Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has responded to growing criticism of the Ethereum Foundation’s role in the Ethereum ecosystem, pushing back against critics who want the organization to take a more dynamic role in supporting token prices and marketing.

Buterin said the Foundation will continue to focus on promoting censorship resistance, open source software code, long-range research, cybersecurity and decentralization of the Ethereum protocol, in line with its mandate. He he said: :

“EF is not an “Ethereum hub”, rather EF is “one node with a specific purpose, alongside other nodes.” We have always said that EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem and even in EF wanted us to be the former.

The Ethereum Foundation mandate was published in March 2026. Source: Ethereum Foundation

“We are now taking steps to ensure that we are the latter,” he continued, adding that the Ethereum Foundation seeks to strengthen cybersecurity and the Ethereum codebase, but does not necessarily compete with high-throughput chains or scale to 1 million transactions per second.

The comments follow several enormous ETH holders selling their entire ETH position and high-profile departure from the Ethereum Foundation as the cryptocurrency’s current price of around $2,094 is more than 50% below its all-time high of almost $5,000 reached in August 2025.

“EF only holds about 0.16% of all ETH,” he said, noting that other foundations often hold 10-50% of their native tokens.

Related: Blockchain researcher defends Ethereum Foundation, says it does its job “exactly”.

Under pressure in the face of falling token price

“I think Ethereum’s original sin was not considering tokenomics in every move it made since Dencun” – Laura Shin, cryptocurrency journalist he said.

The Dencun Update was a major protocol update released in March 2024 that significantly lowered network fees for Layer 2 transactions and led to the subsequent collapse of Ethereum’s Core Layer revenues.

Fees on the Ethereum Layer 1 blockchain network dropped significantly following the Dencun update in March 2024. Source: Token terminal

Most investors “don’t want to believe in something that doesn’t also mean scoring points on the leaderboard,” Shin said of ETH.

Buterin said on Sunday that the Foundation will focus on “longevity” and exploit its funds to fund research, which means it will sell less ETH in the future.

In May, the Foundation offloaded 21,270 ETH from liquid staking platform Lido as part of its treasury strategy.

The withdrawal of ETH means that these assets will no longer generate income for the Ethereum Foundation, but this is not confirmation that the organization will sell these tokens.

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