Ethereum Foundation executive director Aerugo has published a wide-ranging mandate note that puts censorship resistance, privacy, open-source infrastructure and security at the center of the
Ethereum Foundation executive director Aerugo has published a wide-ranging mandate note that puts censorship resistance, privacy, open-source infrastructure and security at the center of the EF’s future direction.
The new Ethereum Foundation mandate post follows recent writing from Vitalik Buterin and Aya, moving the discussion from what the EF should be toward how it plans to execute. Aerugo framed the Foundation’s role around making Ethereum “real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty,” with the network hardened against capture by states, cartels, intermediaries, surveillance systems and privileged market structure.
The post rejects a more promotional version of the EF. Aerugo said the Foundation is not built to optimize its own importance, please short-term speculators, market every Ethereum app, or make the ecosystem more attractive by sanding off the properties that make it different from permissioned financial rails.
That makes the post part strategy statement and part institutional boundary-setting. Ethereum’s current reset has already triggered public debate around staffing, budget discipline and protocol funding, including recent concern that Ethereum core development could face a funding squeeze as EF support narrows. Aerugo’s answer is not broader spending or broader messaging, but a tighter mandate around work the Foundation sees as essential to Ethereum’s long-term neutrality.
MEV sits near the center of the execution plan. Aerugo described the transaction pipeline as part of Ethereum’s neutrality boundary, covering transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation and settlement.
The concern is that Ethereum can remain formally permissionless while becoming practically intermediated at the exact point where value moves. Privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing and narrow validator supply chains can all make users dependent on actors that sit between them and the protocol.
Aerugo said the EF will prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, competitive transaction pipelines and clearer user-facing trust assumptions. The note also treats open orderflow research as a core area rather than a side issue.
That framing lands during a year when MEV and transaction routing have become more visible through both market-structure debates and incidents. A recent JaredFromSubway MEV bot drain showed how complex Ethereum execution paths can become when approvals, routing, bots and value extraction collide in public markets.
Aerugo also warned that fixes can create new trade-offs. FOCIL may improve censorship resistance while adding cross-block MEV risk. ePBS can reduce relay trust while potentially entrenching the builder economy. Encrypted mempools can reduce pre-execution transparency while creating new advantages for specialized actors. The EF’s mandate now treats those problems as one system-level extraction challenge rather than isolated research topics.
Privacy is treated as a foundation-level property, not an optional app-layer feature. Aerugo argued that a public ledger without serious privacy defaults becomes a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees, and that unconditional privacy must come before opt-in constraints such as disclosure, compliance logic, reputation, auditability or identity.
The post also rejects privacy that depends on fragile user behavior across special wallets, RPCs, bridges, apps and compliance tools. The direction is deeper privacy as normal infrastructure, with selective disclosure and programmable constraints layered above it when users or communities choose them.
Staking receives the same infrastructure-risk treatment. Aerugo said staking is not merely a yield product, and liquid staking is not only an app-layer market. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum’s security layer can become vulnerable through the economic layer around it.
That puts EF work around staking, access interfaces and wallet standards into the same mandate bucket. The Foundation wants Ethereum users, including institutions, to become less dependent on coercive defaults, intermediated access and soft compromises made in exchange for reach.
The opportunity side of the mandate is just as aggressive. Aerugo listed post-quantum security, a full self-sovereign stack, ETH as normal digital cash, personal AI wallets, institutional use cases and security-preserving scaling as major areas for Ethereum to seize.
The ETH cash language is direct. The goal is to make ETH a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset for private computation and coordination.
Personal wallets with personal AI agents also appear as a major future interface. Aerugo’s framing is that users should own the wallet, model, memory, policy and signing authority as AI agents become economic actors. That puts AI wallet design inside the same sovereignty debate as custody and private keys.
Institutional adoption is treated differently from a normal enterprise-blockchain pitch. Aerugo argues Ethereum should win by proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can coordinate at scale without disappearing into invisible backends, closed operators, opaque sequencing, custodial UX or upgrade committees users cannot realistically exit.
That line also applies to L2s. Scaling is not only throughput. The mandate defines scale as self-sovereignty that remains available under real load, including exits, proving, inclusion and security guarantees.
Aerugo also addressed speculation around Ethereum Foundation departures. Some people resigned, others were terminated, and the post says the EF will not litigate individual personnel matters in public. The Foundation may correct materially misleading claims about policy or direction, but it does not plan to turn employment history into public factional content.
Spinouts are getting a stricter funding test. Aerugo said some work will leave the EF in the months ahead because another organization is a better home, markets should decide its value, or the work is useful but no longer EF work. Former EF affiliation will not automatically create a claim on EF funding.
The new standard is mandate fit. External funding may be appropriate when work is critical, protects Ethereum’s core properties, advances self-sovereignty, reduces dependence on the EF over time and can be reviewed without creating capture risk or permanent dependency. It is not meant to preserve old relationships, avoid hard decisions or support work outside the Foundation’s direction.
The mandate now leaves the EF with a sharper operating line: fund and build around censorship resistance, open-source infrastructure, privacy, security, permissionless staking, MEV resistance, ETH cash, AI-wallet sovereignty and institutional adoption that does not turn Ethereum into a permissioned backend. That gives Ethereum’s next phase a narrower Foundation, but a more explicit target for what the Foundation is willing to defend.
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