Ethereum’s strength lies in its decentralization — not just technically, but socially and structurally. This blog articulates the EF's vision, its role, and priorities as one of the ecosystem's stewards. We use this moment as an opportunity to restate our vision, principles and values which we continue to uphold as we welcome the new management team. These priorities are not a rigid plan and are reflected in the strategies described by EF’s Co-EDs. By defining our approach and focus, we also aim to clarify where we direct our efforts — and where we intentionally step back — so that the ecosystem can continue to thrive with everyone's participation.
Vision
To steward the Infinite Garden — the ecosystem of projects, communities, and infrastructure built around Ethereum — to remain resilient amid changing environments. We uphold Ethereum as humanity’s shared world computer, an open and permissionless platform that is already bringing stability, freedom and technologically-empowered collaboration to millions of people worldwide. We honor the fact that Ethereum is already in use, creating real value for communities across the globe.
In that spirit, we embrace the metaphor of the Infinite Garden to describe the Ethereum ecosystem: a living, evolving space where builders, dreamers, and stewards from around the world can plant ideas and support each other as we build the tools that will redefine finance, identity and other roots in the soil of our civilization for decades to come.
Our Role
Ethereum’s greatest advantage is its unparalleled ecosystem. There are many teams and organizations outside of EF that contribute to Ethereum by pushing its boundaries forward, through technical innovations, educational events, and by funding public goods. The Ethereum Foundation exists to strengthen this advantage and to uphold Ethereum's core values. We identify gaps, correct imbalances, and support critical initiatives — always ensuring that no single actor (including EF) can dominate Ethereum’s evolution. We step in strategically and step out intentionally, continuously adjusting our focus as Ethereum matures and the environment evolves.
By practicing purposeful subtraction, we’ve empowered others in the ecosystem to take on the majority of responsibilities. Today, we see our role as twofold:
- We do what no one else can do today.
- We help others do tomorrow what only we can do today.
This means focusing on high-leverage areas where EF’s unique position allows us to support the ecosystem in ways few others can — while also building capacity and infrastructure so others can eventually take the lead. Below are examples of how this shows up in practice:
Where we step in to do what no one else can today:
- Funding and maintaining critical Ethereum infrastructure like client diversity.
- Coordinating on core protocol upgrades (e.g. The Merge, Dencun), where neutral stewardship is essential - both on critical initiatives that will complete within the next 12 months, and on longer-term efforts that will define Ethereum’s role for the next decade.
- Supporting zero-knowledge research and open-source tooling that pushes the frontier of privacy-preserving tech.
- Hosting ecosystem-wide gatherings (like Devcon) that bring together diverse global contributors.
- Operating ethereum.org as a neutral public knowledge hub for new users and builders.
Where we’ve helped others grow into roles we once held:
- Seeding early-stage public goods projects through grants until they become self-sustaining or community-funded
- Open-sourcing educational content, developer tooling, and research to be built upon by others.
- Helping new coordination mechanisms emerge and guiding them toward independent stewardship (e.g. MACI pilots, Protocol Guild, retroactive public goods funding).
- Supporting geographic decentralization and local leadership through:
- Next Billion Fellowship – Empowering local builders in underserved regions.
- Grants to grassroots communities – Strengthening local Ethereum ecosystems.
- Road to Devcon – Engaging and growing regional communities ahead of Devcon.
- Devcon Scholars – Providing access and support for participants from underrepresented communities.
Our Approach
Adaptive Evolution
We evolve alongside the ecosystem, continuously reassessing our role and impact. Our structure and initiatives adapt to serve Ethereum's changing needs while maintaining our core principles.
Thoughtful Complexity
We embrace the necessary complexity of decentralized systems while striving for elegant solutions. Our goal is not simplification for its own sake but rather achieving balance through careful design.
Community Empowerment
We support and amplify community-led initiatives, helping create conditions where independent teams can succeed without ongoing dependency on the Foundation.
Core Principles:
Long‑term Thinking
We optimize for Ethereum’s long‑term success over short‑term gains, evaluating every decision for its sustainable, multi‑generational impact and recognizing that lasting resilience requires continuous learning, adaptation, and evolution.
Stewardship of Values
We protect and nurture Ethereum’s core values — censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security — while empowering the ecosystem to grow and evolve independently. We preserve these essential qualities as the foundation for lasting innovation and progress.
Purposeful Subtraction
Rather than accumulate power, we design for resilience by:
- Maintaining a plurality of approaches, solutions, and teams
- Enabling diverse participation
- Facilitating collaboration
- Reducing centralization
Building resilience isn’t about doing less. It often requires adding new mechanisms or complexity — but always with the goal of creating an anti‑fragile ecosystem that distributes power and ownership broadly.
Goals Ahead
As we move through a pivotal time and into the years ahead, our direction is shaped by a clear vision. Teams are deeply engaged, and active projects are already in motion to support Ethereum’s continued evolution. The work ahead isn’t about hitting benchmarks — it’s about focusing our energy where it matters most. To help guide our collective focus, we’ve outlined a few impact areas — tangible outcomes that anyone in the Ethereum ecosystem can contribute toward.
These goals are not static; they will continue to evolve alongside the ecosystem and the needs of the world around us.
The Ethereum Foundation’s role is to identify high-leverage gaps — the places where it is uniquely positioned to contribute — and direct its efforts toward the greatest possible impact.
Goal: Maximize the number of people who (directly or indirectly) use Ethereum, in such a way that they benefit from Ethereum’s underlying values.
What meaningful usage can look like:
- Internet-native financial access: People using tokenized assets on Ethereum or DeFi for payments, savings and wealth building – particularly where fiat infrastructure is limited, unreliable or charges extortionate fees, or where the infrastructure is reliable today but can easily become unreliable tomorrow.
- Internet-native organizations: People participating in DAOs with programmable incentive structures that enable new forms of coordination, decision-making, and capital formation that transcend the limitations of traditional approaches
- Decentralized social media: People using an Ethereum-based social media platform where content is stored in a decentralized network, allowing users to switch clients without giving up their social graph
- Decentralized AI: People building on Ethereum to collectively train and provide AI models with verifiable security guarantees, and also using Ethereum to create economic frameworks where AI agents can coordinate with each other and human beings (examples: micro prediction markets)
- Enterprise benefits: People using an institutional application that uses Ethereum on the backend. If built correctly, this can provide benefits such as auditability, privacy, interoperability and “escape hatch” mechanisms even if users normally interact with the app through servers without a wallet (examples: on-chain-enforced limits to monetary issuance; ability to exit assets to L1 and interact with L1 DeFi; ability to zk-prove credentials to arbitrary third-party apps)
What it’s not:
- Custodial wallets that only allow ETH or token transfers to other approved custodial wallets.
- Institutions that post hashes onchain to represent events, without actually giving users security properties that they wouldn't otherwise have.
Goal: Maximize the resilience of Ethereum's technical and social infrastructure.
What resilience looks like:
- Ecosystem autonomy: thriving independently of the EF or any other single organization
- Value alignment: staying focused on its values, even in the face of strong interests pulling in other directions
- Team diversity: strength and plurality of independent development teams
- Network robustness: maintaining liveness, censorship resistance, safety even in the face of highly adverse events toward large parts of technical infrastructure (including “low levels of the stack” e.g. OS, hardware, internet)
- Decentralization: eliminating single points of control or failure
- Proactive risk management: The ecosystem’s ability to proactively identify and mitigate central points of failure that may arise over time
What it’s not:
- 100 strong teams in education, client development, or organizing events, yet all dependent on EF for funding
- High-resilience in some sectors, but very low-resilience in others, which then become critical bottlenecks (e.g. wallets, proprietary ZK provers, social single points of failure)
- Performative diversity that masks underlying common vulnerability (e.g. 20 clients that actually use most of the same code base, events in 100 countries that are run by the same centralized organization)
As we work toward these impact areas, we also remain grounded in a long-term perspective — one that sees Ethereum not just as a technology, but as a living ecosystem with the potential to serve humanity for generations to come.
We envision a future where Ethereum serves as a resilient, neutral platform for global coordination. That means that decentralization must remain preserved in both development and governance, innovation will flourish at every layer of the stack, and communities around the world can craft and sustain their own adaptive solutions. We believe the network’s technical and social resilience will only continue to grow stronger, and EF will do everything within its vision and ability to ensure that we succeed together.