2 Groups Now Control Ethereum's Future. Here's What They Want.

Two distinct factions now control Ethereum's direction. One is a hard-line cypherpunk group that has come to dominate the Ethereum Foundation under executive director Bastian. The other is a post-ideological pragmatist faction, business school in orientation, that favors market efficiencies and more centralized decision-making, and has formalized itself as ETH Labs, a nonprofit led by senior people who split off from the Ethereum Foundation. Researcher Paul Dylan Ennis calls this split one of the more underrated and consequential moments in Ethereum history, and says it became organizational after a co-executive director arrangement between the two factions was deemed untenable.

ETH Labs supporters and funders include Bitmine, Joseph Lubin, David Hoffman of Bankless, Anthony Sassano, Consensys, and Sharpling, most of whom are affiliated with for-profit companies despite ETH Labs being structured as a nonprofit. Key ETH Labs personnel including Casper, Ansgar, Barnaby, and Julian are described as economically minded and were previously involved in the issuance debate. Ansgar already moderates All Core Devs or a related governance process, meaning ETH Labs personnel are embedded in Ethereum governance from the start. Justin Drake appears on the ETH Labs funding list despite remaining at the Ethereum Foundation, suggesting the split is not fully contentious.

The Ethereum Foundation's published mandate is organized around what it calls CROPS, covering censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security, with capture resistance added within roughly a week of the original publication. Censorship resistance is defined in the traditional sense of equal treatment of transactions and non-interference with downstream applications, with Tornado Cash as an implicit recurring reference point. Capture resistance extends this by arguing that even the potential to censor, without active censorship, constitutes a form of capture, a framing directly relevant to builders and relayers who did censor Tornado Cash transactions. The EF mandate was written for two audiences simultaneously: externally it signals that anything outside CROPS must be handled by other organizations, and internally it clarifies that securing the layer one is the core mission.

The EF layoffs are described as a strategic decision to become lean in a CROPS-focused cypherpunk sense, deliberately ceding ground on other aspects of Ethereum development to organizations like ETH Labs. The EF Silver Culture Society, an external cypherpunk advisory group created around the time of the populist revolt, was partly designed to monitor whether the EF would shift too far in a pragmatist direction. Members cannot discuss internal proceedings and are described as independent with no vested interest in any projects. Ennis says the Silver Culture Society did not see the EF mandate before it was released and is now somewhat redundant because the EF's cypherpunk orientation has become unambiguous.

The EF still sets the Ethereum roadmap, which does not heavily emphasize ETH as an asset, creating potential tension with ETH Labs, whose stated focus areas include protocol scaling and value accrual to the ETH asset. The chair role in All Core Devs has historically been filled by someone from the Ethereum Foundation, and that is now changing, with observers raising questions about capture as the role is increasingly seen as a position of power. ETH Labs documentation is described as relatively ambiguous with no concrete plans, consistent with an organization that has just formed. Disputes in Ethereum governance are expected to begin in obscure governance forums before becoming visible to broader audiences.

On the application layer, Ennis expresses uncertainty about what Ethereum is supposed to be for at this point. Recapturing users for perpetuals, decentralized exchanges, and tokenized stock trading from Solana and Hyperliquid is described as very difficult to imagine without a catastrophic failure of those platforms. Every major upturn for Ethereum historically corresponded to a new primitive being invented, including DAOs, DeFi, NFTs, and prediction markets, and no equivalent next primitive is currently identified. The possibility of crypto becoming a subgenre of artificial intelligence, facilitating GPU and CPU compute, storage, and agentic payments, is raised as one potential direction. Ethereum is described as the most credibly neutral chain among established participants, and a more private future Ethereum is anticipated, with the Kohaku wallet integrating Railgun cited as an example.

Ethereum ossification is estimated to be approximately ten to fifteen years away, though pure ossification is qualified as not fully achievable since any protocol is effectively GitHub repositories that could be forked at any point. The recent EF downsizing and focus on a few core functions could shorten that timeline to roughly a decade.