Bastian Aue, the interim co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), has published a plan outlining the foundation's mandate. He presented the thread as a continuation of recent posts by Vitalik Buterin regarding the direction of the EF and Aya Miyaguchi on how the foundation reached its current stage.

1. Intro

Vitalik recently wrote about where the EF should go; Aya added a note to explain how we got here, and why. I’ll write about the execution.

We now have enough clarity to stop treating “what is the EF for?” as an open-ended question. Our mandate is clear: The EF exists…

— Aerugo (@aerugoettinea) June 22, 2026

One of the key topics Aue highlighted is MEV (Maximal Extractable Value). He stated that MEV could become "the next major front in the cypherpunk wars," and that combating toxic MEV is a primary focus of the Ethereum Foundation, rather than a secondary concern of market infrastructure.

Core Issues

Aue emphasized that the EF should strengthen Ethereum as an open infrastructure for user self-sovereignty. In this context, the foundation will focus on resilience to censorship and capture, open-source code, privacy, and security. He stressed that the organization does not exist for short-term speculators, to promote specific Ethereum applications, or to enhance the ecosystem's appeal by sacrificing the characteristics that distinguish it from permissioned financial systems.

Regarding MEV, Aue listed risks that he believes could undermine Ethereum's neutrality:

  • privileged order flow;
  • cartelization of builders;
  • trusted relays;
  • opaque transaction routing;
  • validator dependency on a narrow supply chain.

Aue stated that a formally open network could effectively become intermediated if users rely on a limited number of infrastructure participants during value transfer.

Why Encrypted Mempools Don’t Solve Everything

Aue noted that the Ethereum Foundation will support efforts to lower barriers to block creation and validation, enhance transaction inclusion guarantees, reduce opaque value extraction, and develop competitive transaction processing pathways.

However, he cautioned that individual technical solutions could introduce new risks. In particular, encrypted mempools may reduce transparency before transaction execution and obscure the flow of pending transactions, while simultaneously granting advantages to new privileged participants, including operators of specialized equipment in certain architectures. Such solutions also increase protocol complexity.

Aue also pointed out the limitations of FOCIL and ePBS. FOCIL may enhance censorship resistance but could create new forms of inter-block MEV. ePBS reduces reliance on trusted relays but should not entrench builder economics in a way that hinders more long-term solutions.

The author of the thread warned that targeting individual manifestations of MEV will not resolve the issue. He argued that value extraction must be viewed at the systemic level.

Privacy and Payments in ETH

The second major theme of the thread is privacy. He advocated for a model where unconditional confidentiality is first made available at the base level, with mechanisms for selective data disclosure, proofs, auditing, compliance, and governance layered on top.

“A public ledger without serious privacy settings by default becomes a surveillance infrastructure with guarantees of settlement,” he stated.

Aue also mentioned that the Ethereum Foundation will gradually transition employee payments and key financial relationships towards ETH and “Ethereum-native” stablecoins, unless hindered by laws or operational constraints. He explained this is not a symbolic gesture but a way to test the infrastructure firsthand.

In his view, if the EF is working to make Ethereum a viable infrastructure for self-sovereignty, its employees should face the same challenges as users: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy, payment friction, reliance on stablecoins, and access recovery.

Staking and Spinouts

The thread specifically addressed staking concentration, which Aue described not just as a profitable product but as an infrastructural risk to the protocol. He noted that if the share of stake, liquidity, access to validators, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small number of issuers or operators, Ethereum's security level could become vulnerable through the economic layer.

Another section focused on spinouts—projects that may emerge from the Ethereum Foundation or receive external funding. He indicated that the EF would evaluate such initiatives based on several criteria:

  • how important they are to the foundation's mandate;
  • whether the EF would undertake this work internally if resources were available;
  • whether there is a more suitable organizational base for it;
  • whether external execution increases risks of capture, opacity, or dependency.

He emphasized that the foundation should not fund projects out of inertia, personal connections, or to avoid difficult decisions. Aue summarized the approach by stating that the EF has limited resources, legitimacy, and a specific mandate, and it will expend all three as if they matter.

Aue's thread comes amid personnel changes at the Ethereum Foundation. In February, co-executive director Tomas Stanczak left his position, after which Bastian Aue was appointed as interim co-executive director. In June, Xiao-Wei Wang also announced her departure from a similar role and from the foundation's board.

As reported by The Defiant, at that time, five former EF researchers—Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monno, Kaspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma—launched an independent nonprofit R&D lab called Ethlabs. Among its anchor sponsors are BitMine, SharpLink, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. According to media reports, Ethlabs' focus on MEV and foundational protocol research overlaps with the directions Aue described as part of the new execution of the EF mandate.

Previously, the Flashbots research group stated that MEV has become "the dominant constraint on blockchain scalability." Experts found that spam transactions generated by arbitrage bots consume block space faster than even high-performance networks can expand it.

It is worth noting that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin identified MEV as one of the main threats to the network's decentralization, alongside liquid staking and the cost of running a full node.