Vitalik steps back, is Ethereum going to focus on 'technology'?
The Ethereum Foundation is undergoing a significant shift: Vitalik Buterin will step back from the front lines to a research position, and the Foundation will focus on underlying performance, scalability, and user experience, fully committed to tackling L1 protocol upgrades.
The new co-lead of the EF, Tomasz Stańczak, stated:
The upcoming series of upgrades (such as Pectra, Fusaka, Glamsterdam) will focus on optimizing user experience, L2 support, and performance improvements, aiming to make Ethereum not only 'usable' but also 'easy to use, fast to use, and affordable to use'.
In other words, Ethereum is proactively refining its 'internal skills' on the eve of a bull market to get ahead in the next round of public chain competition.
This reveals several core signals:
✅ Vitalik fully transitions to a research-oriented role
He will no longer be 'kidnapped' by complicated affairs but will focus on exploratory research in cutting-edge fields such as zkVM, RISC-V instruction sets, and privacy enhancements. Each of his research outputs often serves as an accelerator for Ethereum's technical roadmap.
✅ Ethereum's long-term roadmap is 'accelerating'
Upgrades that could originally take 35 years to implement are now being attempted by the Foundation to be completed within 12 years. The intensive contributions of the research community suggest that technological breakthroughs may come faster than market expectations.
⚠️ But don't overlook the risks:
Although rapidly advancing the roadmap seems exciting, it may also bring challenges in security, compatibility, and community consensus. Each upgrade is a system-level 'engine replacement' with very low fault tolerance.
Vitalik's transformation is essentially an evolution of Ethereum's governance—from 'human governance' to 'consensus-driven'. He steps back to promote technical direction and allows community participation to decide whether to adopt it, ultimately leading to true open-source collaboration.
This is a significant boon for Ethereum and a reaffirmation of its 'decentralized spirit'.
In the long run, this could become a turning point for Ethereum to regain its technological leadership advantage. Whether the future market will recognize this depends on the performance of these protocol upgrades being 'satisfactory'.
