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Bastian Aue, interim co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), has presented a detailed plan for implementing the foundation's mandate. This document is essentially a manifesto for a new era for the organization, where the fight against Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) takes center stage. Aue directly states that MEV is not just a market problem but "the next major front in the cypherpunk war," and combating its toxic manifestations becomes the foundation's primary, not secondary, task.

Why MEV is a Threat to Neutrality

In his analysis, Aue highlights five key risks capable of undermining Ethereum's fundamental neutrality: privileged access to the transaction flow, cartelization of builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, and validators' critical dependence on a narrow circle of providers. He emphasizes a paradoxical situation: a formally open network can effectively turn into an intermediary one if users, at the moment of value transfer, are forced to rely on a limited number of infrastructure players.

Technical Solutions: A Double-Edged Sword

Aue warns that even promising technologies like encrypted mempools carry hidden risks. They can reduce transparency and, instead of solving the problem, simply shift the advantage to new privileged participants, such as operators of specialized hardware. Similarly, mechanisms like FOCIL and ePBS, while solving individual tasks, can create new forms of inter-block MEV or lock in suboptimal builder economics. The key takeaway: piecemeal fighting of symptoms is ineffective — a systemic approach to value extraction is necessary.

Privacy and Internal Changes

The second pillar of the new strategy is privacy. Aue insists that confidentiality should be a baseline level, not an additional option. "A public registry without serious privacy settings becomes surveillance infrastructure," he states. As a sign of commitment to its principles, the EF plans to shift employee salaries and core financial operations to ETH and native stablecoins to test the infrastructure firsthand. Separately, Aue addresses the issue of staking concentration, calling it not just a yield-generating product but an infrastructure risk capable of making the network vulnerable through the economic layer.

Expert commentary. This plan marks a turning point for the Ethereum Foundation. The foundation ceases to be merely a development coordinator and transforms into an active defender of decentralization principles. It is particularly telling that Aue openly calls spinouts (like the recently launched Ethlabs) part of the new ecosystem, but with a clear criterion: external funding is justified only if it does not increase the risks of capture and dependency. This is a pragmatic and mature approach that could set the tone for all of Ethereum's development in the coming years.