This article is from: Ethereum Foundation
Translation | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina); Translator | Azuma (@azuma_eth)
Editor's Note: The Ethereum Foundation (EF) released three articles last night, which are: "The Vision of the Ethereum Foundation" written by Vitalik Buterin and EF Chair Aya Miyaguchi; "The Next Chapter of the Ethereum Foundation" written by the two new Executive Directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak; and "The Governance and Board Structure of the Ethereum Foundation" published by the EF Board.
The three articles are not too long, but they restate the EF's vision and work direction from a higher level, emphasizing the EF's plans for decentralization in certain areas, which may be seen as a landmark node on the path of EF's self-reform.
Below are the full texts of the three articles, translated by Odaily Planet Daily.
"The Vision of the Ethereum Foundation" — Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi
The power of Ethereum comes from its decentralized nature — not only technically but also socially and structurally. This article outlines the vision, role, and work focus of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) as one of the guardians of the ecosystem. As the new management team takes office, we reaffirm the vision, principles, and values that we have always upheld. These focuses are not rigid plans but are reflected in the strategies articulated by the two co-executive directors of EF. By clarifying our methods and priorities, we hope to elucidate our direction while also indicating that we will intentionally withdraw from certain areas — to ensure that the ecosystem can continue to thrive with the participation of all.
Vision
Guarding the "Infinite Garden" — an ecosystem composed of projects, communities, and infrastructure built around Ethereum, maintaining its resilience in a changing environment. We see Ethereum as a world computer shared by humanity, an open and permissionless platform that has brought stability, freedom, and technological empowerment to millions of people worldwide. We cherish the real value that Ethereum is creating.
Thus, we use the metaphor of the "Infinite Garden" to describe the Ethereum ecosystem: a space that is ever-evolving, where builders, dreamers, and guardians from around the world sow creativity, support each other, and collaboratively create tools that will reshape the foundations of civilization, such as finance and identity, for decades to come.
Role Positioning
Ethereum's greatest advantage lies in its unparalleled ecosystem. Beyond EF, numerous teams are pushing the boundaries through technological innovation, educational activities, and public goods funding. The mission of EF is to strengthen this advantage and safeguard core values: we fill gaps, correct imbalances, and support key initiatives, always ensuring that no single entity (including EF) can dominate the evolution of Ethereum. We strategically intervene, consciously withdraw, and continuously adjust our focus as Ethereum matures and the environment evolves.
Through "purposeful subtraction," we empower ecosystem members to take on primary responsibilities. Our role today is dual:
We do what no one else can do today;
We also help others do what only we can do today in the future.
This means focusing on high-leverage areas where EF's unique position allows us to support the ecosystem in ways that are difficult for other organizations to achieve, while building capabilities and infrastructure so that others can eventually take over leadership. Here are some practical examples:
We are doing what no one else can do today:
Funding and maintaining critical Ethereum infrastructure, such as client diversity.
Coordinating core protocol upgrades (e.g., Merge, Dencun), where neutral management is crucial — including projects to be completed in the next 12 months and long-term efforts that define Ethereum's role for the next decade.
Supporting zero-knowledge research and open-source tools, pushing the frontier of privacy-preserving technology.
Hosting ecosystem-wide gatherings (e.g., Devcon) to bring together diverse contributors from around the world.
Operating ethereum.org as a neutral public knowledge center for new users and builders.
We are also helping others grow to take on the roles we once held:
Funding early public goods projects until they can become self-sustaining or community-funded.
Open-sourcing educational content, developer tools, and research for others to continue developing.
Helping new coordination mechanisms emerge and guiding them toward independent governance (e.g., MACI pilot, protocol guilds, retrospective public goods funding).
Supporting geographic decentralization and local leadership through: Next Billion scholarships, empowering local builders in underserved areas; grassroots community funding to strengthen local Ethereum ecosystems; Devcon Road, attracting and growing regional communities before Devcon; Devcon Scholar Program, providing support and opportunities for participants from underrepresented communities.
Working Methods
Adaptive Evolution: We evolve alongside the ecosystem, continuously reassessing our roles and impacts. Our structure and initiatives adapt to the ever-changing needs of Ethereum while maintaining our core principles.
Thoughtful Complexity: We embrace the complexity required by decentralized systems while pursuing elegant solutions. Our goal is not to simplify for the sake of simplification, but to achieve balance through careful 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 the long-term success of Ethereum rather than short-term gains, evaluating the sustainability and multi-generational impacts of each decision, and recognizing that lasting resilience requires continuous learning, adaptation, and evolution.
Value Guardianship: Defend Ethereum's core values — censorship resistance, open-source, privacy, and security — while empowering the ecosystem to develop autonomously. Treat these qualities as the foundation for enduring innovation.
Purposeful Subtraction, reinforcing resilience rather than accumulating power:
Maintain diversity in methods, solutions, and teams.
Facilitate broad participation.
Promote collaboration.
Reduce centralization.
Reinforcing resilience does not mean doing less; it often requires adding new mechanisms or complexities — but always with the goal of creating a robust ecosystem that widely distributes power and ownership.
Future Goals
At this critical moment and in the coming years, our direction is shaped by a clear vision. The team is deeply engaged, and existing projects are driving the ongoing evolution of Ethereum. Future work is not about reaching certain benchmarks but focusing on the most important matters. To guide our collective attention, we outline 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 surrounding world.
The role of EF is to identify high-leverage gaps — areas where only it can effectively fill the void — and concentrate efforts to create the greatest impact.
Goal 1: Maximize the User Base Benefiting from Ethereum's Underlying Value
Meaningful scenarios include:
Internet-native finance: Using tokenized assets/DeFi for payments, savings, and wealth accumulation in areas where fiat infrastructure is limited or may become unreliable in the future;
Internet-native organizations: Participating in DAOs with programmable incentive structures, achieving collaboration, decision-making, and capital formation beyond traditional methods;
Decentralized social: Using Ethereum-based social platforms where content is stored on decentralized networks, allowing users to switch clients without losing their social graph;
Decentralized AI: Collectively training AI models with verifiable safety guarantees based on Ethereum, creating economic frameworks for AI agents to coordinate with humans (e.g., micro-prediction markets);
Enterprise applications: Institutional applications using Ethereum in the backend, providing auditability, privacy, interoperability, and "escape hatch" mechanisms even when interacting through non-wallet interfaces.
Non-target scenarios include:
Custodial solutions that only support transfers between custodial wallets;
Institutional applications that only hash events on-chain without providing additional security attributes.
Goal 2: Maximize the Resilience of Ethereum's Technical and Social Infrastructure
Resilience is reflected in:
Ecosystem autonomy: Not relying on EF or any single organization;
Value consistency: Upholding values in the face of strong temptations;
Team diversity: Strong and diverse independent development teams;
Network robustness: Maintaining activity, censorship resistance, and security when infrastructure faces severe shocks;
Decentralization: Eliminating single points of control or failure;
Proactive risk management: Being able to identify and mitigate emerging centralization failure points over time.
Non-resilient manifestations:
While there are many teams in education, client development, or event organization, funding is entirely dependent on EF;
Bottlenecks formed by high resilience in some areas and low resilience in others (e.g., wallets, ZK provers, social single points of failure);
Surface diversity that masks common vulnerabilities (e.g., 20 clients sharing the same codebase, 100 country events operated by the same central organization).
As we advance these goals, we also maintain a long-term perspective — viewing Ethereum not just as a technology but as a living ecosystem with the potential to serve generations of humanity.
We envision a future where Ethereum serves as a resilient, neutral global coordination platform. Decentralization must be maintained in both development and governance, and innovation will thrive at every layer of the protocol, allowing communities around the world to build and sustain their adaptive solutions. We believe that the network's technical and social resilience will continue to strengthen, and the foundation will do its utmost to ensure our collective success.
"The Next Chapter of the Ethereum Foundation" — Hsiao-Wei Wang, Tomasz Stańczak
Hello! This article is co-authored by Hsiao-Wei and Tomasz. We have been serving as co-executive directors of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) for nearly a month. The honeymoon period is over, and it’s time to take action.
A Moment of Transformation and Opportunity
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. Although EF has been established for ten years, we have always maintained the courage for self-reform.
This year, EF adopted a new leadership model with dual executive directors. This design brings diverse and complementary perspectives, enhancing our ability to tackle complex challenges. Guided by a steadfast commitment to Ethereum's core values, we will embrace future opportunities and challenges with a guardian spirit, coordination capabilities, and long-term vision.
It is important to emphasize that EF is not a two-headed horse going its own way. Our partnership is built on mutual respect, trust, and shared values. We work closely together, constructively challenging each other, ultimately moving forward as a unified team with aligned goals.
Working Principles and Key Areas
Looking ahead, we will focus our work around two main pillars: guiding principles (core values) and goals (pursuit of impact and resilience). Excellent technology is the foundation of all our work and the fundamental guarantee for achieving our mission.
As executive directors, our responsibility is to implement EF's vision in a rapidly changing world. This includes strategic planning, ecosystem guardianship, team leadership, and operational oversight — all serving the long-term success of Ethereum.
The core values we advocate are:
Censorship Resistance: Ensuring that Ethereum remains an open network where anyone, anywhere can trade and build without external control.
Open Source Innovation: Promoting collaborative transparency and community-driven development through the open sharing of knowledge tools.
Privacy Protection: Achieving privacy interactions without sacrificing security, defending personal freedom and autonomy in the digital age.
Security: Maintaining the trust, robustness, and resilience of the entire Ethereum ecosystem through secure design and ongoing research.
These values guide our technological choices, ecosystem support, and the long-term vision of Ethereum as a public good.
While upholding these values, we have set our main directions for the next 12 months:
Scaling the Ethereum mainnet;
Scaling Blob transactions;
Enhancing user experience (including L2 interoperability and application layer).
This means improving interoperability and coordination mechanisms between the mainnet and L2, enhancing user experience and developer experience, providing more opportunities for the application layer and L2 to showcase themselves at the Devcon conference, and amplifying their voices through communication channels.
Additionally, we recognize the need to accelerate the journey of developers, entrepreneurs, and institutions in adopting Ethereum. EF has the knowledge base and leaders capable of guiding, leading, attracting, and nurturing talent.
Tomasz's Addendum
Ethereum is about to embark on a new chapter. The core values remain unchanged — open source, censorship resistance, privacy, and security — but EF is changing — it will become a more open organization willing to engage in difficult conversations without delay.
We will focus on execution speed, accountability, clear goals, and measurable metrics. We are concerned with the success of the Ethereum mainnet protocol — it will continue to serve as a global neutral network, a protocol that is trustworthy because it is "trustless." We care about the success of the mainnet as well as the prosperity of the entire ecosystem: L2s that bring large-scale adoption create multiple values for users, while the mainnet serves as a solid and flexible foundation behind all transactions and coordination mechanisms. We look forward to this journey — experiencing the most inspiring technological and social transformations alongside visionaries and pragmatic builders.
The coming year is a year of scaling: scaling the mainnet (L1), supporting the successful scaling of L2 through optimal architecture, ensuring network security, and earning user trust. We are committed to creating a seamless chain ecosystem through excellent engineering and cutting-edge research, providing the best user experience, design, and interoperability.
Hsiao-Wei's Addendum
In the coming months, my focus will be on strengthening EF's 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, clarifying standards, strengthening the ecosystem, and streamlining the process for ideas to take root, we will assist builders and users.
We are improving 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. However, EF's transformation is just the beginning; the real momentum 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 continually inspired by the creativity and resilience of the ecosystem. The foundation will continue to show up where it is most needed, but will also make space as the ecosystem thrives on its own. This is a community-led future.
The road ahead is full of possibilities. Ethereum has already changed the boundaries of imagination in technology, finance, governance, and more. We extend our gratitude to all builders, educators, researchers, experimenters, and future visionaries. What we are building together is a great endeavor that transcends any team, project, or generation. It is an honor to walk alongside you, and we look forward to the new chapter that is about to unfold.
"The Governance and Board Structure of the Ethereum Foundation" — Ethereum Foundation Board
The recent appointment of two co-executive directors and a chair by the Ethereum Foundation is an important 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 develop sustainably. This article will clarify 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 learn about the management team's progress on various plans, decisions, and new changes through regular updates:
Co-executive Directors:
Hsiao-Wei Wang;
Tomasz K. Stańczak.
Core management team members and their roles:
Bastian Aue: Organizational strategy, talent recruitment and training, collaborative guardianship program;
Josh Stark: Project execution, communication and marketing, collaborative guardianship program.
Board of Directors (Oversight and Vision Guidance)
The Ethereum Foundation Board acts as a "security committee" that safeguards the core values of the organization while ensuring that the foundation operates in compliance as a Swiss entity. The board is responsible for setting the vision, overseeing whether the management team's strategic decisions align with the foundation's values, and exercising the authority to appoint and dismiss executive directors. Current board members include:
Vitalik Buterin (Founder): Continuously providing technical and intellectual guidance for the broader Ethereum ecosystem;
Aya Miyaguchi (Chair): Collaborating with other directors to formulate the foundation's vision and manage key external relationships;
Patrick Storchenegger (Swiss Legal Advisor): Responsible for legal compliance matters as the Swiss representative;
Hsiao-Wei Wang (Co-executive Director): Serving as a bridge between the board and the executive management team.
The board has communicated the vision, guiding principles, and goals for the coming years to the management team. We expect to gradually enhance the board's functions to better fulfill its mission.
Structural Design Considerations
The appointment of Tomasz and Hsiao-Wei Wang as co-executive directors, while not a traditional decision, holds special value at a time when both the Ethereum ecosystem and the foundation are at a critical stage of development.
While retaining other corporate roles (Nethermind and venture capital affiliations), Tomasz will leverage his deep understanding of community needs and technological trends to drive comprehensive and impactful changes within the foundation. The board and Tomasz have reached a consensus that his term as co-executive director is expected to last two years — a key window of opportunity for Ethereum, during which he will fully utilize his proven strategic execution capabilities and industry experience.
Hsiao-Wei Wang, holding dual roles as a board member and executive director, along with his research background and thorough understanding of the foundation's historical context, enables him to accurately grasp organizational needs and effectively connect board decisions with management execution.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
