Is there a "serious disconnect" between the Ethereum Foundation and the crypto community?

Author: Katherine Ross, Blockworks; compiled by: Wuzhu, Golden Finance

ETH has a hard time.

This did not start with the sell-off this weekend. We have "wartime" Vitalik Buterin, criticism of the Ethereum Foundation, not to mention price movements (down 10% in the past week).

On the positive side, at least Eric Trump still seems optimistic, and – in the now-edited post on X – initially encourages people to buy ETH, adding “you can thank me later.” But I'm not sure if this is the type of support anyone wants right now.

There is a lot of discussion about where something went wrong and how to correct it. Evan Park of Tribe Capital told me that the mood hasn’t been new lately.

“When I was at Devcon, I noticed that the foundation focused on infrastructure, while retail users and the wider crypto community demanded exciting new applications, and there was a huge disconnect between the two. On the one hand, Base, on the one hand, ETH L2 such as Ink and MegaETH are targeting the introduction of new applications and users. However, Ethereum leaders need to realize that they are facing accelerated competition from established L1s such as Solana and new L1s such as Berachain and Monad, which are expected to Dominate the next year,” he explained.

Even if Buterin emits a "greater sense of urgency", we are still in a moment when the market cannot stop, will not stop. Just yesterday, Berachain announced that its mainnet will be launched tomorrow.

In my conversation with Ryan Connor of Blockworks Research, he explained that he and his team were initially “excited” about the potential cultural impact of Max Resnick on ETH. But when all this fails and Resnick jumps to Solana, the excitement fades away.

It's "pretty bad" now after Resnick left, but Connor tells me there's still a way to make ETH great again.

" Bringing execution back to the base layer is the easiest way to say it. How do you do it? You're technically scaling up. You compete with L2. You change the culture of the ETH organization, the people who release upgrades, and the applications that live on that chain Developers. [This] is easier said than done. You have to basically give up these very niche political, philosophical views, which many people in the ecosystem hold, [although] I think, from years Look, it’s obvious that they don’t want to do that,” he explained.

This includes putting the focus of “hardware requirements” aside.

Although there are some technical things that can be done, it is necessary to change the culture in the end. Connor admits that this is not an easy battle to win.

Connor compared it to the Motor Vehicle Administration: No matter who is in charge of the department, they can’t turn on “wartime” mode and change everything. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

Whether Buterin and EF have been politicized to the same level as government departments remains to be seen.