Vitalik Buterin Reveals 90% of His Net Worth Sits in ETH Amid Foundation Overhaul Plans

Buterin Warns Ethereum Risks Mediocrity if It Chases Speed Over Decentralization

Writing on X, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin explained that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is choosing longevity over breadth. The shift comes after a period he described as productive, with major efficiency gains in 2025, but one question kept surfacing in his feed: Why did the foundation’s actions not reflect the decentralization and privacy values he spoke about publicly?

Buterin acknowledged that tension clearly. Some people saw a foundation finally getting serious about execution and business development. He saw something different and stated that the critics who pushed hardest on idealism were the ones whose words carried the most weight with him.

To explain the choice the EF is making, Buterin reached for an analogy. He described Google as a company that started with strong, idealistic roots but slowly moved away from them as mainstream corporate pressure set in. He remarked that if he could have pressed a button in 2008 to make Google two standard deviations more principled, he would have pressed it immediately. His reasoning: one organization choosing to hold a different standard matters more when the rest of the industry is drifting in the other direction.

That same logic now applies to the Ethereum Foundation‘s positioning within the broader ecosystem.

Buterin was direct about what the EF is and is not. He stated that the foundation is one node with a defined purpose, not a center of gravity for the entire network. The EF holds approximately 0.16% of all ETH. By comparison, central foundations behind other blockchains typically hold between 10% and 50% of their native supply. The original mandate, building the chain software through the Serenity upgrade, was completed in 2022. The EF was never designed to be a permanent steward.

Going forward, the EF will concentrate on activities critical to Ethereum’s function as a censorship-resistant, private, and open system, and only those activities that would not happen without the foundation’s direct involvement. That means some respected contributors and technically aligned teams will move outside the EF structure. Buterin said that is necessary, not accidental. External teams need the ability to attract outside capital, and that is harder when they sit inside the foundation.

On the technical side, Buterin pointed to several specific goals. He called for provably bug-free Ethereum using AI-assisted formal verification, a target he wrote would have seemed impossible six months ago but is now within reach. He also cited available chain consensus, which he described as a property only Ethereum and Bitcoin share, combining fault tolerance under asynchrony with protection against attackers controlling up to 49% of nodes. A third priority is intermediary minimization, meaning users and protocols should be able to send transactions directly to the chain without routing through third parties.

Buterin was clear that these goals are not in conflict with scalability. He wrote on X that they are compatible with high transaction throughput, lower slot times, and well-designed layer two ( L2) networks built for specific applications.

He also addressed ETH directly. Buterin said the asset secures $250 billion in value and that nearly 90% of his net worth is held in ETH. The remainder, approximately $40 million, is in onchain fiat that he said has already been allocated to open-source biotech, software, and hardware projects. He noted that some aspects of supporting ETH as an asset fall outside the EF’s new scope, and called on other organizations, some of which hold more ETH than the foundation does, to take on that work.

Buterin closed the post by describing what the EF is becoming. A smaller ship. More opinionated. Built to last longer. He said the foundation’s new long-term structure should stabilize over the next few months.

Board member Aya Miyaguchi is leading the operational side of the transition. Buterin said his own influence on the board will continue to decrease, and that is the outcome he wants.