The interim co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Bastian Aue, presented the strategic development plan for the organization, highlighting the issue of maximum recoverable value (MEV) as "the next cyber front". In his view, the network’s neutrality is threatened by toxic MEV, cartels of decision makers, and opaque transaction routing that turn a formally open blockchain into an intermediary structure. However, Aue warned that point-to-point technical solutions such as encrypted mempules or FOCIL and ePBS protocols are not a panacea and can only shift privileges to new members or complicate the architecture.

The second important part of the mandate was the fight for privacy and financial self-reliance. Ae suggested that unconditional privacy should be introduced at the basic level of the protocol, so that a public registry would not become an instrument of total surveillance. To test the infrastructure on its own, the Ethereum Foundation plans to transfer employee salaries and basic financial operations to ETH and native stablecoins. Moreover, the Fund views the excessive concentration of steakmaking in the hands of a limited number of operators not as a market trend, but as a serious vulnerability of the economy and a threat to the safety of the entire ecosystem.

In the face of staff reshuffles and the departure of a number of key managers, the fund will tighten the rules for financing external projects and spinoffs, supporting only those initiatives that strictly comply with the EF mandate. In parallel, five former researchers of the organization launched an independent laboratory Ethlabs with support from Joe Lubin, focusing on MEV and basic protocols. This underscores the critical importance of these directions for the future of Ethereum, especially given Flashbots' claims that spam transactions from arbitration bots have already become a major constraint on blockchain scaling.