tl;dr
I am stepping down from my co-ED role at the EF at the end of February 2026. Bastian Aue is taking over the co-ED role alongside Hsiao-Wei. The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for the EF, and for me.
Future of Ethereum
As competing ideas emerge and fail and the markets jump up and down, we have never been given too much certainty. The conviction about Ethereum that comes from a deep understanding of its technology, its governance, its meaning for the future, and the values we share will always make us converge intermittently, even when our curiosities drive our explorations very far from the canonical paths.
For a long time, I have been exploring what the future of Ethereum looks like. We are witnessing the transition of financial infrastructure to Ethereum, and the emergence of automated, agentic interactions. Very soon, we will witness robots, new forms of governance, and AI healthcare and education. I believe that Ethereum will remain a natural infrastructure layer for coordination of all these technologies interacting.
Open-source LLM models are not doing badly and will hopefully do better and better. Open-source agentic workers are becoming the most exciting toys for builders and creators since early Ethereum. Important privacy and security questions emerge around the new paradigms; the world is changing fast, and among the changes, Ethereum is becoming the underlying infrastructure for verification and financial transactions. The cypherpunk ethos of Ethereum remains intact, with the best of the privacy builders and security experts ensuring that the network helps people preserve privacy and access to essential infrastructure.
Ethereum emerged as the clear institutional preference in 2025. Dashboards show Ethereum’s growing market share in stablecoins and RWA activity. Ethereum is seen as the lowest-risk chain. Credible neutrality, decentralization, and no downtime since genesis all present institutions with an infrastructure with uniquely low counterparty, technology, and jurisdiction risk. I am looking forward to Ethereum showing up at the financial centers of the world, with the major institutional Ethereum conference coming to New York this year.
With the advancement of AI and progressing integration into the world financial systems, there has rarely been a more exciting time to build on Ethereum.
Future of the EF
It has been important for me, over the last year, to present the role of the EF co-ED as impactful and desirable, a position where one can make a meaningful difference by empowering people of extraordinary talent and dedication, both at the EF and more broadly in the Ethereum ecosystem.
We have managed to deliver change at the EF fast; we have great talent that learns quickly and has a great direction for 2026. The co-ED position was extremely rewarding, strategically challenging, and brought me a lot of joy and inspiration. The support that I received from the community was tremendous. I am happy with the current state of things; the roadmap is clearer; the goals are set; the leaders at the EF grew more confident about making decisions by themselves and owning more. The most important goals: accelerating decision-making, speaking to younger generations, bringing new excitement to the builders’ community, communicating more openly on social media and podcasts, becoming more open to institutions, supporting founders, setting up treasury policies, strengthening local hubs and communities, introducing compensation policy, bringing more clarity to the L1–L2 relationship, creating more internal and external transparency around budgets and structure have either been completed or are consistently improving. People who delivered these changes continue working on Ethereum. More and more people see ETH clearly as a store of value. Some of the changes can only happen by surprise. While my ability to execute independently at the EF diminishes over time, my time at the organization in 2026 would feel more and more like just staying around to pass the baton. The EF is in a healthy state of an organization that can balance long-term goals and the need for change. The EF is unique, far from boring, very resilient, and led by highly intelligent people.
The beginning of 2026 makes me very excited about the role the EF can play in the future of Ethereum. Very soon, we plan to release a proposal for a merged LEAN Ethereum and core development roadmap, highlighting the long-term path forward for the Ethereum protocol that the EF Protocol team believes in. It should provide clear guidance and a setup for coordination in 2026 and beyond. After delivering two network upgrades in 2025 and with the support of coordination teams from the EF, core devs are well positioned to keep shipping essential improvements on time.
We have a very clear quantum strategy, with the top quantum security researchers finalizing the specs and the best engineers working on implementations. Post-quantum security has a clear place in the EF Protocol roadmap.
We have a dedicated decentralized AI team delivering standards, experiments, and solutions for the agentic economy ([1], [2]).
We have the ecosystem development EcoDev team focusing on the success of founders, institutions, and governments building on Ethereum. We have a dedicated Global Policy Support team. We are automating more and more of our efforts by using AI for coordination. Communication about the roadmaps, use cases, and applications is much clearer, with fantastic work from the teams at ethereum.org and forkcast.org.
One of the major discussion points and challenges for the last year was around the L1–L2 relationship. Vitalik’s recent posts seek to provide more clarity about the situation that has been observed for a long time. L2s extend or build on top of Ethereum with various security and decentralization trade-offs. L2s choose to build their value proposition by choosing between risks and improved UX across parameters such as scaling, decentralization, historical state availability, privacy, etc. We have created the Platform team at the EF and brought over 20 Ethereum L2s to discuss the future of scaling, differentiation, and interoperability at the Network School. Teams building based rollups, native rollups, and synchronous composability are starting this year with clearer visions and a more focused approach. Recently, major Ethereum rollups have started more and more consistently overtaking all AltL1s in the stablecoin and TPS metrics, a trend that I am convinced will continue.
While we became more open to applications and institutional space, we remained centered around cypherpunk values with groups like Vitalik’s Silviculture Society advising senior leaders on emerging risks and warning against false steps. With a series of tweets at the beginning of 2026, Vitalik set a tone for respecting the importance of what is fundamental to the EF’s existence. The work of PSE and Kohaku focuses nowadays on applied privacy. The Protocol team dedicates more effort than ever to security and censorship resistance with FOCIL and the Trillion Dollar Security program.
I am extremely excited about Devcon Mumbai bringing the world’s blockchain thought leaders and founders to work together on Ethereum. The Indian community has deserved this event for years, and I am very proud that the team brings Devcon to India in 2026.
In 2026, the EF is also much better at speaking to the new generation of builders. The work of the new voices at the EF, and all the talented people working with founders and media behind the scenes shows the new energy at the EF and it will keep the community excited in 2026, especially with the movement around agentic AI and Ethereum becoming its go-to trust infrastructure.
The Ethereum Everywhere efforts already support the hubs in San Francisco, Lagos, London, Berlin, and Hong Kong. The Academic Secretariat team plans many new university events this year; the pop-up cities idea maintains momentum and the scene gets better and better organized; new builders and long-term thought leaders meet and build around the world.
In the coming weeks, the DeFi coordination team at the EF will publish a blog post with their plans and roadmap. I am extremely excited about the talent that we brought to the EF to help with the DeFi coordination. There could be no better people to help us support the DeFi ecosystem.
Hsiao-Wei stays and continues the path. Bastian Aue takes on an expanded leadership role alongside Hsiao-Wei. Whatever direction they take, they will have the support of the best talent in crypto. The entire EcoDev transformation on the builders, founders, and institutional side was brought to the EF by James Smith, who continues on his mission. Policy support and long-term work continue under the great leadership of Bastian Aue and Tju Liang. Josh Stark has an exceptional talent for executing operational changes fast and also led all the major communication changes on social media that happened in 2025. Engineers and the researchers in the Protocol cluster work more closely together and confidently set roadmaps for the future and tackle the toughest technological challenges. The EF is the place where things move fast, and changes can happen within days or weeks.
My future
My DMs stay open for all of you who need support in connecting with people at the EF or discussing the vision and strategy of Ethereum. I will remain available for the EF leadership, should they ever feel they need advice (although I am sure that more often than not I have received valuable advice from them in the past). I plan to always put pressure on the Ethereum ecosystem to move at pace.
I may continue traveling and working with local communities and helping businesses build on Ethereum. I plan to act more as a core dev, a hands-on product builder and among other things, work on the agentic core development and agentic governance. I feel much the same as I felt when I started Nethermind in 2017. I felt very strongly at the time that a big change was happening. I knew that Ethereum was going to replace the financial systems and I knew that I had an important experience in the financial industry to make it more of an evolution rather than a revolution. I know now that agentic systems and AI-assisted discovery are reshaping the world. I am well aware of the impermanence or even uselessness of some of the agentic ideas, but it is the playful experimentation that defined much of the early Ethereum innovation.
I plan to continue working directly with founders in frontier tech and Ethereum. I want to see and support the realization of the vision that I have talked about over the last years. It is one of the most exciting times to be a builder on Ethereum.
Thank You
It is impossible to list everyone who helped me, the EF, and Ethereum in 2025. During my time at the EF, I visited over 20 countries for work and spent much time with local communities. I met thousands of people: builders, financiers, educators, policymakers, creators, researchers, academics. I loved all the words of support, tough questions, and critique coming from you.
I would love to wholeheartedly thank the EF board for taking the bold step of bringing me on to join Hsiao-Wei as a co-ED. I would like to thank Hsiao-Wei and the management team for moving fast together. Massive thanks to Bastian Aue, Josh Stark, and Tju Liang for bringing so much emotional intelligence and facilitating thoughtful discussions when facing the most difficult matters. Thank you, Joe Schweitzer, for reviewing countless podcasts and helping us all reach a broad audience when talking about the future of Ethereum.
Huge thanks to hundreds of Ethereum leaders reaching out to me in March and April 2025, telling me about every single thing that needed attention and sharing their views on what the EF strategy should be. Thank you so much; I would never have found the right paths without you.
Thank you to every single person at the EF for executing on your beliefs and talents.
—
Tomasz
