Vitalik Buterin Says EF Should Be the "Unreasonable Man" of Crypto

Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy personal statement on X laying out where he believes the Ethereum Foundation is going. It was not a press release. It read more like a confession.

He opened by clarifying that the board is not just him, that Aya Miyaguchi, EF’s executive director, is executing much of the transition, and that his own power within the organisation will keep going down. He called that outcome something he genuinely wants.

The Google Analogy Nobody Else Is Talking About

The part most outlets skipped is buried halfway through Vitalik’s post. He invokes George Bernard Shaw’s concept of the “Unreasonable Man,” applying it directly to what the EF should become relative to the wider crypto industry. He compares the situation to Google circa 2008, saying that if he could have pressed a button then to make Google “one or two standard deviations more dogmatic,” he would have done it without hesitation.

His reasoning was not nostalgia. It was structural. One organisation choosing to be ideologically rigid, he wrote, provides a counterweight when an entire industry is drifting toward what he called greed for financial gain and craven capitulation to government pressure for surveillance and control.

He is applying that same logic to the EF right now.

As Zeitgeist Jones posted on X: “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.” — Jones called it the work of a “genuine dude.”

The line matters because it tells you whose feedback is actually steering EF decisions. Not the BD crowd demanding faster execution. Not the institutional desks pushing for TPS benchmarks. Vitalik wrote that some people were probably hearing that EF was finally taking execution seriously and should keep going that way. He said their view and his view are just different, and that difference is now written into EF policy.

Smaller Ship, Harder Positions

The EF holds roughly 0.16% of all ETH, according to Vitalik’s post. He contrasted that with other blockchain foundations that typically hold 10 to 50 percent of their native supply. He used that figure to argue the EF was never designed to be an eternal steward, that its original mandate from the 2014 token sale was to ship Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity, and that mandate was completed in 2022.

What comes next is a deliberate narrowing. EF will focus only on activities critical to Ethereum as a censorship-resistant, open, private, and secure system that would not happen otherwise. Vitalik’s post on X was explicit: people of great technical talent and even genuine mission alignment will be outside the EF. That is not a failure. It is required if those people want to attract outside capital.

As Arry Tiwari posted on X: “Vitalik dropping a 10-page manifesto on why Ethereum should be the ‘Unreasonable Chain’ instead of chasing Solana TPS clout is peak cypherpunk. EF shrinking itself on purpose while doubling down on provable security, intermediary-minimization, and actual privacy?”

The three technical goals Vitalik listed under his CROPS framework are each aggressive. First: provably bug-free Ethereum through AI-assisted formal verification, which he acknowledged all cybersecurity researchers would have considered impossible until roughly six months ago. Second: available chain consensus that holds both traditional Byzantine fault tolerance properties and Bitcoin-style safety under synchrony, something he says no other major chain is even planning for. Third: full intermediary minimisation for transaction sending, which he described as an active embarrassment in the current state of the protocol.

That last point matters for any retail ETH holder watching how their wallet actually works today. Most wallets do not verify the chain. They send private data to a dozen third-party servers. Vitalik named Kohaku as the project pulling the user layer toward a different state, alongside FOCIL and EIP-8141 at the protocol layer.

What the Privacy Camp Says

As Zchat, the shielded messaging app, posted on X: “governance reform is cosmetic when every transaction is still visible by default. privacy is a protocol decision, not a board decision.”

That tension sits underneath the entire post. Vitalik is announcing a cultural and structural pivot for the EF. But the privacy-first wing of Ethereum development has been pointing out for years that the gap between stated values and default on-chain behaviour is wide. Formal verification milestones and board reshuffles do not close that gap directly.

Aya Miyaguchi, in a separate statement cited by The Block, said the mandate was developed to make the EF’s guiding principles more explicit as Ethereum’s ecosystem expands. The foundation described its role as focusing on work with “no other natural home,” specifically protocol research and security. Per The Block’s reporting on the EF mandate, the foundation also codified CROPS, covering censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security as its operational constitution.

ETH open interest on Ethereum derivatives stood at roughly $8.4 billion on May 23, per Coinglass data, a number that has held relatively stable even as EF governance discourse picked up. Nearly 90% of Vitalik’s net worth is in ETH, he stated directly, with the remaining roughly $40 million in on-chain fiat already allocated to open-source biotech and hardware initiatives.

The new EF will be smaller. More opinionated. In Vitalik’s words, opinionated “in ways that might be difficult to comprehend.” He framed that not as a risk but as the point.