#VitalikOnEFSales

#VitalikOnEFSales When Idealism Meets Market Reality In the Ethereum ecosystem, Vitalik Buterin is often seen as someone who pursues long-term ideals rather than reacting to market price movements. But even the greatest ideals still require a “foundation” to survive. The Ethereum Foundation occasionally sells ETH to fund research, development, and the ongoing maintenance of the ecosystem. This is not merely a financial action — it is part of the system’s operational reality. Many interpret these sales as market pressure. But from another perspective, they represent how Ethereum sustains itself: converting assets into resources to continue expanding technology and community. Vitalik has always maintained a balancing stance — minimizing negative market impact while ensuring the system still has enough “fuel” to grow in the long run. Ultimately, #VitalikOnEFSales is not a story about buying or selling. It is a reminder that even a decentralized system must confront reality: to survive long-term, it needs real-world resources in the real world. $BTC $ETH $PI @OKX星球 @Wind•Crypto✅

Vitalik just went on record: the Ethereum Foundation is getting smaller on purpose. Facing growing community pushback over the EF's ongoing ETH sales, he responded publicly on X, revealing that the Foundation holds just ~0.16% of total ETH supply with 99.1% of its treasury still in ETH. For comparison, most L1 foundations hold 10-50% of their native token supply. The plan? Sell less, shrink the team, and survive longer. His exact words: "a smaller ship, a more opinionated one, but a longer-lasting one." The key shifts: · EF will narrow its mission to CROPS: Censorship resistance, Open source, Privacy, and Security · Already staked 70,000 ETH (~$143M) to generate yield instead of selling · Encouraging "other heroes" to step up where the Foundation steps back The timing matters. Eight EF researchers have quit in 2026, five in May alone, following a loyalty pledge tied to the CROPS mandate. Not everyone signed on. Vitalik also confirmed ~90% of his personal net worth remains in ETH. For holders, less sell pressure from the EF is a clear positive. But a leaner Foundation also means more responsibility falls on the broader ecosystem. EF selling less, Vitalik still all-in. Does that change your confidence in ETH? #VitalikOnEFSales

#VitalikOnEFSales Vitalik just addressed the EF selling controversy directly on X 👀 Key reveals: EF holds only ~0.16% of ETH supply. No sustainable income stream. So yes, they've been selling to operate — and they're now committing to downsize and sell less 📉 Also: 90% of his personal net worth is still in ETH 💀 The EF is repositioning from "center of the Ethereum ecosystem" to a focused mission-driven node — censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security. Less empire, more values 🔒 Less selling pressure + clearer mandate = supply-side positive. The community complaints were loud enough that it actually moved the needle. Does Vitalik keeping 90% of his net worth in ETH change how you're positioned? 🤔

Vitalik Responds to Critics: Should Ethereum Prioritize Price or Principles? As ETH continues to face price pressure, criticism toward the Ethereum Foundation has intensified. Some community members argue that the Foundation should hold a much larger share of ETH to better support the ecosystem and strengthen market confidence. Vitalik Buterin disagrees. According to Vitalik, many blockchain foundations hold between 10% and 50% of their native token supply, while the Ethereum Foundation reportedly holds only around 0.16% of total ETH supply. He argues this approach helps preserve Ethereum’s neutrality and decentralization rather than concentrating influence in a single organization. Instead of focusing on short-term price action, Vitalik says Ethereum’s priority remains: 🔹 Long-term sustainability 🔹 Privacy and open-source innovation 🔹 Decentralization and self-sovereignty 🔹 Core protocol development This raises a bigger question for crypto investors: Many projects support token prices through treasury holdings, buybacks, or aggressive token management. Ethereum chooses a different path. 💭 Would you rather invest in a blockchain that actively supports its token price, or one that prioritizes decentralization and long-term development even when the market is unhappy? 👇 Which approach creates more value over the next 10 years? $ETH

🚨 Vitalik Responds to Critics: Should Ethereum Prioritize Price or Principles? As ETH continues to face price pressure, criticism toward the Ethereum Foundation has intensified. Some community members argue that the Foundation should hold a much larger share of ETH to better support the ecosystem and strengthen market confidence. Vitalik Buterin disagrees. According to Vitalik, many blockchain foundations hold between 10% and 50% of their native token supply, while the Ethereum Foundation reportedly holds only around 0.16% of total ETH supply. He argues this approach helps preserve Ethereum’s neutrality and decentralization rather than concentrating influence in a single organization. Instead of focusing on short-term price action, Vitalik says Ethereum’s priority remains: 🔹 Long-term sustainability 🔹 Privacy and open-source innovation 🔹 Decentralization and self-sovereignty 🔹 Core protocol development This raises a bigger question for crypto investors: Many projects support token prices through treasury holdings, buybacks, or aggressive token management. Ethereum chooses a different path. 💭 Would you rather invest in a blockchain that actively supports its token price, or one that prioritizes decentralization and long-term development even when the market is unhappy? 👇 Which approach creates more value over the next 10 years? $ETH

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want. The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?" Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain. As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain. One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan. My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it. Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism. This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate. Now how does this all get to the role of the EF? EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter. This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward. And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally. This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself) EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects). At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting. To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose. I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like: * Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this. * Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash. * Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future. Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%. Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations. The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support. EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

I've been an Ethereum supporter since the early days and I still believe it's one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in crypto. The tech is great, my conviction hasn't changed in that respect. But watching 9 senior researchers and key operators leave the Ethereum Foundation in 2026 alone is something I can't just ignore. People like Tim Beiko, Josh Stark, Barnabé Monnot, Trent Van Epps, Carl Beek. These people weren't just random employees at the foundation, they were the foundation. You can call it restructuring, you can call it decentralization, whatever. But when your best people are walking out the door, that's a massive red flag regardless of what narrative you put around it. And honestly, this whole situation just reinforces something I've been feeling for a while now. I am so tired of chain wars, ecosystem politics and spending any more time debating how to price an asset than actually evaluating the businesses being built on top of it. I don't want to argue about L1 vs L2. I don't want to pick sides in some tribal war between ecosystems. I just want to back exceptional founders building real businesses with real revenue, real users and real products. Hyperliquid recently flipping Solana is another great example of how a great product and distribution can organically build an ecosystem top down, rather than trying to force it from the ground up. The infrastructure circle jerk and the idealistic cypherpunk phase of selling delusional dreams in crypto was great and fun, but it's over. The next decade will be dominated by much sharper founders building real businesses, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see some of these even flip ETH and SOL as they continue to bleed out. Time to grow up and play real games with real people.

In the Ethereum ecosystem, Vitalik Buterin is often seen as someone who pursues long-term ideals rather than reacting to market price movements. But even the greatest ideals still require a “foundation” to survive. The Ethereum Foundation occasionally sells ETH to fund research, development, and the ongoing maintenance of the ecosystem. This is not merely a financial action — it is part of the system’s operational reality. Many interpret these sales as market pressure. But from another perspective, they represent how Ethereum sustains itself: converting assets into resources to continue expanding technology and community. Vitalik has always maintained a balancing stance — minimizing negative market impact while ensuring the system still has enough “fuel” to grow in the long run. Ultimately, #VitalikOnEFSales is not a story about buying or selling. It is a reminder that even a decentralized system must confront reality: to survive long-term, it needs real-world resources in the real world. $BTC $BTC #ICEBacksOKXOilPerps #RateHikeRepricing #VitalikOnEFSales

🚨 ETHEREUM EMERGENCY: VITALIK "SHIP" STARTS TO WRECK OR TURN INTO A WARSHIP? 🚨 The crypto world is in turmoil! Ethereum Foundation (EF) is now in survival mode. After a series of mass resignations—with 5 senior researchers leaving only this May—Vitalik Buterin finally spoke up about the future of Ethereum's "Ship". 🛳️🔥 In the midst of community accusations about the sale of ETH, Vitalik emphasized: EF will now be a leaner, more "stubborn" organization, but more durable. Their new strategy? Reduce asset sales, tighten budgets, and focus on CROPS (Censorship resistance, Open source, Privacy, Security) doctrines. 🛡️📉 Is this the beginning of institutional collapse, or is it a genius move so that Ethereum no longer depends on one central point? While Vitalik still holds 90% of his wealth in ETH, many are skeptical: Will a new "hero" appear when EF retreats from the front line? Or are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the glory era of Ethereum? 🏛️🤔 Determine your position: Do you believe in Vitalik's "slim boat", or is this a signal to withdraw from the ETH market? 📊👇 #VitalikOnEFSales #CFTCPurgeExposed #RateHikeRepricing

Vitalik says Ethereum Foundation will become a “smaller ship” and sell less ETH Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum Foundation is prioritizing longevity over breadth, reducing ETH sales, and focusing on censorship resistance, open source development, privacy, and security. The comments come amid researcher departures, with Buterin also saying his influence within the foundation will continue to decrease over time.