MEV declared the main front of the cyberpunk war: Ethereum Foundation changes strategy
Ethereum Foundation (EF) Interim Co-Executive Director Bastian Aue has presented an ambitious plan to implement the foundation's mandate, in which Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is described not merely as a technical issue, but as "the next major front in the cypherpunk war." This statement, building on recent posts by Vitalik Buterin, fundamentally shifts the organization's priorities.
MEV as an Existential Threat to Neutrality
Aue emphasizes that combating toxic MEV should become the primary work of the EF, not a secondary topic of market infrastructure. In his assessment, a formally open network can effectively turn into an intermediary one if users, at the moment of value transfer, depend on a limited number of participants. He highlights five key risks capable of undermining Ethereum's neutrality: privileged access to transaction order flow, builder cartelization, trusted relays, opaque transaction routing, and validator dependence on a narrow chain of suppliers.
Encrypted Mempools: Not a Panacea, but New Risks
Aue pays special attention to the limitations of popular solutions. He warns that encrypted mempools, while reducing transparency until transaction execution, could shift the advantage to new privileged participants, including operators of specialized hardware. Similarly, FOCIL and ePBS, while solving some problems, create new forms of inter-block MEV or risk cementing suboptimal builder economics. The analyst's key conclusion: targeted fighting against individual manifestations of MEV will not solve the problem — value extraction must be considered at the level of the entire system.
Privacy, Staking, and Strategic Independence
The second major theme of the plan is privacy. Aue advocates for a model where unconditional confidentiality first becomes available at the base layer, with mechanisms for selective disclosure added on top. He states firmly: "A public ledger without serious privacy settings by default becomes surveillance infrastructure with settlement guarantees." Practically, the EF will begin gradually transitioning employee payments and core financial relationships into ETH and "Ethereum-native" stablecoins — not as a symbolic gesture, but as a way to test the infrastructure on itself, encountering the same UX problems as ordinary users.
Staking concentration is addressed separately, which Aue calls not a revenue-generating product, but an infrastructural risk to the protocol. If the staking share and access to validators become concentrated around a small number of issuers, Ethereum's security level becomes vulnerable through the economic layer. The Foundation will also rigorously evaluate spinouts, funding only those projects critically important to the mandate, not those advanced by inertia or through personal connections.
My analysis: This document is not just a reorganization plan, but an intellectual manifesto. Aue effectively acknowledges that Ethereum faces a "prince and pauper problem": formal decentralization does not guarantee actual decentralization if infrastructure nodes are captured by a narrow circle of players. Moving MEV from the category of "optimization" to the category of "cyberpunk war" is a signal to the market: the EF will sacrifice short-term efficiency for long-term sustainability. Investors should closely monitor how this affects the economics of validators and builders — a major restructuring of the entire value chain within the ecosystem is possible.