The Ethereum Foundation is done treating maximum extractable value as an inconvenience. It now considers it a structural threat to the network’s neutrality, and it has a plan to act accordingly.
Bastian Aue, the EF’s Chief Strategy Advisor and interim co-Executive Director, published a six-part execution thread on June 22 laying out a sweeping operational pivot. The plan treats toxic MEV extraction as a fundamental problem to solve, elevates privacy to a default protocol feature, and shifts the foundation’s own compensation structure toward ETH and Ethereum-native stablecoins.
What the execution plan actually says
Aue’s thread is essentially a roadmap for turning the Ethereum Foundation into a more focused, more aligned organization. The six sections cover three major commitments that together represent a significant change in how the EF thinks about its role.
First, MEV. For the uninitiated: maximum extractable value is the profit that block producers and searchers can capture by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions within a block. Some forms of MEV are relatively benign. Others, the “toxic” variety, directly harm regular users through front-running and sandwich attacks.
