Ethereum Foundation Reboots: New Management, Vision, and Focus for the Coming Year

Note: Under the pressure of the long-term downturn in ETH prices, the Ethereum Fund will accelerate the pace of adjustment in 2025, with Aya Miyaguchi officially becoming the chairman of the Ethereum Foundation on February 25, 2025, and Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak serving as co-executive directors of Ethereum on March 17. On April 28, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation posted three articles on its official website, from the new management to the Ethereum vision, and then to the focus of the coming year, re-demonstrating the determination of the Ethereum Foundation to start again.

1. Management and Board Structure

The Ethereum Foundation recently appointed two co-executive directors and a chairperson.

New Management Team (Strategy and Operations Execution)

The co-executive director of Ethereum will lead and execute together with other management members.

• Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director
• Tomasz K. Stańczak, Co-Executive Director
• Bastian Aue, Key Areas: Organizational Strategy, Recruitment and Training, Joint Contract Management
• Josh Stark, Key Areas: Project Execution, Communication and Marketing, Co-Management

Board of Directors (Supervision and Vision)

The Ethereum Board acts like a security committee, guarding the core and soul of EF, and ensuring its compliance as a Swiss foundation. The board sets the vision and oversees whether the senior management's high-level strategies and decisions align with the foundation's values. The board is also responsible for selecting the executive director and terminating the appointment of executives when necessary. The current board members include:

• Vitalik Buterin, Founder — Continuing to provide technical and knowledge guidance for the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
• Aya Miyaguchi, Chairwoman - Collaborates with other board members to establish the vision of the Ethereum Foundation. Responsible for managing some important external relationships.
• Patrick Storchenegger, Swiss legal advisor - serves as the representative for Swiss legal and compliance affairs.
• Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director - Serving as a bridge between the board, executives, and management.

The board has shared the vision, guiding principles, and goals for the next few years with the management team. We look forward to further strengthening the board so that it can better fulfill its mission.

Appointing Tomasz and Hsiao-Wei Wang as co-directors is an unconventional decision, but it allows them to complement each other during the busy times in the Ethereum ecosystem and the EF.

Tomasz will leverage his understanding of community and technical needs to help the Ethereum Foundation (EF) drive strong and comprehensive change, while he will continue to be involved in the operations of other companies (Nethermind and the venture capital alliance). The board and Tomasz have agreed that he will serve as co-director of the EF for a term expected to last two years, in order to fully utilize his proven strategic execution expertise and experience, especially in the context of significant opportunities that will arise for Ethereum in the coming years.

Hsiao-Wei's dual role as a board member and executive director, along with her research experience, will help her serve as a bridge between the board and management, focusing on the organization's needs and gaining a deep understanding of the organization's history and status.

2. Vision of the Ethereum Foundation by Aya Miyaguchi and Vitalik Buterin

Vision

Guarding the Infinite Garden - an ecosystem of projects, communities, and infrastructures built around Ethereum - ensures its resilience in an ever-changing environment. Upholding the idea of Ethereum as a shared world computer for humanity, it is an open and permissionless platform that has brought stability, freedom, and technology-enabled collaboration to millions of people worldwide. We respect the fact that Ethereum is already in use and is creating real value for the global community.

In this spirit, we use the metaphor of an infinite garden to describe the Ethereum ecosystem: a vibrant and ever-evolving space where builders, dreamers, and managers from around the world can sow ideas, support each other, and collaboratively build tools that will redefine finance, identity, and other roots in the soil of civilization for decades to come.

The Role of the Ethereum Fund

The greatest advantage of Ethereum lies in its unparalleled ecosystem. In addition to the Ethereum Foundation (EF), many teams and organizations contribute to Ethereum through technological innovations, educational activities, and funding public goods, constantly expanding its boundaries. The existence of the Ethereum Foundation aims to strengthen this advantage and uphold the core values of Ethereum. We identify gaps, correct imbalances, and support key initiatives—ensuring that no single participant (including the EF) can dominate the evolution of Ethereum. We strategically intervene and consciously withdraw, continuously adjusting our focus as Ethereum matures and the environment evolves.

By strategically implementing "subtraction," we have empowered other members in the ecosystem to take on most of the responsibilities. Today, we believe our role has a dual nature:

• What we do is something that others cannot do at the moment.
• We help others accomplish what only we can achieve today for tomorrow.

This means we need to focus on high leverage areas, where EF's unique position allows us to support the ecosystem in ways that other institutions cannot, while also building capabilities and infrastructure so that other institutions can eventually take the lead. Here are examples of how this is reflected in practice:

We can do things that others cannot do at present:

• Funding and maintaining critical Ethereum infrastructure, such as client diversity.
• Coordinate core protocol upgrades (e.g., The Merge, Dencun), where neutral governance is crucial—this includes both key initiatives to be completed within the next 12 months and long-term efforts that will determine Ethereum's role over the next decade.
• Supports zero-knowledge research and open-source tools to promote the development of privacy protection technologies.
• Hold ecosystem-wide gatherings (such as Devcon) to bring together diverse contributors from around the world.
• Operate ethereum.org as a neutral public knowledge center for new users and builders.

We help others grow into the roles they have once held:

• Funding early public goods projects through grants until they can sustain themselves or are funded by the community
• Open educational content, development tools, and research for others to reference.
• Help new coordination mechanisms emerge and guide them towards independent management (e.g., MACI pilot, protocol associations, tracing public goods funding).
• Support geographical decentralization and local leadership in the following ways:

• The next billion scholarships - providing support to local builders in underserved areas.
• Provide funding to grassroots communities - strengthen the local Ethereum ecosystem.
• The Road to Devcon - Attracting and Developing Regional Communities Before Devcon.
• Devcon Scholars - Providing opportunities and support for participants from underrepresented communities.

Our method

Adaptive Evolution: We evolve alongside the ecosystem, continuously reassessing our roles and influence. Our architecture and initiatives are constantly adjusted to meet the changing demands of Ethereum, while adhering to our core principles.

Thoughtful Complexity: We embrace the necessary complexity of decentralized systems while striving to provide elegant solutions. Our goal is not simplification for the sake of simplification, but to achieve balance through careful design.

Community Empowerment: We support and expand community-led initiatives to help create conditions for independent teams to succeed without relying on the foundation continuously.

Core Principles:

Long-term considerations: We optimize for the long-term success of Ethereum rather than short-term gains, evaluating the sustainability and multi-generational impacts of each decision, and recognizing that enduring resilience requires continuous learning, adaptation, and growth.

Guarding Values: We protect and cultivate the core values of Ethereum—censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security—while empowering the ecosystem to develop independently. We uphold these fundamental characteristics as the foundation for enduring innovation and progress.

Purposeful Subtraction

We do not accumulate power, but design resilience through the following ways:

• Maintain multiple methods, solutions, and teams
• Achieve diversified participation
• Promote cooperation
• Reduce centralization

Building resilience does not mean doing less. It often requires adding new mechanisms or complexities—but always with the aim of creating an antifragile ecosystem that can widely distribute power and ownership.

Future Goals

At this critical moment, looking to the future, a clear vision will guide our direction forward. The team is actively engaged, and multiple projects have already been launched to support the ongoing development of Ethereum. Future work is not about pursuing excellence, but rather focusing our efforts on the most important things. To guide our common goals, we have outlined several impactful areas—tangible outcomes that everyone 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 world around us.

The role of the Ethereum Foundation is to identify areas of high leverage gap—where it has unique advantages to contribute—and to direct its efforts toward making the greatest possible impact.

Goal 1: Maximize the number of people (directly or indirectly) using Ethereum so that they can benefit from the underlying value of Ethereum.

A meaningful usage is as follows:

• Internet-native financial access: People use Ether or tokenized assets on DeFi for payments, savings, and wealth accumulation—especially in situations where the fiat infrastructure is limited, unreliable, or charges excessive fees, or where the infrastructure is reliable today but can easily become unreliable tomorrow.
• Internet-native organizations: Participants in DAOs have programmable incentive structures that enable new forms of coordination, decision-making, and capital formation that go beyond the limitations of traditional methods.
• Decentralized social media: People use Ethereum-based social media platforms where the content is stored on a decentralized network, allowing users to switch clients without losing their social graph.
• Decentralized Artificial Intelligence: People collectively train on Ethereum and provide verifiable security guarantees for AI models, while using Ethereum to create AI agents that can coordinate with each other and with humans within an economic framework (e.g., micro-prediction markets).
• Enterprise-level advantages: Users of institutional-level applications that use Ethereum as the backend. If built correctly, it can provide advantages such as auditability, privacy, interoperability, and "secure exit" mechanisms even when users typically interact with the application through servers without wallets (for example: on-chain enforced restrictions on currency issuance; the ability to withdraw assets to Layer-1 and interact with Layer-1 DeFi; the ability to provide zero-knowledge proofs to any third-party application).

It is not:

• Custodial wallet, only allows transferring ETH or tokens to other approved custodial wallets.
• Organizations publish hash values on the blockchain to represent events, but in reality, they do not provide users with security attributes that they would not have otherwise.

Objective 2: Maximize the resilience of Ethereum technology and social infrastructure.

What is resilience like:

• Ecosystem autonomy: Thriving independently of EF or any other single organization.
• Shared values: Even in the face of strong interests from other directions, one should adhere to their own values.
• Team Diversity: The strength and diversity of an independent development team
• Network Robustness: The ability to maintain activity, censorship resistance, and security even when faced with extremely adverse events targeting most technical infrastructure (including the "lower layers of the stack", such as operating systems, hardware, and the internet).
• Decentralization: Eliminate single points of control or failure
• Active Risk Management: The ability of the ecosystem to proactively identify and mitigate potential central failure points that may emerge over time.

It is not:

• 100 powerful educational, customer development, or organizational activity teams, but all rely on EF for funding.
• Some areas have high elasticity, while others have very low elasticity, which becomes a critical bottleneck (e.g., wallets, proprietary ZK provers, social single points of failure)
• The diversity of implementations masks potential common weaknesses (for example, 20 clients that actually use mostly the same codebase, operated by a single centralized organization across 100 countries/regions).

In our efforts to achieve these areas of impact, we always take a long-term perspective—not only viewing Ethereum as a technology but also as a living ecosystem with the potential to serve future generations.

We envision a future where Ethereum will become a resilient and neutral global collaboration platform. This means that decentralization must be preserved in development and governance, innovation will thrive at every layer of the stack, and communities around the world will be able to build and maintain their own adaptive solutions. We believe that the technical and social resilience of the Ethereum network will only continue to grow, and the Ethereum Foundation (EF) will do its utmost within its vision and capabilities to ensure our collective success.

3. The Next Chapter of the Ethereum Foundation

We are Hsiao-Wei and Tomasz, and we are co-authoring this blog post. We have been the new co-CEOs for almost a month now. The honeymoon period is over, and it's time to take action.

A Moment of Transformation and Opportunity

Ethereum has always been a journey: an evolving ecosystem driven by those committed to building a more open and decentralized world. Although the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has a history of ten years, it continues to boldly reshape itself.

This year, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has implemented a new leadership model with dual executive directors. This design brings diverse and complementary perspectives, enhancing our ability to tackle complex challenges. We eagerly embrace future opportunities and challenges, maintaining a strong commitment to the core values of Ethereum, grounded in management, coordination, and long-term thinking.

Importantly, EF is not a two-headed horse-drawn carriage moving in different directions. Our relationship is built on mutual respect, trust, and shared values. We work closely together, challenge each other, and ultimately move forward as a united team with a common goal.

Our Principles and Focus Areas

Looking to the future, we will uphold two main pillars: guiding principles (our core values) and goals (our pursuit of impact and resilience). Excellent technology is the foundation of all our work and the cornerstone of our mission.

As Executive Directors, our responsibility is to implement the vision of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) in a constantly changing world. Our duties include strategic planning, ecosystem management, team leadership, and operational oversight. All of this is to support the long-term success of Ethereum.

The values we advocate:

• Anti-censorship: Ensure that Ethereum remains an open network where anyone, anywhere can transact and build without any barriers or external control.
• Open Source Innovation: Promoting collaboration, transparency, and community-driven development through publicly shared knowledge and tools.
• Privacy Protection: Achieve private interactions without sacrificing security, ensuring personal freedom and autonomy in the digital world.
• Security: By prioritizing secure design and ongoing research, maintain the trust, robustness, and resilience of the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

These values guide our technology choices, our support for the ecosystem, and our long-term vision of Ethereum as a public good.

While keeping these values in mind, we have set our main direction for the next 12 months:

• Expand Ethereum mainnet
• Blob Expansion
• Improve user experience, including L2 interoperability + application layer

Overall, this means improving the interoperability and coordination of the mainnet and L2, UX, DevEx, allowing applications and L2 to gain more presence and attention at Devcon, and expanding their information through communication channels.

In addition, we are well aware that we need to accelerate the process for developers, founders, and institutions to build and apply on Ethereum. The Ethereum Foundation has extensive knowledge and leaders who can guide, lead, attract, and nurture talent.

Tomasz：

Ethereum has opened a new chapter. Its values remain unchanged: open-source, anti-censorship, privacy, and security. The Ethereum Foundation will transform - becoming a more open organization for communication, one willing to engage in difficult conversations immediately.

We will focus on execution speed, accountability, clear goals, objectives, and measurable metrics. We will concentrate on the success of the Ethereum mainnet protocol. The Ethereum mainnet will always be a global neutral network, a trusted trustless protocol. We will focus on the success of the Ethereum mainnet and the entire ecosystem—L2 will bring mass adoption and numerous benefits to users, and the mainnet will serve as a solid cornerstone and flexible network behind all transactions and coordination mechanisms. We are excited about this journey—it will be one of the most inspiring technological and social transformations we have ever experienced, and we will embark on this journey together—with visionary individuals and down-to-earth builders.

Our expansion work for the next year includes: expanding the Ethereum mainnet (Layer1) and supporting its successful scaling by providing the best architecture for Layer2 chains, ensuring network security and enhancing user confidence. Our goal is to integrate the entire blockchain ecosystem by providing the best user experience, design, and interoperability, while achieving scalability through excellent engineering design and cutting-edge research.

Hsiao-Wei ：

In the coming months, my top priority will be to strengthen the operations of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) to support the development of the ecosystem. A strong and adaptable foundation will help us better serve Ethereum's long-term mission.

As we focus more on development, one of our goals is to better support the application layer of Ethereum. We will provide support for developers and users by enhancing the developer and user experience, clarifying standards, strengthening the ecosystem, and streamlining the entire process from idea to practical application.

We are working hard to improve the planning, prioritization, and coordination of the Ethereum Foundation's internal team and the entire ecosystem to ensure that our work aligns with community needs and the cryptopunk spirit of Ethereum. Strengthening the EF is just part of the transformation. The real drive comes from the vitality and creativity of the global Ethereum ecosystem.

( Building a shared future

Ethereum is not a monolith. It is a vibrant network made up of communities, builders, researchers, artists, educators, and dreamers. It is global, diverse, and prides itself on decentralization. We are constantly inspired by the creativity and resilience of the ecosystem. Ethereum will continue to emerge where we are needed the most, while also making space for itself to thrive as the ecosystem flourishes. It is a community-led future.

The road ahead is filled with infinite possibilities. Ethereum has completely transformed the potential in fields such as technology, finance, and governance. To everyone who is building, teaching, researching, experimenting, and envisioning a new future: Thank you! Together, we create achievements that far exceed any single team, project, or generation. We are honored to walk alongside you and are filled with anticipation for the future.