-source innovation: Foster collaborative transparency and community-driven development through the open sharing of knowledge tools.

· Privacy protection: Achieve private interactions without compromising security, upholding individual freedom and sovereignty in the digital age.

· Security: Maintain the trustworthiness, robustness, and resilience of the entire Ethereum ecosystem through secure design and ongoing research.

These values guide our technical choices, ecosystem support, and the long-term vision of Ethereum as a public good.

While upholding these values, we have set the following key directions for the next 12 months:

· Ethereum mainnet scalability;

· Blob transaction scalability;

· Enhancing user experience (including L2 interoperability and application layer).

This entails improving mainnet-L2 interoperability and coordination mechanisms, user experience, developer experience, providing more visibility to the application layer and L2 at the Devcon conference, and amplifying their voices through communication channels. Additionally, we recognize the need to accelerate the Ethereum adoption journey for developers, entrepreneurs, and institutions. EF possesses a knowledge base and leadership that can guide, lead, attract, and nurture talent.

Tomasz's Addendum

Ethereum is embarking on a new chapter. The core values remain unchanged - open-source, anti-censorship, privacy, and security, but the EF is evolving - becoming a more open communicating organization, willing to engage in difficult conversations without delay.

We will focus on execution speed, accountability, clear goals, and measurable metrics. Emphasis will be placed on the success of the Ethereum mainnet protocol - it will continue to serve as a globally neutral network, a protocol worthy of trust due to its "trustlessness." We care about the success of the mainnet and the prosperity of the entire ecosystem: L2 solutions bringing multi-faceted value to users, with the mainnet serving as a stable and flexible cornerstone behind all transactions and coordination mechanisms. We look forward to this journey - experiencing the most inspiring technological and societal transformation, alongside visionaries and pragmatic builders.

The coming year is the year of scalability: scaling the mainnet (L1) to support the successful scaling of L2, ensuring network security, and gaining user trust. We will dedicate ourselves to integrating the entire chain ecosystem seamlessly through outstanding engineering and cutting-edge research, providing the best user experience, design, and interoperability.

Hsiao-Wei's Addendum

In the coming months, my work focus will be to strengthen EF operations to support ecosystem growth. A flexible and efficient foundation can better serve Ethereum's long-term mission. While focusing on the core, one of our goals is to provide better support for the application layer. By improving developer experience, defining standards, strengthening the ecosystem, and smoothing the creative implementation process, we aim to empower builders and users.

We are enhancing EF's internal and cross-ecosystem planning, prioritization, and coordination mechanisms to ensure that our work aligns with community needs and the Ethereum cypherpunk spirit. But the EF's transformation is just the beginning; the real drive comes from the energy and creativity of the global Ethereum ecosystem.

Co-Building the Future

Ethereum is not a monolith; it is a vibrant network composed of community members, builders, researchers, artists, educators, and dreamers. It is global, diverse, and proud of its decentralization. We are continuously inspired by the ecosystem's creativity and resilience. The Foundation will continue to show up where most needed but will also make room for the ecosystem to thrive on its own. This is a community-led future.

The road ahead is full of possibilities. Ethereum has already pushed the boundaries of imagination in technology, finance, governance, and beyond. My heartfelt thanks to all builders, educators, researchers, experimenters, and future thinkers. Together, we are building a great endeavor that transcends any team, project, or generation. It is an honor to journey with you, and I look forward to the new chapter ahead.

“Ethereum Foundation Management and Board Structure” — Ethereum Foundation Board

The Ethereum Foundation's recent appointment of two Co-Executive Directors and a Chair is a critical part of its organizational strengthening plan. This new governance structure aims to ensure the Foundation's vision is realized, strategic execution is balanced, technical direction is clear, and the ecosystem continues to grow. This article will elucidate the specific structure of the management team and the board.

New Management Team (Strategic and Operational Execution)

The Co-Executive Directors will lead and execute work alongside other management team members. In the future, you will receive regular updates to understand the management team's progress in various plans, decisions, and new initiatives:

Co-Executive Directors:

· Hsiao-Wei Wang;

· Tomasz K. Stańczak.

Core Management Team Members and Responsibilities:

· Bastian Aue: Organizational strategy, talent recruitment and training, collaborative guardian plan;

· Josh Stark: Project Execution, Communication & Marketing, Guardian Plan.

Board of Directors (Oversight & Vision Guidance)

The Ethereum Foundation's Board of Directors acts as a "Security Council" guarding the core values of the organization while ensuring the Foundation operates in compliance as a Swiss entity. The Board is responsible for setting the vision, overseeing strategic decisions by management to align with the Foundation's values, and exercising the power to appoint or remove executive directors.

The current Board of Directors includes:

· Vitalik Buterin (Founder): Continuously providing technical and philosophical guidance for the broader Ethereum ecosystem;

· Aya Miyaguchi (Chair): Collaborating with other directors to shape the Foundation's vision and manage key external relationships;

· Patrick Storchenegger (Swiss Legal Counsel): Serving as the Swiss representative for legal compliance matters;

· Hsiao-Wei Wang (Co-Executive Director): Acting as a bridge between the Board and the executive management.

The Board has communicated the vision, guiding principles, and goals for the coming years to the management team. We anticipate enhancing the Board's functions gradually to better fulfill its mission.

Architectural Design Considerations

While the appointment of Tomasz and Hsiao-Wei Wang as Co-Executive Directors may not be a traditional decision, in the current critical development stage for both the Ethereum ecosystem and the Foundation, this complementary leadership structure holds special value.

While maintaining other corporate positions (Nethermind and venture capital affiliations), Tomasz will leverage his deep understanding of community needs and technological trends to drive a comprehensive and impactful transformation within the Foundation. The Board and Tomasz have reached a consensus on his two-year term as Co-Executive Director—this aligns with a crucial window of opportunity for Ethereum, where he will fully utilize his proven strategic execution capabilities and industry experience.

With a dual role as a Board member and an executive director, Hsiao-Wei Wang's research background and thorough understanding of the Foundation's historical context enable her to precisely grasp organizational needs and effectively bridge Board decisions with management execution.

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