Ethereum Foundation Shifts Strategy After Leadership Rework
The Ethereum Foundation is shifting its strategic focus to improving user experience and solving layer-1 scaling problems. The move comes after a leadership rework in March, when Tomasz Stańczak, Nethermind CEO, and Ethereum researcher Hsiao-Wei Wang were named as co-executive directors.
The new leadership structure is intended to unclutter everyday operations, enabling co-founder Vitalik Buterin to devote his time to long-term research and innovation, Stańczak said. “Each time Vitalik gives advice or speaks about a direction, he accelerates monumental long-term progress,” Stańczak wrote on April 21 in an X post.
Vitalik Buterin to Emphasize Privacy and Efficiency
With more time devoted to research, Buterin has already put forward new proposals to address Ethereum’s limitations. On April 11, he published a roadmap for privacy with features anonymizing transactions, hopefully enabled by default. This followed an April 20 blog post that suggested enhancing the Ethereum Virtual Machine’s (EVM) contract language in a bid to speed up the network’s execution speed and efficiency.
Stańczak clarified that Buterin’s proposals are not definitive mandates but rather help to spur discussion and creation among the Ethereum research community.
Foundation Focuses on Near-Term Protocol Enhancements
The Foundation, in its new leadership, will focus on practical, near-term protocol enhancements. Stańczak cited projects such as layer-1 scaling, enhanced support for layer-2 solutions, and user experience enhancements. These will be addressed in upcoming upgrades like Pectra, Fusaka, and Glamsterdam.
Balancing Short-Term Gains With Long-Term Vision
Despite the focus being placed on short-term gains, the Foundation has not abandoned its long-term goals. Stańczak showed that many of Ethereum’s top researchers’ ideas can be realized within one to two years, particularly in areas like next-generation execution and consensus layers.
Cointelegraph reached out to the Ethereum Foundation for comment but hadn’t heard back at the time of publication.
