Ethereum Foundation Interim Co-Executive Director Outlines Mission, Governance Priorities, and Staffing Stance

An Ethereum Foundation (EF) interim co-executive director, Bastian Aue (Aerugo), published a post describing the foundation’s mission, key protocol risks, and its approach to recent staff departures. According to Foresight News, Aue said EF exists to ensure Ethereum becomes and remains a truly permissionless autonomy infrastructure with censorship resistance, resilience against capture by capital and states, privacy, and security, rather than to expand the foundation’s influence, cater to short-term speculators, or endorse ecosystem projects.

Addressing controversy around recent departures, the post said reasons can include strategic disagreements, role fit, normal organizational changes, or personal choices. It added that EF will not discuss individual personnel matters on social media, while stating that departing staff should have a dignified exit. If public statements seriously mislead the public about EF’s direction or decisions, the foundation may clarify at the level of policy and facts, without publicizing personal matters.

The post described maximal extractable value (MEV) governance as a core EF focus rather than a peripheral market-structure issue, warning that beneficiaries could seek improper influence and that malicious MEV could become Ethereum’s next major security battleground.

On privacy, it argued that unconditional privacy must exist before optional compliance constraints, and said a public ledger without privacy by default is effectively a surveillance system with settlement guarantees.

Staking was framed as a protocol-layer infrastructure risk, with the post calling for preventing concentration of staking power, liquidity, and governance influence among a small number of issuers or operators.

The post also listed opportunities EF believes Ethereum should pursue, including making Ethereum the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure, building an end-to-end censorship-resistant autonomy technology stack, positioning ETH as “digital cash,” and enabling user-run personal AI wallet agents.

On EF funding decisions for external teams, the post said criteria include whether the work is mission-critical, whether a more suitable executor exists, and whether it can be completed without increasing capture risk or dependency, rather than whether a team previously belonged to EF.