Vitalik Buterin Unveils New Plan to Shake Up the Ethereum Foundation

It's been a rough year for the Ethereum Foundation, the grant-giving nonprofit that helps support Ethereum, the best-known blockchain behind Bitcoin.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revealed that he is personally making decisions about the Ethereum Foundation's leadership team following a pressure campaign to remove the foundation's executive director, Aya Miyaguchi.

"The person deciding the new EF leadership team is me," Buterin stated in an X post on Monday. "One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to give the EF a 'proper board', but until that happens it's me."

The foundation, a grant-giving nonprofit, has been making changes to its leadership structure for close to a year, Buterin added.

In his X post, Buterin listed a series of goals for the foundation, including improving the "technical expertise within EF leadership" and enhancing "two-way communications and ties between EF leadership and the ecosystem actors" that it supports.

The changes are not designed to centralize, corporatize or politicize the foundation, Buterin stated. The organization will not suddenly "[s]tart aggressively lobbying regulators and powerful political figures," he said, nor would it "[b]ecome an arena for vested interests [...] or even more of a 'main character' within Ethereum."

The foundation's reputation among builders has soured in recent months as members of the broader crypto community flock to fast and cheap competitors like Solana, which has been quicker to accommodate the recent memecoin fervor.

Some say Ethereum has lagged because it lacks an organizing vision — something the foundation, while not "in charge" of Ethereum, might have helped remedy.

Over the past 12 months, the foundation has also been mired in controversy. It has weathered accusations of being both ineffectual and too powerful. Conflict-of-interest scandals haven't helped, either: Payments from private companies to foundation employees recently sparked wide backlash and forced the organization to update its policies.

Some have blamed Miyaguchi for the foundation's woes. But Buterin lambasted some of her critics on X, accusing them of using her as a "scapegoat."

In multiple tweets, Buterin highlighted certain particularly inflammatory social media comments — including death threats and explicit calls for more bullying of Miyaguchi — and called them "pure evil."

"If you 'keep the pressure on', then you are creating an environment that is actively toxic to top talent," Buterin wrote. "Some of Ethereum's best devs have been messaging me recently, expressing their disgust with the social media environment that people like you are creating. YOU ARE MAKING MY JOB HARDER."