Aerugo, the newly appointed Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), has published an extensive post outlining the EF's mandate and responding to recent personnel controversies. The statement makes clear that the EF's purpose is no longer an open-ended question: the EF exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty — censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure; capable of supporting sovereignty-preserving coordination at scales where trusted institutions have previously been unavoidable.
What the EF Is Not For, and What It Is For
Aerugo explicitly states that the EF is not for optimizing its own importance, corporate/political appeal, or ecosystem popularity; nor is it for pleasing short-term speculators, propping up too-big-to-fail neo-SIFIs, marketing every app on Ethereum, or helping anyone look good to their crypto or investor friends. The core work of the EF is defensive: to reinforce places where Ethereum is or can become extractive, totalizing, vulnerable to cartel or state capture, or turned into authoritarian tools of surveillance or coercion.
The EF will base its actions on a full examination of Ethereum at the protocol layer, the access layer, the user layer, and the institutional layer. The EF exists to harden every surface of Ethereum, including the transaction pipeline, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, self-sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and social layer governance processes. Aerugo emphasizes that the work starts with the EF itself: moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stablecoins, so that everyone at the EF lives inside the constraints of the system they aim to improve.
Transaction Pipeline and MEV
Preventing toxic MEV capture is core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern. The transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement are part of Ethereum's neutrality boundary. EF protocol work will prioritize lowering barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, competitive transaction pipelines, and aggressively exploring the open orderflow solution space. Aerugo warns that if credibly neutral execution is subverted by privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain, Ethereum will look permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. He calls MEV likely the next major front in the cypherpunk war and insists the EF must win.
Privacy is equally fundamental. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees. Unconditional privacy must be available across Ethereum first, with opt-in constraints second. Deep privacy must be more robust than forcing users to assemble a fragile stack of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, and compliance providers. Staking must be treated as protocol infrastructure risk: if stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers, Ethereum's security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through the economic layer. The EF will support research and designs that keep staking permissionless, plural in operation, and resistant to intermediaries becoming permanent control points.
Seizing Opportunities: Quantum Resistance, AI Agents, Institutional Use Cases
Beyond shoring up fundamentals, Aerugo identifies several visible opportunities: making Ethereum the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure; building a verifiably self-sovereign stack from soup to nuts (browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasts, orderflow, inclusion, block construction, proposal, proving, exit, recovery); making ETH normal digital cash — a private, debasement-resistant, surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value; and personal wallets with personal AI agents that users can actually own and run on their own computers. For institutional and enterprise use cases, Ethereum should win by proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries have to meet Ethereum users on Ethereum's terms. Scale is not just throughput; scale is the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty under real load.
Addressing Departures and Spinouts
On recent personnel departures, Aerugo states that the EF will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter. Some people resigned, others were terminated — reasons vary from strategy to role fit to normal institutional change. Departing contributors deserve dignity; their employment history should not be turned into factional content. If public claims materially mislead about EF's direction, the EF may correct the record at the policy and process level, but will not turn personal files into public spectacle.
Regarding spinouts (projects leaving the EF), Aerugo clarifies that a spinout is not automatically good because it reduces headcount, and former EF affiliation is not a claim on EF funding. The EF asks: Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do it internally? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence? EF funding for external work is appropriate when it is a capacity solution for mandate work that no other actor can reliably do without EF support. It is not appropriate for lazy continuity payments, friendship payments, reputational hedges, or avoiding hard decisions. The EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate — it will spend all three as if they matter.
Aerugo concludes by affirming that the EF is not neutral on the direction Ethereum takes. CROPS (censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, security) are not just beliefs — they are characteristics that must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork. The EF is partisan for and builder of something of such incredible neutrality that it will fundamentally reshape the world. It seeks to work with everyone committed to this shared purpose.