Bastian Aué, the interim co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), has presented an updated execution plan for the foundation’s mandate. The core thesis: Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is no longer just a market side effect, but an infrastructure risk whose mitigation is becoming a top priority.
Back to Roots: Neutrality Over Speculation
Aué clearly defined the boundaries of the Ethereum Foundation’s interests. The organization does not exist to serve short-term speculators or artificially boost the ecosystem’s appeal at the expense of its core principles. The foundation intends to protect Ethereum as an open infrastructure for user self-sovereignty.
In focus are four core pillars: censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy, and security.
MEV: A Toxic Threat to Decentralization
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is recognized as one of the key problems. According to Aué, a formally open blockchain network risks turning into a mediated structure if users are forced to rely on a narrow circle of infrastructure players when transferring value.
The main threats undermining the network’s neutrality include:
- Privileged order flow;
- Cartelization among block builders;
- Network dependence on trusted relays;
- Opaque transaction routing;
- Monopolization of the validator supply chain.
Why There Are No “Silver Bullets”
The EF plans to lower barriers to block creation and strengthen transaction inclusion guarantees. However, Aué warns against blind faith in isolated technical solutions.
For instance, encrypted mempools hide data before transactions are executed, but they simultaneously complicate the protocol and shift the advantage to new monopolists—operators of specialized hardware. Initiatives like FOCIL (censorship resistance) and ePBS (reducing dependence on relays) are undoubtedly useful, but they carry risks of forming cross-block MEV or “cementing” the builder economy.
“Targeted combat against individual manifestations of MEV is doomed to fail; the problem must be addressed at the system-wide level,” the author concludes.
Privacy by Default and “Dogfooding” with Salaries
The second major topic of the updated mandate is confidentiality. Aué promotes a model where privacy is provided at the base level of the network, with audit, proof, and compliance mechanisms built on top.
“A public ledger without serious privacy settings by default becomes surveillance infrastructure with settlement guarantees,” he stated.
To ensure developers better understand the pain points of regular users, the EF is gradually transitioning employee compensation to ETH and native stablecoins. This is classic “dogfooding” (testing your own product): the foundation’s team must experience wallet UX issues, volatility, accounting complexities, and payment frictions firsthand.
Staking Monopolies and Strict Filters for Grants
Staking concentration is labeled not just a market trend, but a vulnerability of the economic security layer. If assets, liquidity, and influence are concentrated within a few issuers, it puts the entire protocol at risk.
The funding policy for external projects (spin-outs) will also change. The foundation will no longer allocate funds “by inertia”. Each project will be strictly evaluated:
- Is it important for the EF’s mandate?
- Could the foundation’s team do this internally if resources were available?
- Does the external contractor pose new risks of capture, opacity, or dependence?
Context: Shake-ups in the EF and the Scale of the Problem
Bastian Aué’s statements come amid serious personnel changes at the Ethereum Foundation. In February, co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak left, and in June, Xiao-Wei Wang also departed from the foundation.
In parallel, five former EF researchers united into an independent R&D laboratory called Ethlabs (with Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin among the anchor sponsors). According to media reports, Ethlabs’ focus on deep MEV and protocol research directly overlaps with the new vision of the EF.
The scale of the threat is confirmed by data from the Flashbots group: MEV has already become the main barrier to scaling blockchains. Spam transactions from arbitrage bots consume block space faster than high-performance networks can expand their throughput.
