Buterin shrinks influence at Ethereum Foundation as ETH sales slow

Vitalik Buterin plans to scale back his influence on the Ethereum Foundation board as the organization expands its leadership and runs a multi-month transition led by president Aya Miyaguchi. The board will grow to dilute any single member’s control.

The Foundation narrowed its mission to four technical priorities it calls CROPS: censorship resistance, openness, privacy and security. The organization will stop focusing on raw transaction speed and concentrate on technical work that other chains are less likely to pursue.

The Foundation will reduce the pace of ETH sales to preserve treasury resources and has moved part of its holdings into staking. Buterin wrote, ‘today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH).’

Technical goals include making Ethereum provably free of major bugs through formal verification assisted by artificial intelligence, building a lean consensus layer designed to remain safe in asynchronous network conditions and under scenarios where an attacker controls a large share of hashpower, and reducing intermediaries with protocol proposals such as FOCIL and EIP-8141. The Foundation also highlighted wallet-layer work like Kohaku to lower dependence on third-party servers.

The Foundation holds about 0.16% of all ether and reported that 99.1% of its reserves remain in ETH. That stake is smaller than several individual holders and far below treasury sizes common at some rival chain foundations, which often control between 10% and 50% of supply.

Buterin reported nearly 90% of his personal net worth is tied to ETH, with the remainder allocated to open-source projects in biotech, software and hardware.

The Foundation expects outside groups to take on work it will no longer prioritize, including activities that support ETH as an asset. The organization plans to provide initial support to those groups but has not detailed specific partnerships or funding.

The change follows criticism from parts of the community that some Foundation actions did not match public commitments to decentralization and privacy. The Foundation expects the leadership and operational changes to settle over the coming months as it aligns with the wider Ethereum 2026 vision. Ethereum traded around $2,100 as of this writing.