The EF’s Endless Manifestos

The Ethereum Foundation's 'EF Mandate' feels like an out-of-touch return to vibes over pragmatic vision.

David Hoffman
Mar 14, 2026 • 3 min read

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This week, the Ethereum Foundation released its “EF Mandate.”

This is yet another public document of Ethereum’s mission, values, and how the EF will steward it, wrapped in flowery language, rainbows, and anime.

I’m honestly tired of this stuff.

asking this strictly as a graphic designer: who is the intended audience here?

i feel like i'm in an AI-generated crystals shop where some wispy white woman is about to tell me she wants to code her own dreams pic.twitter.com/PCC6WMzxg4
— david phelps (@divine_economy) March 13, 2026

The time to write a ‘mandate’ of Ethereum’s values, as a guiding document for the direction of Ethereum, was in the 2015-2020 era. And I’m sure there was something like this published back then, too. It seems the main exports of the EF these days are these kinds of mood board documents to remind themselves, and us, what their vibe is.

I worry that Dankrad's analysis of this document is accurate. This ‘mandate’ from the EF is saying, “Hey, we tried doing the whole ‘maximize Ethereum’s value’ thing, but we’re going back to building cypherpunk stuff only.”

I’m of the disposition that if you maximize the market value something brings to the world, then that is highly synonymous with maximizing the most good for most people, which is what I’m assuming Vitalik thinks he's doing when he reaffirms Ethereum's trajectory to only support the hardline cypherpunk side of Ethereum.

In the mandate document, and also restated in Vitalik’s tweet, is the line: “Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world that is here to have specific properties.”

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