Leading projects collectively "forced the palace", and community anger once again swept the Ethereum Foundation

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

The world has been suffering from the Ethereum Foundation (EF) for a long time.

As the community's disappointment with ETH's weak performance this cycle gradually accumulated and finally erupted, calls for rectification of EF became increasingly louder.

In the past few days, the entire Ethereum community has been discussing EF's leadership structure, personnel composition, operating model, and financial plan. The current executive director of EF, Aya Miyaguchi, was criticized verbally by the community, and Vitalik himself had to make it public under heavy pressure. It stated that it is "making large-scale changes to the EF leadership structure."

As time came to this Monday, the discussion deepened further. The founders and executives of many leading projects in the Ethereum ecosystem have jumped out to express their opinions and denounced EF for many of its sins. The fierce rhetoric shows that major project parties have also been resentful of Ethereum's performance for a long time.

The following is a collection of opinions from all parties compiled by Odaily Planet Daily.

Founder of Synthetix and Infinex: EF should request L2 to use revenue to

buy back ETH

Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix and Infinex, took the lead.

On Monday afternoon, Kain posted on .

Curve founder: EF should abandon L2 strategy immediately

Following Kain, Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov also jumped out to attack Layer 2, but his wording was more aggressive.

On Monday afternoon, Egorov posted on X that EF’s first priority should be to abandon the Layer 2-centric roadmap and instead focus on expanding Layer 1.

In subsequent discussions with community members, Egorov also bluntly said: "Layer 2 is not a moat, but a band-aid."

Aave founder: 12 measures to save EF

In the evening, Aave founder Stani Kulechov posted a long post on

1. Immediately reduce the cash burn rate from US$130 million to US$30 million;

2. Reduce the number of employees to 80;

3. Carefully review who can stay. Remove senior positions, consultants, any part-time roles, interns, free riders, cockroaches and parasites;

4. No consulting or any conflict of interest;

5. Ensure that 80% of employees are technical personnel;

6. All technical teams are divided into small teams of 5, each focusing on specific fields and professions;

7. The leadership should be a 5-person committee, selected based on performance, one of whom is the chairman and is responsible for VB;

8. Part of the non-technical team should focus on financial management (done in-house);

9. Diversify your finances and invest in various long-term sustainable assets (LRSTs), as well as DeFi projects and non-DeFi projects with good fundamentals and profitability, and built on Ethereum;

10. Diversify staking income into stablecoins and invest funds in DeFi;

11. Borrow money from Aave to manage finances and conduct scheduled sales when ETH performs better than other assets;

12. Create a sustainable revenue model from trading or staking fees to fund a reasonable EF budget.

Former head of growth at Ethena: EF should focus on DeFi

Seraphim, the former head of growth at Ethena who just stepped down and was also the former head of development at Lido, also wrote about his views on EF reform.

Seraphim mentioned that Ethereum needs two paths to save itself. One is that EF should focus on DeFi, and the other is that Consensys, run by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, should follow Microstrategy's approach to BTC. As long as these two things can be done, ETH will soon exceed $6,000.

Wintermute founder: Ethereum’s potential death spiral may

Although Wintermute, the industry's top market-making organization, is not exclusive to the Ethereum ecosystem, it is directly involved in market making for a large number of Ethereum ecological projects, so the organization's stance also has a significant impact on Ethereum.

In the evening, founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy posted a message talking about Ethereum’s potential death spiral.

Evgeny said that the biggest internal contradiction of Ethereum is: the more ETH is used for "gambling" and the more financial-related Dapps run on Ethereum, the higher the price of ETH and the higher the security; On the other hand, if there is no gambling behavior and ETH is only used for transfers on Zazulu, then the price of ETH will be very low and the security will be very low. As the price of ETH drops, fewer and fewer Dapps believe that Ethereum is still safe and flee to other chains, further reducing the price of ETH. This may be a very big death spiral.

Therefore, any blockchain must include gambling, speculation, and wider financial applications as part of its offering, or it will be considered unsafe.

Amid public outrage, EF once again chose to sell...

At a time when the community was collectively condemning and the public was outraged, EF once again chose an unexpected operation.

At around 6:20 p.m., EF's address 0xd77...1f4, which is used for small-amount high-frequency sales of ETH, sold 100 ETH again, with an average selling price of $3,364.

As a long-term ETH holder, it is difficult for me to imagine why EF would conduct such an operation with "low total value, but great symbolic significance" at such a sensitive time point, especially when the community actively recommends that EF use staking. Proceeds were used to replace outright selling, an option that Vitalik admitted would be further explored.

You read that right, as the top organization in the Ethereum ecological structure, EF did not even put the ETH in its hands into pledge. Vitalik's explanation for this is that one is concerned about regulatory issues; the other is the issue of EF's neutrality. If EF pledges itself, it will force them to take a stance on any future controversial hard forks.

Let’s not talk about the regulatory issues for now. In fact, with the overall relaxation of the regulatory environment, this has gradually become less of a problem.

As for the second point, is this explanation really tenable? When Solana is pressing harder and the competition has reached a life-or-death stage, EF is even "avoiding suspicion" for unwarranted situations in the future.

Oh, by the way, EF doesn't seem to care about competition - today the Ethereum community revealed what Aya Miyaguchi said in an interview before: "I am training people to say no to competition and the culture of winning."

I am speechless and hope that the day of real change will come soon.