Ethereum's North Star: Roadmap & CROPS

Ethereum Korea One: Genesis · Day 2 · 2026-09-29 · 55:39 · In Korean

Who sets Ethereum's direction, and how? At Ethereum Korea One: Genesis, four panelists moderated by Bosul Mun, a Geth engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, discuss Ethereum's North Star, the Strawmap and CROPS.

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Speakers

Sose, Co-Founder, ECK
Lucia Kim, Head of Research, Nonce Classic
Hudson Jang, SRE & Tech Researcher, Four Pillars
Christopher Choi, Korea Community & Culture Lead, Remilia Korea
Bosul Mun, Geth Core Engineer, Ethereum Foundation (moderator)

About this session

The panel was built around four questions: what Ethereum's North Star should be now, how to judge the past year or two of roadmap changes and the Ethereum Foundation (EF) reorganization, which Strawmap goals should come first, and what future scene would show the direction was set right. Audience questions on governance, AI and quantum resistance followed.

Key takeaways

Lucia Kim (Nonce Classic) named a chain that guarantees self-sovereignty while sustaining its own economy as the North Star, hoping more institutions and governments adopt it beyond BlackRock and Franklin Templeton. She saw the EF reorganization's layer that helps keep CROPS intact as institutions come in as positive, but regretted the loss of the enterprise team that used to drive institutional adoption.
Sose (ECK) said predictability matters for a world computer that anyone can verify on their own device and where no valid transaction is censored. Since huge incentives never drove adoption by people, he expects AI agents to become blockchains' main users, and picked frame transactions, which allow granular permissions, as a short-term priority. The EF shrinking its influence is the right direction, he said, but its communication is weak.
Hudson Jang (Four Pillars) put survival first and prioritized quantum resistance, saying the EF should publicize its PQ work more to win community attention. He also worried that as the EF downsizes, new organizations are funded by similar for-profit companies, with no visible checks on that.
Christopher Choi (Remilia Korea) said Vitalik Buterin's post "The cryptographic world computer," published two days earlier, read as if it had put his own thoughts into words. The post sees Ethereum in 2030 as a hybrid of Satoshi's blockchain and 50 years of maturing cryptography, with privacy built in by default for writes, reads and networking. Citing paying a meetup's costs onchain only to have his balance exposed by the fully public ledger, and a team experiment in deciding by anonymous vote and publishing only the result, he said he looks forward to businesses coming onchain. Another panelist pointed to keyed nonces and mempool research as the groundwork for private transactions, and cautioned against rushing to fix a specific privacy pool into the protocol.
Bosul Mun said Ethereum's direction is not set because the foundation or one person says so, but through sharing and checking perspectives, and which EIPs go in is discussed at ACD, which anyone can join. Slower decisions are a tradeoff, and AI is mostly used to summarize calls and decisions. Sose cited the public debate after Base and Tempo proposed new AA-related EIPs.
An attendee from a financial institution argued that with client funds coming onto Ethereum, quantum resistance should come before AI. Jang said quantum resistance is harder to agree on than to build, citing the question of what to do with Satoshi's wallets, while a counterpoint held that it is already a Strawmap goal and so a matter of priorities. Jang also warned that validator infrastructure relying on a few LLMs could become a new single point of failure (SPOF).

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