Very excited to welcome @pcaversaccio to join us at the EF board! What he brings isn't just security and privacy expertise. He's a living example of what 100% CROPS alignment looks like in practice. Looking forward to the perspective he'll bring, and to being pushed to think much harder about security and privacy🛡️🥷

1/ Today, the Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team is publishing Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions, a non-technical primer to equip the leaders making policy and deployment decisions with an understanding of how Ethereum works, how it's governed, and how it compares with perceived alternatives.

If you want to learn more about the incredible people stepping up to lead the next chapter of the Ethereum foundation, please let me know below, and we will tell their story in its entirety. A few people on the protocol side: > @corcoranwill (was a renowned architect that made buildings throughout manhattan and public libraries before going from castles in the sand to castles in the sky with his work coordinating across lean ethereum and quantum etc) > @kevaundray (made noir and has been pioneering ZK at a GM level across the board, while also being an incredibly talented musician) > @fredrik0x (helped make and secure world of war craft, then created a trillion dollar security initiative for Ethereum..probably inadvertently led to the creation of Ethereum) Their stories are amazing, and their personalities are even better. Ethereum is more than the EF, but the EF is star-studded, more focused than ever, and ready to dance.

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year. Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world. Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring. Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list): * The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals. * PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer * Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate. * Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds. * EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale. These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play. In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin. The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.

Today, the EF is changing shape, concluding a months-long process of reorganization as part of the implementation of the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy. We come out of this process with the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead of us, but also with 54 fewer colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom will be finding ways to contribute to Ethereum from outside the EF in the coming weeks. Find a brief introduction to the new structure, and learn more about how we are supporting the people who are leaving in the full post below:

1. Intro Vitalik recently wrote about where the EF should go; Aya added a note to explain how we got here, and why. I’ll write about the execution. We now have enough clarity to stop treating “what is the EF for?” as an open-ended question. Our mandate is clear: The EF exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty: censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure; and capable of supporting sovereignty-preserving coordination at scales where trusted institutions hitherto have been unavoidable. The following are my thoughts on some of the points that follow from the mandate and how we are translating it to action. But first, a short reminder about 2. What the EF is not for We are not here to optimize for EF importance, corpo/pol appeal, or ecosystem popularity. We are also not here to please short-term speculators, prop up TBTF neo-SIFIs, market every app on Ethereum, help anyone look good to their crypto or investor friends, or provide on-demand entertainment for dinner parties and private retreats. 3. What the EF is for: Eliminating weaknesses We are here to defensively strengthen places where Ethereum is, or can still become, extractive, totalizing, or vulnerable to cartel or state capture, or authoritarian tools of surveillance or coercion. We will base our actions on a full examination of what Ethereum is and can be at the protocol layer (what is actually running as “Ethereum”), the access layer (what users use to interact with the protocol), the user layer (the end-users who need and will need Ethereum), and the institutional layer (the intermediated paths that scale self-sovereign usage). The EF exists to harden every surface of Ethereum, including those where Ethereum can remain formally permissionless while becoming practically captured. Some obvious surfaces are the transaction pipeline, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, self-sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and social layer governance processes. The primary concerns are similar across most of them: does the status quo and its future trajectory minimize trusted dependencies, minimize points of leverage and capture vectors, make user privacy the default, preserve exit, and make trust assumptions legible? The work starts with the EF itself. We are moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stables, with exceptions where positive law or unavoidable operational constraints require exceptions. Rather than a purity ritual or instruction for people to take unmanaged personal risk, it is robustness, alignment, and product pressure. If the EF’s work is to make Ethereum usable as infrastructure for self-sovereignty, everyone at the EF will increasingly live inside the constraints of the system the EF exists to improve: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, dependency risk, etc. If we can’t use these tools ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect others to. Ethereum is already mature; those who do not depend on the user-facing stack have no business trying to shape its future, at any layer. The transaction pipeline is next. Preventing toxic MEV capture is core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern. Transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement are part of Ethereum’s neutrality boundary. Some MEV may persist as an adversarial phenomenon the protocol contains, but it must be absolutely minimized and, for that to be possible, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by its beneficiaries. If credibly neutral execution is subverted by privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain, Ethereum will look permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. EF protocol work will therefore prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, competitive transaction pipelines, user-facing legibility of trust assumptions, and more aggressively exploring the open orderflow solution space. None of this is simple. A good solution in one place can aggravate problems elsewhere. FOCIL is good for censorship resistance, but it may introduce more cross-block MEV. While ePBS solves the relayer trust problem, we must make sure that its implementation does not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to even larger problems. It would be unacceptable, for example, if ePBS enshrining the builder economy ends up making it harder to reduce reliance on the private orderflow that has emptied out the public mempool. Encrypted mempools may not only reduce pre-execution transparency and pending orderflow visibility, but also shift competitive advantage to new privileged actors, including specialized hardware operators in some designs, while adding protocol complexity. In order to avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to solving the extraction problem at a whole system scale. Doing so will require creativity, courage, and the understanding that failure to solve this problem is unacceptable. If we fail, we will have left in place an unnecessary barrier to institutional adoption, but, more importantly, we will also have surrendered a core part of the promise of Ethereum - the replacement of extractive middlemen with permissionless, credibly neutral infrastructure and competitive markets. That must not happen. MEV is likely to be the next major front in the cypherpunk war. We must set ourselves up to win here. Privacy is just as fundamental. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees. That is not an acceptable end state for the world computer. Unconditional privacy will be readily available across Ethereum, with programmability on top for selective disclosure, proofs, auditability, compliance logic, reputation, governance, identity, and other constraints chosen by users and their communities. The temporal order matters: unconditional privacy must exist first, opt-in constraints come second. It is also important to avoid forcing users to assemble a fragile stack of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, apps, compliance providers, and operational habits to attain privacy. Deep privacy must be more secure than this. Privacy is a condition for Ethereum’s viability as freedom-respecting coordination infrastructure and as such must be robust. Staking must be treated as protocol infrastructure risk. Staking is not merely a yield product, and liquid staking is not merely an app-layer market. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum’s security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through capture of the economic layer around it. EF will support research, specifications, and designs that keep staking permissionless, private where possible, plural in operation, and resistant to intermediaries becoming permanent control points. The access interfaces are where users access either the protocol directly or through intermediated defaults. The primary problem to solve here is not getting Ethereum into more rooms directly, but making its users, both end users and institutions, more self-sovereign and less susceptible to coercion, and avoiding normalization of soft coercion in exchange for reach. EF will not help Ethereum become more acceptable by sanding off the properties that make it uniquely valuable. Ethereum does not need to become another permissioned settlement backend with better branding. It needs to show, in production, that self-sovereign coordination at scale is possible. Across Ethereum, the EF’s defensive work seeks to ensure that Ethereum is infrastructure people can still use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, intermediaries extract, and coordination problems become infeasible for trusted systems to handle. A core part of that is to make that infrastructure secure and robust against capture at every layer wherever capture opportunities can hide. 4. What the EF is also for: Seizing opportunities Shoring up the fundamentals is not enough. Ethereum’s potential is still largely unrealized, but that does not mean that the path ahead is going to be straight. Opportunities must be seized when the time is right. At this moment in time, a number are visible, including: * Ethereum becoming the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure. Ethereum researchers will lead the post-quantum cryptographic migration before the threat becomes urgent, not after it becomes a governance emergency. That means hardening Ethereum’s cryptographic foundations while there is still time to design carefully. The same applies to other long-horizon risks, where waiting for market demand means waiting until the window for principled design has already closed. * Verifiably self-sovereign stack, from soup to nuts, whether local or remote, with no censorship or extraction openings: browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasts, orderflow, inclusion, block construction, proposal, proving, exit, and recovery. Minimal MEV, and zero toxic MEV entrenchment, either in or around the protocol. No execution layer that is formally permissionless but practically gatekept by privileged supply chains. If there’s a funnel towards an extractive private lane, there’s other options that keep the game live. The goal is not only to prevent extraction or capture, but to make credibly neutral execution competitive enough that serious users prefer it. * Making ETH normal digital cash: a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset of private computation and private coordination for both humans and their agents. If Ethereum can make private economic life and private institutional life possible without routing users back through the friction and potential abuse of custodians, surveillance vendors, or permissioned ledgers with softer branding, as well as provide a venue for secure and competitive machine economics, the value unlocks will be immense. * Personal wallets with personal AI agents that users can actually own and run on their own personal computers. Not your keys, not your coins; not your model, not your mind. As agents become interfaces for more economic and social action, the question of who owns the wallet, the model, the memory, the policy, and the signing authority becomes an existential question about sovereignty instead of UX details - we are all users above any other roles, and no one at EF will forget this. * Institutional and enterprise use cases where Ethereum wins by not disappearing into an invisible backend, gatekept by intermediaries or terrible UX, and by not compromising into a compliant fintech rail with web3 branding. Rather, we will win through proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries have to meet Ethereum users on Ethereum’s terms. * Security-preserving scaling. L2s and related infrastructure will be able to meet institutional-level needs without accepting dependencies on closed operators, opaque sequencing, custodial UX, or upgrade committees that users cannot realistically exit. Scale is not throughput alone. Scale is the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty under real load. We are ensuring Ethereum remains the hardest bedrock for settlement, local and worldwide; and beyond that, a civilizational ledger and execution substrate to stand the test of time. When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum. Ethereum will outlast all of us. More than enough people watching understand this. Many wondered why it needed saying at all, but it did. If you don't believe us or don't get it, we don't have time to try to convince you, sorry. 5. Addressing departures There has been a lot of online speculation about departures from EF, both before and after the mandate. Some people resigned, others were terminated. Some departures were about strategy, some about role fit, some about normal institutional change, and some simply about people deciding that their best work for Ethereum should happen somewhere else. We will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter. That is the default because it is better for EF, better for the people involved, and better for Ethereum. People who contributed through EF deserve dignity on the way out. They do not deserve to have their employment history turned into factional content. Where possible, we have let people describe their departures in their own words as a matter of courtesy, and not concession. If public claims materially mislead people about EF’s direction, decision-making, or mandate, we may correct the record at the level of policy, process, and institutional facts. We still will not turn personal files into public spectacle. Ethereum is permissionless. People may disagree, criticize, compete, fork, and build elsewhere. We intend to keep exits dignified and expect others to do the same. It will suffice to say that we are thankful for what all contributors have built; we will continue to do work Ethereum needs. 6. Addressing EF spinouts Some work should and will leave the EF in the months to come. We hope and expect this process to result in some excellent work being done in service of scaling self-sovereign adoption, but we also must take care lest it becomes an abdication of responsibility or an excuse for undisciplined spending. Some work is not mandate-compatible and should not be carried forward with EF funds or EF endorsement, either inside or outside the Foundation. The efforts carried out by the spinouts will vary widely. Some efforts will leave EF because another org would be a better home for them; others will leave because markets should decide on their worth. Some will leave because they are not compatible with the direction set out in the mandate; others because they are useful but not EF work. Just as a spinout is not automatically good because it reduces EF headcount, former EF affiliation is not a claim on EF funding. The question we ask when deciding on funding is not “did this come from the EF?” But, rather the questions that should be asked about all external funding: “Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do this work internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence? Does supporting it reduce Ethereum’s dependence on the EF over time, without prematurely transferring resources and legitimacy to new organizations and thereby risking operational failure or mission drift?” EF funding for work being done externally can be appropriate when it is a capacity solution for mandate work - work the EF should responsibly want done; work that protects CROPS; work that advances self-sovereignty and scales it; essential work that no actor can or will reliably do without EF funding; and work that can be scoped, reviewed, and held accountable without creating a permanent dependency. Such funding is not appropriate when it is a lazy continuity payment, a friendship payment, a reputational hedge, a way to avoid making a hard decision, or a way to support work that is not compatible with the mandate. EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate. We will spend all three as if they matter. When we say “EF is one of many nodes”, we mean that we intend to be one of many nodes working to keep self-sovereignty and its scaling the North Star, and working to keep CROPS the undisplaceable first-class properties of the network. We don’t mean that we will support orgs or projects with different priorities. Diversity that leads to ecosystem resilience, coordination cost right-sizing, and better decision-making is good. Diversity that leads to mission drift is not. We are not neutral on the direction Ethereum takes. CROPS are not just things we “believe in”, they are characteristics we understand must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork for Ethereum to realize its potential. We are partisans for and builders of something of such incredible neutrality that it will fundamentally reshape the world we live in; we wish to work with everyone committed to this shared purpose.

Vitalik shared his perspective on where @ethereumfndn is heading. Here is mine, another part of the same story. The EF Mandate from the board was something I proposed late last year. Two main things prompted me. First, debates that were meant to be technical had started to become political and personal, and at times shaped by quieter incentives. Second, as EF grew, more and more versions of "what EF should be" began pulling at the core of the organization from every direction at once. I became convinced that trying to satisfy all of them would leave us achieving nothing at all. It was time for us to restate our role and underlying principles clearly, both the parts that have been clear from the start and those that have been informed by over a decade of experience. We have said it many times: EF is one of many nodes in Ethereum. I know that is hard to hear for some, because EF was the first group, and in the early years it was essential for making things happen. But it was never meant to stay that way. I have been in crypto since 2012, before it became an "industry." I joined Kraken in 2013, shortly before the implosion of Mt. Gox, which I helped to clean up. I am very aware of how real growth works, and also aware of the real risks of centralization. So when I became ED in 2018, I understood that Ethereum growing beyond EF would be essential to fulfill its real promise as a public blockchain. The goal I set for myself was to ensure that this happens. The opposite path has always been untenable: Ethereum's future is too big for any single organization to bring about. So EF made deliberate choices to distribute power. We did incubate and release, like Uniswap and ENS. Support to seed a new norm, like ETHGlobal and the hackathons that are now everywhere. Funding the funders, like Gitcoin and Moloch. We always asked the same question: how does this stand on its own, without us? Those experiments, alongside the work of countless others, contributed to where we are today. Ethereum is now far bigger than anything EF could coordinate alone. EF now holds less than 0.2% of all ETH, and the return on all of that shared work, together with extraordinary people across the ecosystem, has been beyond anything we could have built by ourselves. That is exactly why a focused EF is possible now. The Mandate states simply the one thing EF must keep carrying: preserving and accelerating the properties and goals that keep Ethereum uniquely valuable, competitive, and worth building on. That is: CROPS - for the sake of inalienable user self-sovereignty and self-sovereign coordination. We cannot do it alone, and we do not intend to. But defining this as the north star for the mission, and coordinating with the allies who share it, is the responsibility we are keeping. None of this means EF stops caring about adoption, for everyday users or for institutions. The opposite is true: everything we do is ultimately for the people who use Ethereum. Supporting adoption, including institutional adoption, remains part of our work, pursued in the ways that fit our mission. The value proposition of Ethereum for both everyday users and institutions rests heavily on this. As EF becomes more focused and more opinionated, the team naturally becomes smaller and more concentrated. That is part of the choice. New leaders are already stepping into this mission and growing within it, and you will hear more from our management in the coming weeks, about what they are doing, and about the new structure and strategy taking shape. The mission we carry is not a smaller one, but a clearer one. Special thanks to those who have stepped in to support, defend and advance it.

1/Introducing ACTA: Anonymous Credentials for Trustless Agents. A composable privacy layer above ERC-8004 so agents can prove: personhood, reputation, model provenance, user jurisdiction, and more — without publishing the interaction graph. 🧵

😎 Just shipped a ZK Privacy skill to 👀 "Privacy Apps with Noir" 🤖 Give your bot 🌾🌾🌾 s/o @phipsae tending the CROPS 🌾🌾🌾

first off, Ethereum is ALIVE just shipped an @ethereum events globe 🔹160 mapped over 52 countries 🔹browsable event calendar 🔹find your city & event! Made possible with @ethereumfndn 's curation with the ethereum community page Link 🔽 thank you @gabrielchua, I feel the AGI

[X] I affirm the direction set out in the mandate, will help translate it into thoroughly reasoned strategies for my domain, and will maintain an exclusive and energetic focus on the mission-critical tasks necessary for its implementation, from today until my last day at the EF.

Embrace the far future. Tend the eternal digital garden. Dream entire epochs. Become a cypherpunk but cuter. Create infinities. Go inside world computers and multiverse computers and ''go no more out''. Have a maintenance mindset. Craft with scale in mind.

Embrace the far future. Tend the eternal digital garden. Dream entire epochs. Become a cypherpunk but cuter. Create infinities. Go inside world computers and multiverse computers and ''go no more out''. Have a maintenance mindset.

I’ve known Tomo for years, since before Ethereum. He’s always been talented, and always generous with my crazy requests to express our vision. This time, I got to see him really push beyond his comfort zone. Both of us had to break through old walls, unlearn what we thought we knew, and find our way a bit back to the weirdness we came from. The last few weeks have been full of sleepless nights, but it’s always fun working together, and it’s been beautiful to witness your growth as an artist. ありがとう for walking this journey together 💚

I have never been more bullish on Ethereum! Look at these bangers in the new EF mandate: "Ether is a store of value and money," 🦇🔊 "Self-sovereignty at scale is the dominant positive-sum strategy." ✊ “We are building nothing less than the machinery of freedom for the next thousand years.” ⏳ "Permissive licenses are accepted, viral copyleft licenses are appreciated, but merely source-available licenses are not tolerated." - Them are fightin' words! "True security protects both system and users from technical failure, social entrapment, and coercion." 🛡️ "We care about doing it right and doing it well [...] We demand technical rigor, excellence, and creativity." 🔥 "We also admit when we get things - particularly big things - wrong, with humility" 🙌 “The privilege of stewarding Ethereum must not be hoarded, but shared.” 🤝 "Subtraction is a definitive signal of success." ✂️ "Adoption can be earned over time, but principled ground once ceded is far harder to regain" 🏞️ "it is not sufficient that a solution simply works today; it also needs to not become a chokepoint tomorrow." 🚧 "We default to empowering user agency" 🧑‍🚀 “The goal is not to sanitize the environment; it is to keep users sovereign inside it.” 🦾 "We work to ensure that barriers to entry are minimized and market competitiveness is maximized" 📈 "Ethereum rejects the idea that there is no alternative" 🔀 "We are here to uncapture the individual, and to entrench their freedoms of association" 🥲 “We have been entrusted with the torch of liberty and we must keep it burning.” 🗽 "Ethereum is for far more than crypto." 🌍 "There will be times when the work will be thankless; the journey will be arduous; the path will be lonely. But every road to the stars first passes through darkness." ✨ AND 'The World Computer' made a comeback! It was mentioned FIVE TIMES! 🖥️🖥️🖥️🖥️🖥️ WE ARE SO BACK!