Ethereum Foundation’s Interim ED Lays Out Execution Plan: MEV Elimination, Default Privacy, ETH Pay

The Ethereum Foundation's interim Executive Director published a six-part execution thread Monday, committing EF to treating MEV extraction as a structural threat, making privacy a protocol default, and moving its own compensation into ETH and Ethereum-native stablecoins.

Bastian Aue, known as Aerugo on X, posted the thread Monday. The post frames itself as the execution counterpart to Vitalik Buterin's earlier post on EF direction and a separate context note from executive director Aya Miyaguchi. The six sections cover MEV, privacy, compensation, staking, spinout funding criteria, and personnel departures.

MEV as a Cypherpunk Battleground

The sharpest commitment in the thread concerns maximal extractable value. AU describes preventing toxic MEV capture as "core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern," and positions it as the next front in a longer cypherpunk project: "MEV is likely to be the next major front in the cypherpunk war. We must set ourselves up to win here."

The specific failure modes EF intends to guard against: privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, and validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain. The argument is that an Ethereum network that looks permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves has failed its core promise. Aue ties this to the broader mandate: the EF exists to ensure Ethereum remains "censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure."

EF protocol work will prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, and competitive transaction pipelines. Aue lags trade-off risks directly: FOCIL improves censorship resistance but may introduce more cross-block MEV; ePBS solves the relayer trust problem but must not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to larger problems.

The thread explicitly warns against enshrining the builder economy in a way that makes it harder to reduce reliance on private orderflow that has emptied the public mempool.

"In order to avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to solving the extraction problem at a whole system scale," the thread states. "Failure to solve this problem is unacceptable."

Privacy by Default

The thread gives privacy equal weight to MEV.

"A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees," Aue writes, calling that "not an acceptable end state for the world computer."

The stated direction: unconditional privacy available by default across Ethereum, with programmability on top for selective disclosure, proofs, auditability, compliance logic, and governance. The temporal ordering is explicit in the thread: unconditional privacy must exist first; opt-in constraints come second.

The thread also rejects a fragmented privacy stack. Users should not need to assemble special wallets, RPCs, bridges, and applications to attain meaningful privacy. The Kohaku Initiative's wallet-level SDK, released in May, reflected an earlier step in that direction.

EF Eats Its Own Cooking

The compensation commitment has a concrete test embedded in it. The EF is moving its own compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and what the thread calls "mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stables," with exceptions only where positive law or unavoidable operational constraints require them.

Aue frames this as product pressure: "If the EF's work is to make Ethereum usable as infrastructure for self-sovereignty, everyone at the EF will increasingly live inside the constraints of the system the EF exists to improve: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, dependency risk, etc. If we can't use these tools ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect others to."

The move follows a period in which EF's treasury management drew scrutiny. The foundation sold 10,000 ETH to BitMNR at an average price of $2,387 in April. ETH traded around $1,735 on Monday, with a market cap of approximately $209.6 billion, according to CoinGecko.

Spinout Criteria and Departures

On spinouts, the thread sets a multi-part test any externally funded work must clear: is it mandate-critical? Would EF do it internally if it had capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk or opacity? Does supporting it reduce Ethereum's dependence on EF over time without prematurely transferring resources?

The thread is explicit on what does not qualify: lazy continuity payments, friendship payments, reputational hedges, or ways to avoid making a hard decision. "EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate. We will spend all three as if they matter."

On the same day the thread published, five former EF researchers — Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma — announced Ethlabs, an independent non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum backed by Bitmine, Sharplink, and Consensys founder Joe Lubin. The lab's stated focus on MEV and core protocol research aligns directly with the mandate areas Aue describes.

The departures section declines to litigate individual cases. "People who contributed through EF deserve dignity on the way out. They do not deserve to have their employment history turned into factional content." The EF has faced a wave of senior departures in 2026, including Josh Stark and Trent Van Epps in April, which drew calls for a more price-focused Ethereum organization.

The thread also covers staking concentration, quantum resistance, and personal AI agents as areas where EF sees mandate-aligned work. On staking, Aue calls it "protocol infrastructure risk," not a yield product, and warns that concentration of stake around a small set of issuers or operators makes "Ethereum's security layer vulnerable to capture through capture of the economic layer around it."

Each theme connects back to the same frame: Ethereum must remain infrastructure people can use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, or governments overreach.

"When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum," Aue wrote.

[CORRECTION: Updated on 6/22 @ 3:30 ET to reflect Aerugo is EF interim Executive Director Bastian Aue]