Ethereum Foundation (EF) Executive Director Aerugo has released a comprehensive statement clarifying the Foundation's mission, operational priorities, and recent controversies surrounding personnel changes and organizational spinouts. Aerugo stated that the EF's mandate is no longer an open question: the Foundation exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains genuine permissionless, censorship-resistant, self-sovereign infrastructure.
Aerugo explicitly stated that the EF does not exist to optimize its own importance, political appeal, or ecosystem popularity, nor to serve short-term speculators, too-big-to-fail neo-SIFIs, or any interest groups. The EF will not make Ethereum more acceptable by sanding off the properties that make it uniquely valuable, nor become another permissioned settlement backend with better branding. The core work is to defensively strengthen Ethereum across all layers (protocol, access, user, and institutional layers) against capture by states, cartels, or intermediaries.
Eliminating Weaknesses: From Internal Governance to the Transaction Pipeline
The EF begins with itself, moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant native stablecoins, forcing team members to experience firsthand the real constraints faced by Ethereum users. The transaction pipeline is the next frontier: toxic MEV capture must be minimized, and privileged order flow, centralized builders, trusted relays, and opaque routing must not subvert Ethereum's neutrality. Aerugo noted that solutions like FOCIL, ePBS, and encrypted mempools each carry trade-offs, and the EF must address the extraction problem at a systemic level rather than through whack-a-mole fixes. If credibly neutral execution is compromised, Ethereum will appear permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. Protocol work will prioritize lowering barriers to block building and validation, strengthening inclusion guarantees, reducing extraction opacity, fostering competitive transaction pipelines, and aggressively exploring open order flow solutions.
Privacy and Staking: Non-Negotiable Foundations
Privacy is elevated to the same fundamental level as censorship resistance. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate. Aerugo stated the EF will push for unconditional privacy as a default on Ethereum, rather than forcing users to assemble fragile stacks of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, and compliance providers. Unconditional privacy must come first, with opt-in constraints secondary. Staking is no longer treated merely as a yield product but as protocol infrastructure risk. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance power concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum's security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through the economic layer. The EF will support research, specifications, and designs that keep staking permissionless, private where possible, plural in operation, and resistant to permanent intermediary control points.
Seizing Opportunities: Quantum Resistance, AI Agents, and Institutional Adoption
Beyond defense, the EF must actively seize strategic opportunities. Aerugo listed several directions: Ethereum should become the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure, with researchers leading the post-quantum cryptographic migration before the threat becomes urgent; build a verifiably self-sovereign stack from browsers to recovery, enabling private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant digital cash (ETH); support personal AI agents running on users' own devices, because "not your model, not your mind"; win institutional adoption by proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries must meet Ethereum users on Ethereum's terms; and achieve security-preserving scaling through L2s that maintain self-sovereignty under real load. Scale is not throughput alone but the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty.
Addressing Departures and Spinouts
Regarding the wave of speculation about EF departures, Aerugo confirmed that some people resigned, others were terminated, for reasons ranging from strategic disagreement to role fit, normal institutional change, or personal choice. The EF will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter; departing contributors deserve dignity. If public claims materially mislead about EF's direction, the Foundation may correct the record at the policy or process level but will not turn personal files into public spectacle. On spinouts, Aerugo emphasized that spinout is not automatically good; the EF will continue to evaluate external funding against mission-critical criteria, only supporting work that is essential, has no better natural home, and does not increase capture risk or opacity. EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate, and will spend all three as if they matter.
Aerugo concluded by reaffirming that the EF is one of many nodes committed to self-sovereignty as the North Star, but it is not neutral on Ethereum's direction. The CROPS properties (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security, etc.) must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork. Ethereum will outlast all of us and become the hardest bedrock for settlement — when future civilizations speak of the infrastructure inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum.