tl;dr
I will be stepping down from my role as Co-ED at EF at the end of February 2026. Bastian Aue will assume the role of co-ED alongside Hsiao-Wei. The future is bright for Builders, Ethereum, EF, and me.
The future of Ethereum
As competing ideas emerge and fail, and markets rise and fall, we never have too much confidence. Confidence in Ethereum, which comes from a deep understanding of its technology, governance, implications for the future, and the values we share, will always keep us converging intermittently, even when our curiosity leads us to take our quest very far from the canonical path.
For a long time, I have been exploring what the future of Ethereum might look like. We are witnessing the transition of financial infrastructure to Ethereum and the emergence of automated agent interactions. Soon we will witness robots, new forms of governance, AI healthcare and education. I believe that Ethereum will remain the natural infrastructure layer for the coordination of all interacting technologies.
The open source LLM model is not doing too bad and will only get better in the future. Open source agent workers have become the most exciting toy for builders and creators since the early days of Ethereum. Significant privacy and security issues emerge with the new paradigm. The world is changing rapidly, and in that change, Ethereum is becoming the basic infrastructure for verification and financial transactions. Ethereum’s cypherpunk spirit remains intact, with leading privacy builders and security experts helping people protect their privacy and access essential infrastructure across the network.
Ethereum emerges as a clear institutional favorite in 2025. The dashboard shows Ethereum’s increasing market share in stablecoin and RWA activity. Ethereum is considered the lowest risk chain. Trusted neutrality, decentralization, and zero downtime from day one all provide institutions with an infrastructure with very low counterparty, technology, and jurisdictional risk. I look forward to seeing Ethereum appear in the world’s financial capitals with the major institutional Ethereum conference being held in New York this year.
With the advancement of AI and its integration into the global financial system, there has rarely been a more exciting time to build on Ethereum.
The future of EF
Over the past year, it has been important to me to present the role of EF co-ED as impactful and desirable. This puts us in a position to create meaningful change by empowering exceptionally talented and dedicated people in both the EF and Ethereum ecosystems.
We communicated the changes to EF quickly. We have great people who are learning quickly and have great direction for 2026. The co-ED position was extremely rewarding and strategically challenging, and brought me much joy and inspiration. The support I have received from the community has been incredible. I am satisfied with my current situation. The roadmap has become clearer. The goal has been set. EF’s leaders have become more confident in making their own decisions and owning more. The most important goals: Accelerating decision-making, talking to the younger generation, bringing new excitement to the builder community, communicating more openly on social media and podcasts, increasing openness to the institution, supporting founders, setting financial policies, strengthening local hubs and communities, introducing compensation policies, improving clarity on L1-L2 relationships, and strengthening internal and external transparency about budgets and structures have been completed or are continuously being improved. The people who delivered these changes continue to work on Ethereum. More and more people are recognizing ETH as a store of value. Some changes may only occur when you least expect them. While your ability to run independently in EF will decline over time, time spent in the organization in 2026 will feel like you’re sticking around to pass the baton. EF is in a healthy organizational state, able to balance long-term goals and the need for change. EF is led by unique, non-boring, highly resilient and highly intelligent people.
The start of 2026 is exciting for the role EF can play in the future of Ethereum. Soon we plan to release a proposal for a merged LEAN Ethereum and core development roadmap that highlights what the EF Protocol team believes is the long-term path for the Ethereum protocol. This should provide clear guidance and settings for coordination beyond 2026. After delivering two network upgrades in 2025 and receiving support from EF’s coordination team, core developers are well-positioned to deliver the required improvements in a timely manner.
We have a very clear quantum strategy, with top quantum security researchers finalizing the specifications and top engineers working on implementation. Post-quantum security has a clear place in the EF protocol roadmap.
We have a dedicated decentralized AI team that provides standards, experiments, and solutions for the agent economy ((1), (2)).
We have an ecosystem development EcoDev team focused on the success of founders, institutions, and governments building on Ethereum. We have a dedicated global policy support team. We are using AI for coordination to automate more and more of our efforts. Thanks to the fantastic work of the ethereum.org and forkcast.org teams, communication about our roadmap, use cases, and applications has become much clearer.
One of the main discussion points and challenges last year was about L1-L2 relationships. Vitalik’s latest post seeks to provide more clarity on a situation that has been observed for a long time. L2 extends or builds on top of Ethereum with various security and decentralization trade-offs. L2 chooses to build its value proposition by choosing between risk and improved UX across parameters such as scalability, decentralization, record state availability, privacy, etc. We created a platform team at EF, brought over 20 Ethereum L2s, and discussed the future of scalability, differentiation, and interoperability at Network School. Team-building-based rollups, native rollups, and synchronous composability launch this year with a clearer vision and a more focused approach. Recently, major Ethereum rollups have started to increasingly and consistently overtake all AltL1 in stablecoin and TPS metrics, and we are confident that this trend will continue.
We have become more open in our applications and institutional spaces, but we have maintained our cypherpunk values at the center, with groups like Vitalik’s Silviculture Society advising senior leaders of emerging risks and warning them of wrong moves. With a series of tweets in early 2026, Vitalik set the tone for respecting the fundamental importance of EF’s existence. PSE and Kohaku’s work focuses on privacy as applied today. The Protocol team is working harder than ever on security and censorship resistance through FOCIL and its trillion-dollar security program.
I am very excited that Devcon Mumbai will bring together the world’s blockchain thought leaders and founders on Ethereum. The Indian community has been deserving of this event for many years and the team is very proud to bring Devcon to India in 2026.
By 2026, EF has become much more adept at speaking to the new generation of builders. The new voices of EF and the work of all the talented people working with our founders and media demonstrate the new energy at EF and will continue to excite the community in 2026, especially as movements around agent AI and Ethereum become a trust infrastructure.
The Ethereum Everywhere effort already supports hubs in San Francisco, Lagos, London, Berlin, and Hong Kong. The Academic Office team is planning many new University events this year. The pop-up city idea maintains momentum and the scene becomes increasingly better structured. New builders and long-term thought leaders meet to build the world.
In the coming weeks, EF’s DeFi coordination team will publish a blog post with its plans and roadmap. I am very excited about the talent we have brought to EF to help coordinate DeFi. There is no one better to support the DeFi ecosystem.
Hsiao-Wei stays behind and continues on his way. Bastian Aue will assume an expanded leadership role alongside Hsiao-Wei. Whichever direction you choose, you will be supported by the best talent in cryptocurrency. The entire EcoDev transformation, both founder and institutional, was brought to EF by James Smith, who continues his mission. Policy support and long-term work continue under the excellent leadership of Bastian Aue and Tju Liang. Josh Stark has an exceptional talent for quickly executing operational change and has led every major communications change in social media that will occur in 2025. Engineers and researchers in the Protocol Cluster work more closely together and confidently set a roadmap for the future and tackle the toughest technical challenges. EF is where things move quickly and changes can happen within days or weeks.
my future
My DMs are open for anyone who needs help connecting with the EF folks or discussing Ethereum’s vision and strategy. I will continue to provide assistance if EF leadership deems you need advice. I plan to always keep the pressure on the Ethereum ecosystem to keep pace (although I’m sure I’ve received valuable advice from them more often than not in the past).
I can continue to travel, collaborate with communities, and help businesses build on Ethereum. I plan to take on more roles as a core developer, hands-on product builder, and most importantly, work on agent core development and agent governance. It’s pretty much the same feeling I had when I started Nethermind in 2017. I felt very strongly at the time that a big change was taking place. I knew that Ethereum would replace the financial system and that I had significant experience in the financial industry that made it more of an evolution than a revolution. Now I know that agent systems and AI-assisted discovery are reshaping the world. I am well aware of the impermanence or even obsolescence of some behavioral ideas, but it was fun experimentation that defined much of the early Ethereum innovation.
I plan to continue working directly with frontier technologies and founders in the Ethereum space. I want to see and support the realization of the vision I’ve been talking about for the past few years. This is one of the most exciting times to be a developer on Ethereum.
thank you
It is impossible to list everyone who helped me, EF, and Ethereum in 2025. During my time at EF, I visited more than 20 countries on business and spent a lot of time with local communities. I’ve met thousands of people: builders, financiers, educators, policy makers, creators, researchers, and academics. I loved every word of support, difficult questions, and criticism coming from you.
I am truly grateful to the EF Board of Directors for taking the bold step of having me join Hsiao-Wei as co-ED. I would like to thank Hsiao-Wei and the management team for moving quickly together. We sincerely thank Bastian Aue, Josh Stark, and Tju Liang for providing much emotional intelligence and facilitating thoughtful discussions as we faced some of our most difficult challenges. Thank you to Joe Schweitzer for reviewing so many podcasts and helping us all reach a broad audience when talking about the future of Ethereum.
I am very grateful to the hundreds of Ethereum leaders who reached out to me in March and April 2025, telling me everything that needed attention and sharing their views on what the EF strategy should be. Thank you very much; Without you I would never have found the right path.
Thank you to everyone at EF for putting your beliefs and talents into practice.
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thomas