Buterin puts 90% of net worth in ETH as EF narrows focus

On May 24, 2026, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote that nearly 90% of his personal net worth is held in ether (ETH) as he outlined a narrower focus for the Ethereum Foundation.

Buterin announced the foundation will shrink its scope to core technical priorities and stop work that other groups can carry out. The EF will concentrate only on activities aimed at keeping Ethereum censorship-resistant, private and open.

He noted the foundation holds roughly 0.16% of all ETH, far below the 10%–50% reserves common at central foundations behind other blockchains. Buterin added that ETH secures about $250 billion in value.

Buterin wrote that roughly $40 million of his remaining assets are in on-chain fiat and have been allocated to open-source biotech, software and hardware projects. He also wrote that his influence on the foundation’s board will continue to decline as the organization reorganizes.

The foundation’s original mandate — building the chain software through the Serenity upgrade — was completed in 2022, and the EF was not designed to be a permanent steward of the whole ecosystem, he wrote. To allow teams to raise outside capital and operate with more flexibility, some respected contributors and technical groups will move outside the EF structure.

Buterin set out specific technical priorities. He called for AI-assisted formal verification to make Ethereum provably bug-free. He described “available chain consensus” as a property Ethereum and Bitcoin share that combines fault tolerance under asynchrony with protection against attackers controlling up to 49% of nodes. He also highlighted intermediary minimization so users and protocols can send transactions directly to the chain without routing through third parties.

He wrote these goals are compatible with higher transaction throughput and well-designed layer-two networks.

Board member Aya Miyaguchi is leading operational aspects of the transition. Buterin said he expects the foundation’s new long-term structure to stabilize over the coming months.

He closed the post with the line: “A smaller ship. More opinionated. Built to last longer.”