Ethereum’s power lies in its decentralization — not simply technically, however socially and structurally. This weblog articulates the EF’s imaginative and prescient, its function, and priorities as one of many ecosystem’s stewards. We use this second as a chance to restate our imaginative and prescient, rules and values which we proceed to uphold as we welcome the brand new administration staff. These priorities aren’t a inflexible plan and are mirrored within the methods described by EF’s Co-EDs. By defining our method and focus, we additionally intention to make clear the place we direct our efforts — and the place we deliberately step again — in order that the ecosystem can proceed to thrive with everybody’s participation.
Imaginative and prescient
To steward the Infinite Backyard — the ecosystem of tasks, communities, and infrastructure constructed round Ethereum — to stay resilient amid altering environments. We uphold Ethereum as humanity’s shared world laptop, an open and permissionless platform that’s already bringing stability, freedom and technologically-empowered collaboration to hundreds of thousands of individuals worldwide. We honor the truth that Ethereum is already in use, creating actual worth for communities throughout the globe.
In that spirit, we embrace the metaphor of the Infinite Backyard to explain the Ethereum ecosystem: a residing, evolving house the place builders, dreamers, and stewards from world wide can plant concepts and help one another as we construct the instruments that may redefine finance, id and different roots within the soil of our civilization for many years to come back.
Our Position
Ethereum’s best benefit is its unparalleled ecosystem. There are a lot of groups and organizations exterior of EF that contribute to Ethereum by pushing its boundaries ahead, by technical improvements, instructional occasions, and by funding public items. The Ethereum Basis exists to strengthen this benefit and to uphold Ethereum’s core values. We establish gaps, appropriate imbalances, and help essential initiatives — at all times making certain that no single actor (together with EF) can dominate Ethereum’s evolution. We step in strategically and step out deliberately, constantly adjusting our focus as Ethereum matures and the surroundings evolves.
By training purposeful subtraction, we’ve empowered others within the ecosystem to tackle nearly all of obligations. At this time, we see our function as twofold:
- We do what nobody else can do in the present day.
- We assist others do tomorrow what solely we will do in the present day.
This implies specializing in high-leverage areas the place EF’s distinctive place permits us to help the ecosystem in methods few others can — whereas additionally constructing capability and infrastructure so others can ultimately take the lead. Under are examples of how this reveals up in follow:
The place we step in to do what nobody else can in the present day:
- Funding and sustaining essential Ethereum infrastructure like consumer variety.
- Coordinating on core protocol upgrades (e.g. The Merge, Dencun), the place impartial stewardship is crucial – each on essential initiatives that may full throughout the subsequent 12 months, and on longer-term efforts that may outline Ethereum’s function for the subsequent decade.
- Supporting zero-knowledge analysis and open-source tooling that pushes the frontier of privacy-preserving tech.
- Internet hosting ecosystem-wide gatherings (like Devcon) that carry collectively numerous world contributors.
- Working ethereum.org as a impartial public data hub for brand new customers and builders.
The place we’ve helped others develop into roles we as soon as held:
- Seeding early-stage public items tasks by grants till they change into self-sustaining or community-funded
- Open-sourcing instructional content material, developer tooling, and analysis to be constructed upon by others.
- Serving to new coordination mechanisms emerge and guiding them towards impartial stewardship (e.g. MACI pilots, Protocol Guild, retroactive public items funding).
- Supporting geographic decentralization and native management by:
- Subsequent Billion Fellowship – Empowering native builders in underserved areas.
- Grants to grassroots communities – Strengthening native Ethereum ecosystems.
- Street to Devcon – Partaking and rising regional communities forward of Devcon.
- Devcon Students – Offering entry and help for contributors from underrepresented communities.
Our Method
Adaptive Evolution
We evolve alongside the ecosystem, constantly reassessing our function and influence. Our construction and initiatives adapt to serve Ethereum’s altering wants whereas sustaining our core rules.
Considerate Complexity
We embrace the mandatory complexity of decentralized techniques whereas striving for elegant options. Our purpose just isn’t simplification for its personal sake however slightly attaining stability by cautious design.
We help and amplify community-led initiatives, serving to create situations the place impartial groups can succeed with out ongoing dependency on the Basis.
Core Rules:
Lengthy‑time period Pondering
We optimize for Ethereum’s lengthy‑time period success over brief‑time period beneficial properties, evaluating each choice for its sustainable, multi‑generational influence and recognizing that lasting resilience requires steady studying, adaptation, and evolution.
Stewardship of Values
We shield and nurture Ethereum’s core values — censorship resistance, open supply, privateness, and safety — whereas empowering the ecosystem to develop and evolve independently. We protect these important qualities as the muse for lasting innovation and progress.
Purposeful Subtraction
Moderately than accumulate energy, we design for resilience by:
- Sustaining a plurality of approaches, options, and groups
- Enabling numerous participation
- Facilitating collaboration
- Decreasing centralization
Constructing resilience isn’t about doing much less. It usually requires including new mechanisms or complexity — however at all times with the purpose of making an anti‑fragile ecosystem that distributes energy and possession broadly.
Targets Forward
As we transfer by a pivotal time and into the years forward, our route is formed by a transparent imaginative and prescient. Groups are deeply engaged, and energetic tasks are already in movement to help Ethereum’s continued evolution. The work forward isn’t about hitting benchmarks — it’s about focusing our power the place it issues most. To assist information our collective focus, we’ve outlined a number of influence areas — tangible outcomes that anybody within the Ethereum ecosystem can contribute towards.
These objectives aren’t static; they may proceed to evolve alongside the ecosystem and the wants of the world round us.
The Ethereum Basis’s function is to establish high-leverage gaps — the locations the place it’s uniquely positioned to contribute — and direct its efforts towards the best doable influence.
Objective: Maximize the quantity of people that (immediately or not directly) use Ethereum, in such a approach that they profit from Ethereum’s underlying values.
What significant utilization can appear like:
- Web-native monetary entry: Individuals utilizing tokenized property on Ethereum or DeFi for funds, financial savings and wealth constructing – notably the place fiat infrastructure is proscribed, unreliable or costs extortionate charges, or the place the infrastructure is dependable in the present day however can simply change into unreliable tomorrow.
- Web-native organizations: Individuals taking part in DAOs with programmable incentive buildings that allow new types of coordination, decision-making, and capital formation that transcend the restrictions of conventional approaches
- Decentralized social media: Individuals utilizing an Ethereum-based social media platform the place content material is saved in a decentralized community, permitting customers to modify purchasers with out giving up their social graph
- Decentralized AI: Individuals constructing on Ethereum to collectively practice and supply AI fashions with verifiable safety ensures, and likewise utilizing Ethereum to create financial frameworks the place AI brokers can coordinate with one another and human beings (examples: micro prediction markets)
- Enterprise advantages: Individuals utilizing an institutional utility that makes use of Ethereum on the backend. If constructed appropriately, this will present advantages similar to auditability, privateness, interoperability and “escape hatch” mechanisms even when customers usually work together with the app by servers and not using a pockets (examples: on-chain-enforced limits to financial issuance; capacity to exit property to L1 and work together with L1 DeFi; capacity to zk-prove credentials to arbitrary third-party apps)
What it’s not:
- Custodial wallets that solely permit ETH or token transfers to different authorized custodial wallets.
- Establishments that put up hashes onchain to symbolize occasions, with out truly giving customers safety properties that they would not in any other case have.
Objective: Maximize the resilience of Ethereum’s technical and social infrastructure.
What resilience appears to be like like:
- Ecosystem autonomy: thriving independently of the EF or every other single group
- Worth alignment: staying centered on its values, even within the face of robust pursuits pulling in different instructions
- Group variety: power and plurality of impartial improvement groups
- Community robustness: sustaining liveness, censorship resistance, security even within the face of extremely antagonistic occasions towards giant elements of technical infrastructure (together with “low ranges of the stack” e.g. OS, {hardware}, web)
- Decentralization: eliminating single factors of management or failure
- Proactive danger administration: The ecosystem’s capacity to proactively establish and mitigate central factors of failure that will come up over time
What it’s not:
- 100 robust groups in schooling, consumer improvement, or organizing occasions, but all depending on EF for funding
- Excessive-resilience in some sectors, however very low-resilience in others, which then change into essential bottlenecks (e.g. wallets, proprietary ZK provers, social single factors of failure)
- Performative variety that masks underlying widespread vulnerability (e.g. 20 purchasers that really use many of the identical code base, occasions in 100 international locations which might be run by the identical centralized group)
As we work towards these influence areas, we additionally stay grounded in a long-term perspective — one which sees Ethereum not simply as a expertise, however as a residing ecosystem with the potential to serve humanity for generations to come back.
We envision a future the place Ethereum serves as a resilient, impartial platform for world coordination. That implies that decentralization should stay preserved in each improvement and governance, innovation will flourish at each layer of the stack, and communities world wide can craft and maintain their very own adaptive options. We consider the community’s technical and social resilience will solely proceed to develop stronger, and EF will do every thing inside its imaginative and prescient and talent to make sure that we succeed collectively.
