The Ethereum Foundation's executive director outlined the foundation's mission and direction, and responded to recent personnel controversies.

According to Foresight News , Bastian Aue (Aerugo), interim co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), published an article outlining EF's mission and direction. The article states that EF exists to ensure Ethereum becomes and remains a truly permissionless, sovereign infrastructure, possessing characteristics such as resistance to censorship, resistance to capital and state capture, privacy, and security, rather than pursuing its own influence, catering to short-term speculators, or endorsing ecosystem projects. The article also addresses recent controversies surrounding EF staff departures, stating that reasons for departure include strategic differences, job mismatches, normal organizational changes, or personal choices. EF will not discuss personal personnel issues on social media, but emphasizes that departing individuals should have a dignified exit. If public statements seriously mislead the public's understanding of EF's direction or decisions, the foundation may clarify at the policy and factual levels, but will not publicize personal matters. The article points out that MEV governance is a core task of EF, not a peripheral market structure issue: We must be wary of beneficiaries using it to gain undue influence; malicious MEVs could be the next major battleground for Ethereum. Regarding privacy, the article emphasizes that unconditional privacy must precede optional compliance constraints; a public ledger lacking default privacy settings is essentially a monitoring system with settlement guarantees. Staking is listed as a protocol-layer infrastructure risk, and it's necessary to prevent the concentration of staked equity, liquidity, and governance influence in the hands of a few issuers or operators. The article also lists opportunities that EF believes should be seized, including pushing Ethereum to become the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure, building an end-to-end censorship-free, self-governing technology stack, making ETH a true "digital cash," and user-run personal AI wallet agents. Regarding EF's criteria for allocating funds to external teams, the article states that the criteria are whether the work is mission-critical, whether there is a more suitable executor, and whether it can be completed without increasing capture risk or dependence, rather than simply because the team was previously with EF.