Vitalik lands in Taipei! What is the mission of the Ethereum Foundation and where to go next? A complete answer with the new Executive Director of EF, Wang Xiaowei (ETH Taipei coverage)

ETHTaipei 2025 officially opened today, and this article provides you with a complete transcript of the first high-profile discussion between Vitalik Buterin and Hsiao-Wei Wang, the new co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. (Synopsis: Vitalik is back in April!) ETHTaipei 2025 Official Cooperation ETHGlobal) (Background Supplement: V God AMA Highlights: Are Rollups Good for Ethereum or Blood-sucking? What is the ultimate narrative of ETH? 3.0 Progress... ETHTaipei 2025, Taiwan's annual Ethereum event, was officially held today (1) at the POPOP Taipei Bottle Cap Factory in Taipei. The inaugural panel was hosted by Hsiao-Wei Wang, the new co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, together with Vitalik Buterin and spokesperson Joseph Schweitzer, focusing on EF ecosystem management and industry trends. The following dynamic area for you to do the activity sharing and sorting out the full text Moderator (Joseph Alby): Hi everyone. I'm Joseph Alby, the moderator of this panel. I work in PR at the Ethereum Foundation, and today I am excited to speak with Vitalik Buterin and Shawai Wang, the new co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation (EF). But today is a very special day. As you may have heard this morning, this marks one of the most significant deals in the history of our industry. Blockstream has announced the upcoming launch of Bitcoin 2.0 – which will address its security and quantum risks by becoming the settlement layer for future rollups. It's time for the Ethereum L3 and native L2 technology stack. Vitalik, you announced in your blog a few minutes ago that you'll be joining Blockstream for the next four years, along with Tim Beiko, who will lead the Bitcoin Core developer conference. What are you most looking forward to working at Blockstream? What can the Ethereum ecosystem expect from Adam Back and incoming leadership to bring to the table in this deal? Vitalik Buterin: yes, I think it's going to be very exciting. We're going to let Ethereum and Bitcoin merge together. This was, of course, Satoshi's original vision, as Craig Wright declared. It will be interesting to see Ethereum return to Proof of Work and Bitcoin to Proof of Stake. And we have to do both. I think this area should do more interesting things for the world, it should scale up, and it should do technical things. It's kind of like you've been looking at Starships. Sometimes people say, you're just looking at the starship all the time, you know, sometimes people are more like... You do something interesting technical, and you, you know, you give the world something to watch and get excited about. So yes, I'm excited about this collaboration with Blockstream, it's going to be fun. Moderator: Okay, in symposia like this, we usually jump straight to technical questions like the one we just did, but... Happy April Fool's Day to all! Note: Yes, the above is Vitalik's April Fool's joke for everyone XD, the following return to the topic Let's start with the Ethereum Foundation. Shawai, does your role mean a new chapter for EF management? Can you share more about your priorities and what you plan to do? Shawai Wang: Okay, everyone... Prior to this role, I was a researcher at EF and a community builder involved in cybersecurity and other Taiwanese communities. So I think the shift in this role for me, first of all, will be exposed to a lot of new areas that I need to be more familiar with, not just (pure) technical research. So I think the priority for me is that first we have to look back at what we're not doing well enough and what we're doing well and should continue. So I think we're doing this process for the first week or two. After that, I think the most important thing is to improve the ability of the management team. Like, I think this new chapter, let's say now we have two co-executive directors, that doesn't mean we're going to change drastically, I mean, we're going to shift our focus a lot to a certain place. I think we'll have some fine-tuning to reflect that 2025 could be a more critical year. Then we need to inject some new inspiration into EF and hopefully spread to EF as well, and hopefully spread to the ecosystem as well. I would also like to say that the next point is that the way we work is not a reboot, but at least for myself and Tomás, we should strengthen our communication and connection with the community. We've been in this industry for many years, but my role in these roles means we need to have a broader view of the ecosystem. So I think these are two of our recent capacity improvements. After that, we will have a more realistic plan for what we think needs to be done to achieve an outcome. Moderator: Yes, thank you. Also about Moo Deng's adoptive father (meaning Vitalik) Can you share a little bit of insight into how EF works, such as the interaction between management and research? During the pressure of the last few months, there have been a lot of people who thought they could bring in someone like Danny and then have the executive director define the roadmap. Vitalik: yes, the way we think about the role of the Ethereum Foundation is basically that it does really valuable and important things for the ecosystem that allow the ecosystem as a whole to thrive while continuing to support Ethereum's core values. But especially those that don't happen automatically in EF's absence, right? So, if you think about, for example, building DeFi apps, DeFi is great, right? But at the same time, there are many other people who are willing to create DeFi applications. So EF itself doesn't need to have a team to do it. But on the other hand, if you think about things like paying security personnel to keep their clients under constant scrutiny of different parts of the protocol, it's easy for the ecosystem itself to underinvest. So your job is to get involved. Or another example of this could be that certain aspects of the infrastructure, if handed over to independent participants, may be designed to be more proprietary than they should, or rely more on additional tokens or centralized participants. So for something like this, EF needs to be built on top of open standards... So in terms of how EF works, it's a very loose collection of many different teams. The research team has actually been quite autonomous for a long time. So I think the job of leadership is to make sure that all these different parts, that they have the resources they need when they need them, that they actually get the job done, but also that they're mindful and...