Vitalik Buterin defines the role of the Ethereum Foundation

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, wrote on

“The Ethereum Foundation is a custodian of Ethereum – the original custodian”stated the Russian-Canadian developer. Its text defines, for the first time in written and public form, what the EF does, what it does not do and why. That same day, the EF board published an institutional letter on the same matter, confirming Buterin’s statements.

Vitalik stipulated what the new function of the Ethereum Foundation will be

According to the network’s co-founder, the new role of the EF is to “custody” specific Ethereum propertiesnot promoting its overall growth.

He mentioned that Ethereum’s mission is to «preserve technological sovereignty, allow cooperation without coercion or domination, and provide an escape route so that no person, organization or ideology can achieve total victory in cyberspace.»

To fulfill this role, the mandate of the EF groups four pillars under the acronym «CROPS»:

• Resistance to censorship and capture.

Both at the protocol level and in the applications and tools that the EF develops or finances, these four pillars are, according to Buterin, non-negotiable. “We are doubling down on Ethereum and are excited about its next chapter,” he wrote as he closed his post.

The mandate represents a change from the previous state: the EF operated with an implicit missionknown within the ecosystem but never formalized. The EF management framed this definition initiative as a sign of institutional maturity: «Systems that mature cannot maintain their culture only implicitly,» stated the institutional letter.

What changes in practice for the Ethereum Foundation?

The developer introduces three concepts in the new mandate that specifically define the role of the Foundation.

The first is Ethereum as a “sanctuary technology” (sanctuary technology): must function as a network that no person, organization or ideology can completely control. The EF, as custodian, will work to preserve that property.

The second is the «walkaway test» (exit proof): The protocol must be designed in such a way that any user can leave it without losing their assets or being trapped by third-party decisions. Adding functionality for specific use cases without guaranteeing that output is valid logic for other networks, but not for Ethereum, says the network’s co-founder.

On this point, Ethereum has demonstrated complications in the past. As reported by NoticiasVE, its latest updates, Pectra and Fusaka, in May and December 2025 respectively, facilitated different types of scams on the network that they effectively led to users losing their assets.

The third point highlighted by the Russian-Canadian is the «zero option» (option zero). At the application layer, the EF will prioritize developing user experiences that maximize privacy, security and absence of intermediarieseven if that means sacrificing simplicity. Projects that prioritize mass adoption over user sovereignty have, according to the mandate, place outside the EF.

Likewise, projects that rely on whitelisting, identity verification (KYC), multiple signatures with broad powers, or centralized interfaces will be outside the financing and capital deployment criteria of the EFaccording to the EF treasury policy published in June 2025.

ETH sales, now with written rules

On the same March 13, the EF confirmed the sale of 5,000 ETH at an average price of USD 2,042.96 per unit, approximately USD 10.2 million in totalthrough an OTC operation (over-the-counterthat is, outside a public exchange) with Bitmine, a publicly listed Bitcoin mining company in the United States.

Along with the mandate, the Ethereum Foundation recalled its treasury management policy. The document establishes that the organization will sell ETH periodically to finance operations.

As reported by NoticiasVE, the Ethereum community has in the past questioned both the EF’s authority over the protocol’s technological development decisions and its ETH sales, arguing that these movements generate downward pressure on the asset’s price.

Faced with these questions, Ignacio Hagopian, developer of the Ethereum Foundation, told NoticiasVE last June that «it is impossible to expect the Ethereum Foundation to work without selling ether.» According to his explanation, the EF (non-profit entity created to promote and sustain the development of the protocol) uses part of its reserves in ETH to finance tasks ranging from maintenance of the base software to support for independent developers and researchers.

The mandate revealed on March 13 does not resolve these tensions directly, but it establishes in writing the limits that the EF imposes on itself.