teacher
I will be stepping down from my role as co-editor at EF at the end of February 2026. Bastien Aue will take over the role of co-editor alongside Xiaowei. The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for EF, and for me.
The future of Ethereum
As competing ideas emerge and fail, markets soar and plummet, we have been given unprecedented confidence. Conviction about Ethereum comes from a deep understanding of its technology, its governance, its implications for the future, and the values we share, constantly bringing us together intermittently, even when our curiosity takes us exploring very far from the canonical path.
I have been exploring what the future holds for Ethereum for a long time. We are witnessing the migration of financial infrastructure to Ethereum and the emergence of automated agent interactions. Soon we will see robots, new forms of governance, AI medicine and education. I believe Ethereum will continue to be the natural infrastructure layer for coordinating all these interacting technologies.
The performance of open source LLM models is not bad and we expect it to get better in the future. Open source agent workers are becoming the most exciting toy for builders and creators since the early days of Ethereum. Important privacy and security issues are emerging around the new paradigm. The world is changing rapidly, and in that change, Ethereum is becoming the underlying infrastructure for verification and financial transactions. Ethereum’s cypherpunk spirit remains intact, with top privacy builders and security experts ensuring the network helps protect people’s privacy and access to critical infrastructure.
In 2025, Ethereum has emerged as a clear institutional priority. The dashboard shows Ethereum’s growing market share in stablecoin and RWA activity. Ethereum is considered the lowest risk chain. Our trusted neutrality, decentralization, and no downtime since our inception provide institutions with an infrastructure with unparalleled low counterparty, technology, and jurisdiction risk. The major institutional Ethereum conference will be held in New York this year, and we look forward to seeing Ethereum appear in the world’s financial centers.
With advances in AI and its increasing integration into the global financial system, there has never been a more exciting time to build Ethereum.
The future of EF
What has been important to me over the last year is that the EF co-ED role is an impactful and desirable one, and a position where we can drive meaningful change by empowering exceptionally talented and dedicated people, both at EF and in the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
We have been successful in delivering changes in EF quickly. We have great talent who are quick learners and have great direction for 2026. The Co-Edward position has been extremely challenging and strategically challenging, and has brought me a lot of joy and inspiration. The support we received from the community was tremendous. I am satisfied with the current situation. The roadmap is clearer. Goals are set. EF leaders became more confident in making their own decisions and owning more. The most important goals have already been completed or are being continuously improved: accelerate decision-making, interact with younger generations, bring new excitement to the builder community, communicate more openly on social media and podcasts, be more open to institutions, support founders, set financial policies, strengthen local bases and communities, introduce remuneration policies, make L1-L2 relationships clearer, and increase internal and external transparency regarding budgets and structures. The people who contributed these changes continue to work on Ethereum. More and more people are clearly considering ETH as a store of value. Some changes occur suddenly. My ability to work independently at EF will diminish over time, but my time with the organization in 2026 will increasingly feel like I’m just sitting there passing the baton. EF is in a healthy organizational state that allows it to balance long-term goals with the need for change. EF is unique, far from boring, extremely resilient, and led by highly intelligent people.
At the beginning of 2026, I’m very excited about the role EF can play in the future of Ethereum. We will soon announce a proposal that integrates LEAN Ethereum with a core development roadmap. This underscores what the EF Protocol team believes in the long-term path of the Ethereum protocol. This should provide clear guidance and setup for adjustments from 2026 onwards. With two network upgrades in 2025 and support from EF’s coordination team, our core developers are well-positioned to continue shipping important improvements on time.
We have a very clear quantum strategy, with top quantum security researchers finalizing the specifications and our best engineers working on implementation. Post-quantum security has a clear place in the EF protocol roadmap.
We have a dedicated decentralized AI team that delivers standards, experiments, and solutions for the agent economy ((1), (2)).
We have an ecosystem development EcoDev team focused on the success of founders, institutions, and governments building on Ethereum. We have a dedicated global policy support team. Our efforts are increasingly automated by using AI for coordination. Great work by the teams at ethereum.org and forkcast.org to make communication around roadmaps, use cases, and applications clearer.
One of the main discussion points and challenges last year was about the relationship between L1 and L2. Vitalik’s recent post attempts to bring more clarity to a situation that has been observed for a long time. L2 will be extended or built on top of Ethereum, with various security and decentralization tradeoffs. L2 chooses to build value propositions by choosing between risk and UX improvements across parameters such as scaling, decentralization, historical state availability, and privacy. We established a platform team at EF and convened over 20 Ethereum L2s to discuss the future of scaling, differentiation, and interoperability at Network School. The team that builds base rollups, native rollups, and synchronous composability starts this year with a clearer vision and a more focused approach. Recently, the major Ethereum rollups have started to steadily overtake all AltL1s in stablecoin and TPS metrics, and I believe this trend will continue.
Although we became more open to applications and institutional spaces, we continued to center our cypherpunk values, with groups like Vitalik’s Silviculture Society advising senior leaders on emerging risks and warning against wrong steps. In a series of tweets in early 2026, Vitalik expressed his respect for the importance of what is fundamental to EF’s existence. PSE and Kohaku’s efforts are currently focused on applied privacy. The Protocol team is more committed than ever to security and resisting censorship with FOCIL and the Trillion Dollar Security Program.
I am very excited that Devcon Mumbai brings together blockchain thought leaders and founders from around the world to collaborate on Ethereum. The Indian community has deserved this event for many years and we are extremely proud that our team will be bringing Devcon to India in 2026.
In 2026, EF will be better able to speak to a new generation of builders. The work of EF’s new voices, and all the talented people working behind the scenes with founders and media, shows the new energy at EF and will continue to excite the community in 2026, especially with the movement around agent AI and Ethereum becoming the go-to trust infrastructure.
The Ethereum Everywhere initiative already supports hubs in San Francisco, Lagos, London, Berlin, and Hong Kong. The Academic Office team is planning a number of new university events this year. The pop-up city idea maintains its momentum and the scene is becoming better and better organized. New builders and long-time thought leaders come together to build around the world.
In the coming weeks, EF’s DeFi coordination team will be publishing a blog post with their plans and roadmap. I’m very excited about the talent we’ve brought to EF to help orchestrate DeFi. There is no better person to support the DeFi ecosystem.
Xiaowei stays and continues on her way. Bastian Aue will take on an expanded leadership role alongside Xiaowei. Whatever direction they take, they will have the support of some of the best talent in the cryptocurrency space. The entire transformation of EcoDev on the builder, founder, and organization side was brought to EF by James Smith, who continues the mission. Policy support and long-term efforts continue under the excellent leadership of Bastien Aue and Chu Liang. Josh Stark has an exceptional talent for implementing operational changes quickly and also led all major communication changes on social media in 2025. Engineers and researchers in the Protocol Cluster will work more closely together to confidently set a roadmap for the future and tackle our toughest technical challenges. EF is a place where things move quickly, and changes can occur within days or weeks.
my future
My DMs remain open for anyone who needs help connecting with people at EF or discussing Ethereum’s vision and strategy. I will continue to be available to EF leaders if they feel they need advice (although I’m sure they have given me some valuable advice). I will continue to push the Ethereum ecosystem to pick up the pace.
I may continue to travel, work with local communities, and help companies build on Ethereum. As a core developer and hands-on product builder, I will be working specifically on agent core development and agent governance. That’s pretty much how I felt when I started Nethermind in 2017. At that time, I felt strongly that a big change was occurring. I knew that Ethereum was going to replace the financial system, and I knew that I had gained significant experience that would make the financial industry evolve rather than revolutionize it. I now know that agent systems and AI-assisted discoveries are reshaping the world. I’m well aware that some of the agent ideas aren’t permanent or even useful, but it was playful experimentation that defined many of Ethereum’s early innovations.
I will continue to work directly with Frontier Technologies and the founders of Ethereum. I want to see and support the realization of the vision I have been talking about. It’s one of the most exciting times to be an Ethereum builder.
thank you
It would be impossible to list everyone who helped me, EF, and Ethereum in 2025. During my time at EF, I traveled to over 20 countries for work and spent a lot of time with local communities. I met thousands of people: builders, investors, educators, policy makers, creators, researchers, and academics. I loved your words of support, tough questions, and critiques.
I would like to sincerely thank the EF Board of Directors for taking the bold step of welcoming me to Hsiao-Wei as Co-Superintendent. I would like to thank Xiaowei and the management team for working together so quickly. A huge thank you to Bastian Aue, Josh Stark, and Tju Liang for bringing so much emotional intelligence and fostering thoughtful discussion when faced with the most difficult problems. Thank you, Joe Schweitzer, for reviewing countless podcasts and helping us reach a wide audience when talking about the future of Ethereum.
A huge thank you to the hundreds of Ethereum leaders who reached out to me in March and April of 2025 to talk about all the things that needed attention and share their views on what their EF strategy should be. Thank you so much; without you I would never have found the right path.
Thank you to everyone at EF for putting your faith and talent into action.
—
Tomasz
