Vitalik Buterin wants Ethereum to stop competing primarily on speed and focus instead on what the Ethereum Foundation calls CROPS, the cypherpunk properties of censorship resistance, openness, privacy and security. The success of that bet will ultimately depend on whether anyone values those properties enough to matter.
Against a backdrop of growing competition from rival low-fee, high-throughput Layer-1 (L1) blockchains, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a personal note on May 24, 2026, outlining his vision of the future for both Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation (EF).
For Buterin, that future does not lie in trying to outperform faster chains but committing to CROPS. These are the cypherpunk properties the EF wants Ethereum to preserve: censorship resistance, openness, privacy and security.
That may not sound like an institutional story at all. At least not on the surface.
Banks and other financial institutions have so far generally preferred permissioned infrastructure. The regulatory framework also enforces this approach. However, if demand for settlement between public and private blockchains grows, the cypherpunk principles Ethereum is trying to pursue may still prove relevant in ways that are not immediately obvious.
The question is whether anyone — institutions, users, developers or ETH holders — will value those principles enough to restore Ethereum’s momentum.
The Case for CROPS
CROPS, as outlined in the Ethereum Foundation’s March 2026 mandate, is an operational and philosophical framework prioritising censorship and capture resistance, openness, privacy and security. In practice, it is less a slogan than a filter for what the EF believes Ethereum should optimise to become “deeply impressive” as the Foundation itself adjusts to a more limited but more focused role.
Those priorities point to a more specific technical agenda centered on goals such as making Ethereum “provably bug-free” through AI-assisted formal verification, stronger consensus resilience and minimising dependence on intermediaries.
The common thread is improved long-term resilience. Ethereum should not depend on users trusting relayers, block builders, social coordination or emergency intervention any more than necessary.
Ethereum’s next major protocol upgrade, Glamsterdam, continues that work at the protocol level. The goal is to continue improving scalability and speed, while the path to scale Ethereum rests on stronger trust guarantees than simply higher throughput.
In Buterin’s framing, Ethereum should be “unreasonable” about those properties because they are the ones that are most important and the market is least likely to protect on its own.
Faster chains can compete on speed, fees and UX. Ethereum’s bet is that what’s harder to copy is credible neutrality and infrastructure that remains open, secure and resistant to capture as it scales.
One of the key tensions is that CROPS does not obviously serve Ethereum’s existing user base in the near term. Users generally choose chains based on fees, speed and where the applications they want actually live, not on formal verification or censorship resistance, which are mostly invisible until they matter.
From the user perspective, a chain that has never had a transaction censored can look identical to one that is structurally harder to censor. In other words, with CROPS Ethereum is prioritising properties its users rarely experience day to day over the ones that already drive activity elsewhere.
The Foundation’s Narrower Mandate
Ethereum’s strategic narrowing is mirrored in the EF itself. Originally chartered to execute the initial technical roadmap outlined in Ethereum’s Whitepaper — a task effectively completed by the 2022 Merge —, according to Buterin, the Foundation was never designed to be Ethereum’s permanent centre of gravity. Rather than seeking to maximise every part of Ethereum’s growth, its role going forward should instead be focused on work critical to the network’s long-term neutrality and resilience.
The logic for this is clear. A smaller EF with less overarching influence is, in theory, harder to capture by regulators, larger holders or coordinated political pressure. It is also less likely to crowd out independent teams and better aligned with the idea that Ethereum should be able to survive even if the Foundation itself were to one day suddenly disappear.
But it also reflects real constraints. According to Buterin, the EF holds around 0.16 percent of all ETH and has signalled it intends to sell less going forward.
The Foundation has also seen a series of senior departures in 2026, alongside visible disagreement over what role it should play. For example, former EF researcher Dankrad Feist proposed a separate organisation in May 2026. This alternative organisation would be backed by at least $1 billion in ETH focused directly on ETH performance, user growth and the “number go up” concerns that CROPS does not obviously address.
The Institutional Case For Using Ethereum
The common assumption is that the institutional case for Ethereum relies on banks and other financial institutions moving their operations on-chain, an assumption until now not borne out by reality.
Institutions are already building their own private infrastructure driven partly by regulatory and compliance obligations. For instance, under Basel’s prudential rules, many permissionless-chain exposures fall into higher-risk categories unless they meet strict classification and hedging criteria. DORA, the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, goes further in requiring financial institutions to demonstrate operational resilience across their digital systems, something easier to evidence on permissioned infrastructure. JPMorgan’s Kinexys, a private, permissioned blockchain platform for institutional transactions, is one example of that direction.
Ethereum could eventually find a role among those institutional systems. As institutional infrastructure fragments across private ledgers, permissioned L2s, public networks and tokenised asset platforms, demand may grow for a neutral coordination and settlement layer. Few institutions building private rails are likely to want to rely on a competitor’s private rail for settlement, which is where public infrastructure may have an advantage.
Bitcoin is the obvious benchmark. Its base layer already represents the strongest example of neutral, censorship-resistant settlement, but its intentionally limited scripting model means complex institutional workflows tend to be built around it rather than directly on it. Bitcoin-native infrastructure such as Liquid extends settlement and tokenised asset issuance without requiring Bitcoin itself to become a more complex smart contract platform.
Ethereum’s claim is different in its attempt to combine public-chain neutrality with programmable settlement.
The institutional argument for Ethereum is not that it replaces private infrastructure, but that it sits between the private systems institutions are building and will keep controlling themselves.
Whether institutions ultimately value CROPS properties enough to rely on public blockchain infrastructure in a meaningful way remains an open question.
Ethereum’s Real Test
Ethereum’s CROPS pivot gives Ethereum a clearer answer to what it wants to be: not the fastest execution environment but a more neutral, resilient and harder-to-capture settlement layer. It is a coherent long-term strategy and potentially a useful one if public and private blockchain infrastructure continues to fragment.
What remains to be seen is whether the market will reward it. CROPS may strengthen Ethereum’s claim as public infrastructure, but the demand for ETH depends on whether settlement demand between fragmented systems materialises and users notice the value of this new optimisation approach.
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