It’s been a tough year for the Ethereum Foundation, the nonprofit that helps support Ethereum, the best-known blockchain behind Bitcoin. As Ethereum loses market capitalization and market share to competitors, the foundation has been plagued by scandal. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder and leading figure of Ethereum, presented a new plan to right the ship.
“We are indeed currently in a process of significant changes in the management structure of EF, which have been underway for almost a year,” Buterin said in an X post. “Some of these measures have already been executed and made public, and others are still in progress.”
In his article FE and the players in the ecosystem” that it supports.
According to Buterin, the changes will not aim to centralize, corporatize or politicize the foundation. The organization is suddenly not going well”[s]“I will not aggressively lobby regulators and powerful political figures,” he said, “nor would this do it.”[b]become an arena for special interests […] or even more of a “main character” within Ethereum. »
This shake-up comes as Ethereum’s reputation among builders has deteriorated in recent months. Members of the broader crypto community are flocking to fast, cheap competitors like Solana, which has been quicker to adapt to the recent memecoin fervor.
Some say Ethereum is lagging because it lacks an organizing vision – something the foundation, while not “in charge” of Ethereum, could have helped fix.
Over the past 12 months, the foundation has been mired in controversy. He has resisted accusations of being ineffective, but also of being too powerful. Conflict of interest scandals haven’t helped either: payments made by private companies to foundation employees have recently sparked widespread backlash and forced the organization to update its policies.
Some have blamed the foundation’s woes on Aya Miyaguchi, the foundation’s executive director since 2018. Amid a pressure campaign for Miyaguchi’s removal, Buterin became the Ethereum Foundation’s sole decision-maker. “The person who decides on the new management team of the FE is me,” he declared on ‘administration’, but in the meantime, it’s me.”
Miyaguchi was not ousted from the foundation, however. Buterin blasted some of his critics of X, accusing them of using him as a “scapegoat.” In several tweets, Buterin highlighted some particularly inflammatory comments on social media — including death threats and explicit calls for more intimidation against Miyaguchi — and called them “pure evil.”
“If you keep the pressure on, you create an environment that is actively toxic for top talent,” Buterin wrote. “Some of Ethereum’s top developers have sent me messages recently, expressing their disgust at the social media environment that people like you are creating. YOU ARE MAKING MY JOB HARDER.”
