Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Responds to Criticism of Ethereum Foundation

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, fired back at all the growing criticism faced by the Ethereum Foundation regarding the Ethereum ecosystem. Buterin pushed back critics who want the organisation to have a proactive role in supporting token prices and marketing. Buterin further stated that the organisation will put its focus on promoting censorship-resistance, open-source software code, long-range research, cybersecurity, and decentralisation of the Ethereum Protocol as part of its mandate. The co-founder's comments come at a time when the Ethereum ecosystem witnessed several high-profile exits from the Foundation.  

Ethereum Foundation Reaffirms Focus on Security and Long-Term Research

The departures of such high-profile employees led to the Foundation facing a fresh set of questions around Ethereum's leadership structure, treasury strategy, and execution pace. Earlier, Buterin had warned that Ethereum should not be a network that is solely focused on transaction speed and scalability. He added that the Foundation is looking to strengthen its cybersecurity and code base, but not necessarily compete with high-throughput chains or scale to 1 million transactions per second.

He also argued that Ethereum should look to strengthen what he called the “CROPS dimension”, which includes censorship resistance, capture resistance, open source, privacy, and security. Buterin has framed CROPS as “technical self-sovereignty and non-coercive cooperation”, positioning Ethereum as “sanctuary technology” instead of a marketing-driven asset that is competing on benchmarks. 

Commenting on such employee exits, cryptocurrency journalist Laura Shin said, “I think Ethereum's original sin was not considering tokenomics with every move it made from Dencun on.” The Dencun upgrade, which was released in March 2024, significantly made a reduction in network fees for layer-2 transactions and led to a subsequent collapse in Ethereum's base layer revenue. Shin further added that “Most investors don't want to believe in something that is not also putting up points on the scoreboard.” Later, Buterin said that the Foundation would focus on “longevity” and stretch its funds to finance research, which means it would sell less ETH in the future. 

In May, as part of its treasury strategy, the Ethereum Foundation unstaked 21,270 ETH from the Lido liquid staking platform. The staked ETH was moved out of Lido's liquid staking protocol and into the withdrawal process. The move does not necessarily mean the foundation is preparing to sell. Lido withdrawals place staked ETH or wrapped staked ETH into a queue, giving the holder a claim on ETH once the request is finalised and claimed.