Second of a two-part reading.

The first text described an institution choosing to step aside. This one turns to what always follows such a gesture, for in history, no void stays empty for long.

A question far older than Ethereum

The first article laid out an observation. The Ethereum Foundation is voluntarily stepping back from the center of the game. Around it, a constellation of new structures is taking shape, while the major rollups now concentrate most of the network’s economic activity. The landscape may look new. It is not.

What is playing out today reaches well beyond the story of a protocol. Every time an institution gives up exercising part of its power directly, three resources change hands at once: funding, legitimacy, and the capacity to define what matters. They never vanish, they circulate. It is that circulation we need to watch.

One could treat this sequence as a quarrel internal to crypto governance. That would miss what makes it interesting. Ethereum is not inventing a new situation, it is making visible, in an unusually transparent environment, an institutional mechanism history has already observed many times. The settings change, the actors too, but the logic stays remarkably stable. When a center withdraws, a contest begins at once over who will inherit the functions it abandons, rarely in dramatic fashion, almost always through gradual shifts.

History offers enough examples to distinguish three recurring movements. The first concerns the capture of the void left by the institution. The second bears on the capture of the value produced by the infrastructure. The third touches the capture of sovereignty itself. These three movements are not obligatory stages, but three ways of answering a single question: what becomes of a power when it stops being exercised from its historical center.

The capture of the void

Choosing to disappear on purpose is no innovation of the crypto world. Large institutions face it regularly once they reach a level of maturity that turns their own existence into a problem. In philanthropy, the strategy has a name, spending down: rather than preserving its capital indefinitely to outlive its founders, an institution chooses to devote all of its resources to its mission, then accepts its own end.

The most famous example remains Atlantic Philanthropies. Founded by Chuck Feeney, the man behind the duty-free shops, it gave away close to eight billion dollars before closing its doors for good in 2020. That decision was neither a bankruptcy nor a surrender, but the fruit of a conviction: an institution can sometimes serve its mission better by organizing its own end than by trying to prolong its existence forever. Atlantic never simply handed out money, either. Over several decades it prepared its withdrawal, encouraging the organizations it backed to diversify their funding and never depend on a single patron, so that its disappearance would be the culmination of an emancipation rather than a collapse.

Seen this way, the recent trajectory of the Ethereum Foundation looks less singular than it seems. The framework meant to accompany the structures spinning out of it, the initial funding of Argot, EEZ, and others, the stated will to reduce its operational role, all of this follows the same logic: the institution seeks less to withdraw than to make its withdrawal bearable.

Yet this strategy has a known weakness. No institution fully controls what happens after it steps back. Trent Van Epps says as much when he worries about the future funding of the teams in charge of protocol development, which he puts at around 30 million dollars a year, with a possible shortfall on the order of 20 million. The organizations that take over inherit not only resources but responsibilities and new uncertainties. Between the moment a historical funder withdraws and the moment new balances appear, there is almost always a period of fragility.

That is precisely what the comparison with so-called perpetual foundations reveals. The Ford Foundation, for instance, chose the opposite strategy: not to disappear, but to maintain, generation after generation, a lasting capacity to act, betting that certain missions demand a continuous presence rather than a concentrated effort. Neither approach has definitively won the argument, one favoring intensity, the other permanence.

Ethereum seems to be looking for a third way. The Foundation does not plan to disappear, nor to remain the ecosystem’s principal actor. It is trying to become an institution able to ensure doctrinal continuity while giving up a central role in execution. That position is harder than it looks, because an institution that leaves the center never leaves only a financial void. It also gives up a power to arbitrate, an accumulated legitimacy, and a power to set direction that others will inevitably seek to exercise.

The void does draw candidates with sharper positions than the Foundation’s. The Ethereum Community Foundation, launched in the summer of 2025 by developer Zak Cole, is the clearest example. Independent of the Foundation, it funds only token-free projects that burn ETH, under a blunt motto, “ETH at 10,000 dollars is a requirement, not a meme,” and sums up its intent in one line: the Foundation did not correct course, so others will. July 1 offers another illustration, more polished. Ethereum Institutional presents itself as the neutral front door for institutions, yet counts among its five stated missions the promotion of ETH as an asset. Founded by former Foundation people and funded by treasuries that also back Ethlabs, it occupies the void in the name of neutrality while professing an interest in the value of the asset. The neutrality proclaimed by those with a stake in adoption is precisely the neutrality worth examining more closely.

This is where the comparison with Atlantic reaches its limit. Atlantic handed out resources. The Ethereum Foundation hands down a living ecosystem, an infrastructure, a community, standards, a reputation, and a political philosophy. The void it creates is therefore not merely budgetary, it is institutional, and like any institutional void, it summons new centers of gravity at once.

The capture of value

The second movement is perhaps the most constant in all of economic history: the infrastructures that make an activity possible are almost never the ones that capture the largest share of the wealth they produce.

The example of the American railways has become a classic, precisely because it illustrates the dynamic so sharply. In the late nineteenth century, railway companies invested vast sums to build thousands of miles of track. They bore the fixed costs, maintained the networks, took the industrial risk. Yet much of the value created ended up concentrating elsewhere. John D. Rockefeller understood early that whoever controls the flows holds more power than whoever owns the rails. His company, Standard Oil, negotiated preferential rates thanks to the volumes it brought the railways. The infrastructures became interchangeable, and the real rent shifted to the actor able to organize the exchanges passing through them.

That inversion is no historical anomaly, it reappears whenever an infrastructure reaches maturity. The internet offers one illustration: network operators built the material foundations of the digital economy, but most of the value moved to the platforms and applications that exploit those networks without owning them. Artificial intelligence seems to be following the same path: the companies developing the large models bear most of the investment today, but as those models become accessible, a growing share of the value migrates to the specialized applications that use them.

Ethereum does not escape this logic. The protocol has never been more robust, its architecture has never hosted so many uses, and yet a growing share of the economic value now concentrates in the layers built on top of it. That shift partly explains the debate over the value of ETH: if the protocol becomes a universal infrastructure, must it also be the asset that captures most of the wealth it makes possible. Nothing in economic history allows an affirmative answer.

In late 2025, Chilla added a nuance I cite as a practitioner’s observation: against the enthusiasm surrounding new chains funded by ever more generous incentive programs, he noted that such capital often stays opportunistic. Rewards attract users fast but retain them poorly, and when the subsidies fall, liquidity moves on to the next platform. Ethereum presents a different configuration, an older, deeper, and often less speculative liquidity, which could become an advantage again once the ecosystem seeks durable infrastructure rather than exceptional returns. The intuition remains a hypothesis, but it is a reminder that an infrastructure can regain value not by growing more spectacular, but because its environment stops privileging speed over solidity.

A third example throws light on the dilemma from another angle, and it is French. Minitel long achieved what the railways had not, making the infrastructure itself share in the wealth produced by the services it hosted. Through the Kiosque system, part of every connection flowed automatically back to the network, which produced almost no content but took a fraction of the value created by those who used it. The model was economically remarkable, and yet it did not survive. Its weakness lay not in its capture mechanism but in its closure: by controlling its environment too tightly, Minitel lost the ability to evolve against a far more open internet.

That comparison illuminates Ethereum’s dilemma. A fully neutral infrastructure risks letting most of the value escape to its periphery. An infrastructure that seeks to retain that value risks, conversely, compromising the neutrality that was its strength. The whole history of great infrastructures seems to swing between these two poles, staying open at the risk of impoverishment, or capturing more value at the risk of closing in. Ethereum is probably not the first system to meet this tension, it may simply be the first to make it visible in real time.

The capture of sovereignty

The third movement is the most discreet, and the most decisive. For an institution can lose its resources without losing its authority, just as it can keep its resources while its real power slips away.

Political history offers countless examples of this drift. The most famous is perhaps that of the mayors of the palace under the Merovingians. At first they were merely the king’s chief servants, charged with running the royal household, and their power derived entirely from delegation. Then the office changed in nature. As the sovereigns weakened, the mayors of the palace administered the finances, led the armies, appointed local officials, and conducted the affairs of the kingdom. The title stayed the same, but the power had already moved. When Pepin the Short deposed Childeric III, the last Merovingian king, in 751, he only ratified an old reality: power had not been seized in a day, it had slowly changed hands.

That sequence illustrates a rule found well beyond monarchies: effective power often migrates before institutions take note of the migration. Contemporary political economy gave the phenomenon a name, capture. George Stigler formalized it in 1971 in his article on economic regulation. His observation is simple: bodies created to oversee a sector often end up adopting the interests, the categories of thought, and sometimes the goals of the actors they were meant to watch. The mechanism does not necessarily rest on corruption, but on an ordinary asymmetry. The parties directly concerned hold an immediate, concentrated, and permanent interest, and devote time and resources to influencing the decisions that touch them. The rest of society holds only a diffuse interest. Collective attention slackens, and institutions begin, little by little, to see the world through the eyes of those they meet daily. One thing should be said about where this theory comes from, so its use is not mistaken: it was born at the Chicago school, in a current for which regulation is almost always captured and should therefore be reduced. That is not the conclusion drawn here.

The work edited by Daniel Carpenter and David Moss extended this analysis by distinguishing two forms of capture. The first is material, working through funding, the revolving door of personnel, conflicts of interest. The second is deeper, it is cultural: by sharing the same spaces, the same conferences, the same professional networks, regulators and regulated come to regard the same solutions as reasonable, spontaneously. Disagreements grow rarer, not because interests truly converge, but because the intellectual frame has become uniform. Capture, then, does not begin when the rules are broken, it begins when the same assumptions stop being discussed.

This distinction illuminates Ethereum’s situation. The question is not only who funds the new structures, but how ideas, work habits, criteria of success, and networks of trust circulate among organizations that often share the same people. A highly cohesive community can preserve a shared vision, but it can also, without noticing, narrow the diversity of viewpoints it claims to encourage.

This is where the work of Elinor Ostrom offers an essential counterpoint. Against theories for which any concentration ends in capture, Ostrom, Nobel laureate in 2009, shows that there are forms of governance able to preserve commons over time. But that success is nothing spontaneous: it requires precise rules, monitoring mechanisms, procedures for resolving conflict, and above all a genuine plurality of decision centers. Polycentricity is not dispersion, it is an architecture in which several autonomous authorities limit one another while remaining able to cooperate. In many ways, this is precisely what the Foundation says it wants to build, and the same can be said of another tradition, that of the economist Peter Evans, for whom a close proximity between power and capital can be fertile rather than corrupting, provided the institution keeps its autonomy while staying engaged with economic actors, what he calls embedded autonomy.

The decisive question then becomes concrete. Do the new organizations really amount to several independent centers, or to different expressions of a single intellectual community, funded through now more varied channels. The case of Ethlabs makes the question visible. In an interview released on June 29, its founders describe their role as complementary to the Foundation’s, which would embody memory and the long term, while they would take charge of accelerating and finding the levers likely to increase the economic power of ETH, their north star being to work out what it would take for ETH to become a trillion-dollar asset. The division looks coherent, it could even be an instance of successful polycentricity. But it holds a deeper question: does an institution’s autonomy depend only on the absence of explicit instructions, or does it also require a genuine diversity of interests, funding, and imaginations. Ethlabs’ founders insist their donors have no grip on their priorities, but its principal donors, Bitmine, Sharplink, and Joe Lubin, are also among the largest holders of ETH. History shows that institutions almost never lose their independence all at once, they watch it erode at the pace of dependencies they first judge inconsequential. The real stake, then, is not to prevent all influence, it is to keep an influence from becoming, over time, the only legitimate way to think.

The first test of that promise is already visible, and it is not unfolding at Ethlabs but in one of the most emblematic organizations of decentralized governance, ENS. On June 29, Alex Van de Sande published a detailed account of the ENS DAO’s finances, an organization meant to be steered collectively by the holders of its token. The figures are hard to ignore: over five years, close to 51.5 million dollars were distributed, and of that sum, 23.7 million, nearly half, went to ENS Labs, the team in charge of development, whose budget requests were never once rejected.

The observation reaches beyond ENS. On paper, the DAO is sovereign, token holders vote, budgets are proposed, debated, then approved through an open procedure. In practice, much of governance consists in ratifying the decisions proposed by the team that already holds the expertise, the institutional memory, and the capacity to execute. The parallel with the mayors of the palace regains all its force here: they never contested the kings’ legitimacy outright, they first took on the functions the sovereigns no longer performed themselves. When token holders have neither the time, nor the skills, nor the information needed to assess decisions, the vote gradually stops being a check and becomes a procedure of validation. Governance still exists, but its balance has already shifted. One boundary of the analogy should be named: the mayors served a hereditary sovereign who could not revoke them, whereas ENS Labs executes a mandate token holders can, in principle, withdraw at any vote. Budgets never rejected can signal passive ratification as much as genuine alignment; what the procedure alone no longer tells us is which.

This does not condemn the model, it invites us to distinguish two levels of decentralization. The first is institutional: the rules are open, the votes public, anyone can in theory take part. The second is cognitive: who truly understands the stakes, who holds the expertise, who drafts the proposals, who controls the information needed to decide. These two forms of power rarely coincide, and experience shows they tend to separate. That is why Van de Sande’s proposal deserves more than a mere budget adjustment: capping annual treasury withdrawals at 5 percent of the endowment, creating a security council, strengthening the safeguards, these measures look strikingly like the ones the Foundation has just adopted for itself.

Two very different organizations independently reach the same conclusion: decentralization does not spare us from building institutions, on the contrary it demands institutions able to resist the concentration effects it produces on its own.

Decentralization consists in making the emergence of any single center durably impossible.

So, four bets on the future

Depending on the reading one holds, four directions open, each resting on one of the cases above.

• If you believe value will eventually return to the center of gravity, you bet on the asset and on the base layer, following both the thesis of a scarce ETH and Chilla’s intuition about the return of builders.
• If you believe value always stays at the periphery, you build and invest instead on the rollups and the applications, drawing the lesson of the railways, where it is the user, not the network, who grows rich.
• If you see capture coming from those who execute and those who fund, you watch corporate treasuries with the caution one should have applied, in their time, to delegated powers that end up emancipating themselves; and you support what preserves a path without intermediary, the neutral funding of developers, the public goods.
• And if you judge that self-sunsetting is an outright abdication, you support rebuilding a central capacity, in the spirit of the foundation that chooses permanence, or of the structures that take on the mission of defending the asset.

Of these four bets, the first and the third refuse fatalism without denying the risk, and they are the only ones faithful to what Ethereum claims to be: a governance with several centers, close to capital without being captured by it, one that genuinely assembles the conditions of a real autonomy rather than relying on the goodwill of a community that knows itself too well.

One can go further, and this is the bet this text defends. The polycentric path and the return of value to the center are not opposed, they can proceed from the same cause. If the properties gathered under CROPS are not just a doctrine but genuinely scarce goods, then they produce two effects at once. They bring back to the center the builders who seek to last rather than the premium of the moment, because that neutrality and that security are found nowhere else to the same degree. And they make polycentricity possible, because a base that no one owns is precisely what lets several centers coexist without any one of them capturing it. The return of builders and governance with several centers are then not two separate bets, but two consequences of a single scarcity.

That coherence rests, however, on a fragile link. Nothing guarantees that the return of builders turns into value for the asset rather than value captured by the upper layers, since the history of neutral infrastructures teaches the opposite.

For the center to benefit, a mechanism has to tie it back, and three are plausible today:

• That the activity coming back is exercised enough on the base layer for the fees paid there to destroy ETH, which is what Buterin’s recent shift toward scaling the base layer pushes for.
• That the value of ETH depends less on those fees than on its immobilization as collateral: if infrastructures for issuing synthetic assets backed by ETH develop, they take ETH out of circulation and open it a yield distinct from fees.
• Or that real interoperability makes the center the place of settlement and shared liquidity toward which the value of the rollups flows back. These three mechanisms share a trait that should give pause: they are exactly the projects championed by the organizations most interested in their success. That does not make them false, but it forbids adopting them for the sole reason that they are well phrased.

This bet therefore has a precise boundary. If activity returns to Ethereum without value ceasing to drift toward its periphery, then the thesis will have been right about governance and wrong about the asset. To bet on the polycentric path is to bet on what Ethereum can remain; to bet on ETH is to bet that what it remains translates into value captured by the center. These are two distinct verdicts, and one can hold the first with confidence and the second with caution, without contradiction.

What this experiment teaches us

This is probably Ethereum’s real wager, and it is what makes the experiment interesting well beyond the world of cryptocurrencies. It requires accepting a permanent tension between coordination and autonomy, between efficiency and pluralism, between speed of execution and institutional diversity. Nothing guarantees Ethereum will hold it. The reader, though, now knows which scene they are watching, and it falls to them to choose their part in it. For the question posed here is, in the end, that of every open society.

How do you organize a power coordinated enough to act, without its becoming concentrated enough to stop being contestable?

Sources

• Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum Foundation: A New Chapter, blog.ethereum.org, June 23, 2026 — blog.ethereum.org
• Ansgar Dietrichs and Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, interview on Ethlabs, Bankless, June 29, 2026 — youtube.com ; see also ethlabs.org
• Trent Van Epps, Succession After Subtraction, June 2026 — x.com/trent_vanepps
• Ethereum Community Foundation (Zak Cole), July 2025 — ethcf.org
• Alex Van de Sande, thread on the ENS DAO treasury, X, June 29, 2026 — x.com/avsa
• Chilla, All Roads May Lead to Ethereum Again, X, December 4, 2025 — x.com/chilla_ct
• George Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation, Bell Journal of Economics, 1971 — doi.org/10.2307/3003160
• Daniel Carpenter, David Moss (eds.), Preventing Regulatory Capture, Cambridge University Press, 2014 — cambridge.org
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, 1990 — cambridge.org
• Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, Princeton University Press, 1995 — press.princeton.edu
• Julien Mailland, Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, MIT Press, 2017 — mitpress.mit.edu
• Atlantic Philanthropies, on the spend-down strategy — atlanticphilanthropies.org