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Ethereum Foundation Faces Internal Revolt - Unchainedunchainedcrypto.beehiiv.com/p/ethereum-foundation-faces-internal-revolt
206 sats \ 5 comments \ @Scoresby 21 Oct lol
Internal disputes and allegations highlight deep divisions over the Ethereum Foundation’s (EF) leadership and evolving role in the network it helped create.

Earlier this week, Péter Szilágyi, the lead developer of Ethereum’s primary execution client, Geth, shared a letter he had sent to the EF leadership team more than a year ago.

In that letter, Szilágyi said the Foundation had a history of underpaying its employees, which forced its most trusted staff to seek compensation elsewhere. He disclosed that over his six-year tenure as Geth lead, he received a total of about $625,000 — a figure that sparked widespread commentary on X, where many users expressed disbelief at how low the compensation was given his critical role in maintaining Ethereum’s core infrastructure.

Ethereum-based projects boiled down to their relationship with founder Vitalik Buterin.

“Do I find Ethereum fixable? No, not really. I don't see how any of this can be reversed. I feel the Foundation blew allegiance to it beyond reversal,” he said.

I read the letter cited above. We all know Ethereum is a mess, but wow. (Of course, I'm sure they point at the knots v core debate and say the same).

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102 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 21 Oct

Does his total compensation include any ETH or other tokens he might have received, or is it just his salary?

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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 21 Oct

I'd guess it's his salary from the foundation.

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 21 Oct

If it's just his salary then it's a misrepresentation. His actual compensation could have been much much more, depending on how many tokens he receives and how their price fluctuates.

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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 21 Oct
This in itself wouldn't even be such a problem, but for the past decade, everyone within the ecosystem was banking on this phenomenon. In the early days of the Foundation, the early founders and stakeholders did it internally, vying for power and influence. Then the conference attendees realised the key to success is Vitalik and everyone was constantly blockading him. Eventually this turned into a small cabal of high profile Ethereum thought leaders, the same 5-10 people having investments and advisorships in everything. At this point, to become successful, you just need to get the correct 5-10 people around Vitalik - or even him - to commit (point in case: Farcaster).

The issue at this point isn't even Vitalik, rather that we now do have a "ruling elite" of Ethereum. New projects do not do public offerings anymore, they reach out to the same 5-10 people for initial investment, or advisorship roles. Everyone realised that if you can get Bankless to invest, they'll sing odes on their podcast. If you can get researchers as advisors, you both solve hard problems, but also reduce perceived friction with Ethereum mainnet. The key to the gray-zone is that 5 people to not revolt. You find the same exact people behind all the new projects launching, each project directly playing into each other's hands and if you zoom out enough, you will also find the same VCs on the outside.

tbf this kind of stuff happens in every ecosystem - power corrupts and power concentrates.

this is also why charitable organizations are dangerous, even absent compensating board members - allocating money is power and the majority of people will abuse it and say whatever they have to keep the charade going. most of bitcoin's charitable orgs are run by extremely principled people, only funding research the network as a whole benefits from, fortunately, but inevitably some of them aren't going to be very principled.

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @carter 21 Oct

I wonder if it was also a wake up call that their infra went down with aws east

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