On January 18th, Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, posted that "a large - scale change to the leadership structure of the Ethereum Foundation (hereinafter referred to as EF) is underway."

As soon as the news broke, it caused a stir. Some people thought he finally "saw the light"; some said "the EF leadership, who have been occupying positions without doing real work, should have been rectified long ago"; others believed that "due to the rapid development of the Solana ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem is facing an unprecedented sense of crisis, and he is in a hurry."

Surely, it's not just Vitalik who is in a hurry.

On the evening of January 22nd, Konstantin Lomashuk, the founder behind Lido, an important infrastructure in the Ethereum ecosystem, first reposted a tweet about a "second foundation," and later clarified that it was not a second EF, just an ordinary tweet. Last September, regarding the sluggish development of the Ethereum ecosystem, we provided reference solutions in the article "Is Ethereum 'Sick'? Do These Three Remedies Work?" Now, it seems our predictions have come true.

But more important questions have emerged: How can the glory of the Ethereum ecosystem be restored? Will the EF reform be the dawn of rejuvenation? With these questions in mind, Odaily Planet Daily will conduct a systematic analysis of the future possibilities of the EF change and the subsequent development of the Ethereum ecosystem in this article for readers' reference.

Arrogance and Prejudice: The Bright and Dark Sides of the Ethereum Foundation

On January 18th, Vitalik Buterin, the spiritual leader of the Ethereum ecosystem and co - founder of Ethereum, posted that the large - scale change to the EF leadership structure had been ongoing for nearly a year. In other words, throughout 2024, the EF leadership led by Vitalik had already started "self - revolution." However, for now, the interim conclusion we can draw is that this self - revolution has had little effect for the time being.

Signals Released by the Reform Goals: Focus on the Ecosystem, No Intention to Involve Politics and Ideology

In view of this, Vitalik also mentioned the main goals of this reform:

• Improve the technical expertise of the EF leadership.

• Improve two - way communication and connection between the EF leadership and new and old participants in the ecosystem. Our responsibility is to support users (individuals and institutions), application developers, wallets, and L2s.

• Introduce new blood to improve execution ability and speed.

• More actively support application developers to ensure that important values and inalienable rights (especially privacy, open - source, and censorship - resistance) are practical and available to users, including at the application layer.

• Continue to increase the use of decentralized and privacy technologies and the Ethereum chain, including for payments and fund management.

In addition, he emphasized that the goals of the EF reform do not include:

• Implement a shift in a certain ideology/atmosphere (it is worth mentioning that here he referred to: from a feminized "wef soyboy" mindset to a Bronze Age mindset. Note from Odaily Planet Daily: that is, from a relatively gentle, feminized perspective to an overly practical, male - oriented perspective focusing on interests and success).

• Actively lobby regulators and powerful political figures (especially in the United States, with more attention to major powers), risking damaging Ethereum's status as a global neutral platform.

• Become an arena for vested interests.

• Become a highly centralized organization, or even the "main character" of Ethereum.

Finally, he said, "These are not what the EF does, and this will not change. People seeking a different vision are welcome to start their own organizations."

After careful consideration, the general meaning of the goals mentioned by Vitalik is as follows: Adhere to the technical approach; adhere to the concept of decentralization; unswervingly implement the L2 development route; however, the specific measures are still unclear. It can be seen that Vitalik's reform of the EF still remains on the surface, and the result is self - evident.

The Most Controversial Focus of the EF: Transparency, Workload, and Dumping Speed

Returning to the root of the EF's current predicament, the author believes it mainly comes from the following three aspects:

First, the lack of information transparency. This is not only reflected in the vague statements about the foundation's related fund spending but also in the delayed public announcements, which is in sharp contrast to the agility and efficiency of the Solana ecosystem. In December last year, the EF officially released the Q3 2024 grant project update report. The total amount of grants during this period reached $12,848,780.33, covering areas such as community education, the consensus layer, cryptography and zero - knowledge proofs, developer experience and tools, the execution layer, L2s, protocol growth and support. Among them, community education projects accounted for the highest proportion, including activities such as Blockchain Summer Bootcamp, BlockHack, and Building Builders. In addition, the foundation continued to support the development of consensus - layer clients such as Lighthouse, Nimbus, and Grandine, as well as development tools such as Web3.js and OpenZeppelin account - abstraction contracts. It is worth mentioning that, as far as I know, the EF's grant funds have not been audited by an independent third - party institution. (If there are relevant examples, please feel free to correct and explain.)

At the same time, due to regional, time, and other limitations, the decision - making power of EF grants is only in the hands of a few people, which is probably predictable. This has also led to the situation where the work of some community members who have contributed to the development of the ecosystem cannot receive the support they deserve. At the beginning of January, Evan Van Ness, the founder of Ethereum News Weekly (Week in Ethereum News, referred to as WiE), posted that "due to a conversation with the EF leadership at the beginning of this year, I announced that this newsletter will cease operation because the communication showed that they thought there was no value in continuing to operate WiE. In the remaining time of 2024, WiE only received very little financial support from the EF. Although most of this support was symbolic, the EF leadership's choice to cut off this negligible support clearly indicated that WiE would end immediately."

Second, the lack of proof of work. For the work of the EF, the outside world cannot see effective proof of work. In the blockchain world, although the Ethereum ecosystem has shifted to the POS mechanism, at the organizational level, POW is still the most direct and relatively efficient operation mode. In this regard, the EF is a textbook example of the opposite. "What you do is completely different from what others know you do."

In addition, this result is also due to the influence of the organizational structure. This is also one of the hot topics in the recent crypto field. For example, the crypto KOL @0xAllending pointed out that "one of the important reasons why Solana can stand out in the competition of blockchain networks is that it challenges the market position of ETH with the concept and intensity of corporate - style operation." In contrast, the Ethereum ecosystem, especially the EF, still remains in the stage of a community - organization form similar to "decentralized community self - governance, with high - level leaders + middle - level researchers/developers + ordinary community members/holders," dreaming of Mass Adoption under the banner of the "world computer," which is nothing but wishful thinking.

Finally, the extremely fast dumping speed. This is the point that countless people criticize the EF the most. It's not that there is no similar phenomenon of selling ecosystem tokens in other ecosystems, but the EF's dumping always seems like a signal of a phased peak. And often at this time, no one mentions "Ethereum belief, firmly HODL ETH" anymore. Previously, according to Lookonchain monitoring, since the EF sold 100 ETH on December 17th, the price of ETH has fallen by about 17%. In 2024, the EF sold 4,466 ETH (approximately $12.6 million) in 32 transactions, and 15 of these transactions were sold at the short - term high points.

Vitalik Fires the First Shot of “Reform”: Where is the Ethereum Foundation Heading?

The EF has been a "Top Signal" for a long time.

It is worth mentioning that previously, Token Terminal data showed that the revenue of the Ethereum L1 network had dropped sharply, falling by 99% since March 2024. On March 5th, the revenue of the Ethereum Layer1 network reached a peak of more than $35 million; while on September 2nd, the daily revenue had dropped to about $200,000, reaching the lowest daily revenue of the year. At that time, the cryptocurrency analyst Kun warned that if this trend continued, L2 networks might dominate and might abandon the Ethereum mainnet, especially for consumer applications. Although this revenue finally recovered to the level before the Dencun upgrade at the end of 2024, the downward trend of the Ethereum main - net protocol revenue was beginning to show.

When delving into the reasons behind this, perhaps arrogance and prejudice come first.

Reasons Behind: Arrogance is the Original Sin, Prejudice is the Shackle

Justin Drake, an EF researcher, said in early December last year that the golden age of Solana was coming to an end and it would not pose a threat to Ethereum. Although Solana is developing strongly, Drake said that Ethereum focuses on long - term returns (does this statement sound familiar?). "Solana is at its peak now, but I think this will be the end of Solana's golden age because all of Solana's competitive advantages in terms of latency and throughput will disappear due to fundamental architectural differences that make it non - scalable." Currently, Ethereum developers rely heavily on Layer 2 to provide faster and lower transaction fees. Drake said, "I think Ethereum L1 is competing with the Bitcoin ecosystem, and L2 networks are competing with Solana. Therefore, competing with Solana is not even within the scope of Ethereum L1's responsibility. We should compete in terms of security and health. Therefore, if there is any competition from Solana, it needs to come from applications and L2 networks."

Coincidentally, in the tweet where Evan Van Ness, the founder of Ethereum News Weekly, responded to the upcoming closure of the newsletter, he referred to "Solana" as "Sqlana," seemingly implying that Solana is a centralized database, and some people in the comment section also mentioned this. The senior node operator @JustDoingItBig was puzzled by this: in 2018, Bitcoin believers laughed at Ethereum nodes for running a "centralized database"; and now, Ethereum supporters are acting in the same way.

Vitalik Fires the First Shot of “Reform”: Where is the Ethereum Foundation Heading?

It can only be said that history rhymes.

As for the views on the EF, from the author's personal observation, most Ethereum community members still support it positively, and those who express dissatisfaction are mostly ETH traders or retail investors in the market. Among them, the view of the community member fishbiscuit (@not_qz) may represent a considerable number of "loyal supporters of the EF." He previously posted a response to various questions from the community about the foundation, clarifying:

• Social media activity: Similar to the Solana Foundation, the EF mainly used to repost content in the past, but recently it has started to post more actively.

• On - chain use: The foundation has staked 42,000 ETH to support client development, and at the same time funded on - chain projects such as EIP - 1559 NFT and Beacon Book, and distributed grants through the mainnet and L2. Events like Devcon also support crypto payments.

• ETH dumping: Regarding the accusation that the foundation is dumping ETH, he pointed out that the foundation is taking various strategies to balance market pressure, and called on the community to avoid double standards, while emphasizing the regulatory challenges faced by the foundation. He called on the community to view the foundation's contributions rationally and encouraged more constructive discussions.

It has to be said that although the EF has many problems, the community's attitude is still extremely tolerant.

To some extent, this also re - verifies a fact: One's position determines one's thinking. Since they have already boarded the Ethereum ship, they can only weather the storm together.

The Focus of Contradictions: Vitalik Under Heavy Pressure, Aya the Executive Director Under Attack, and the Fragmented Ethereum Community

As time goes by, many contradictions related to this EF change have gradually emerged, with the directly pointing at Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, Aya, the executive director of the EF, and the currently severely fragmented Ethereum community.

The Dilemma of the Spiritual Leader of Ethereum: Active Change vs. Past Friendship

Since the news of the EF change was released on the 18th, Vitalik has undoubtedly been at the center of the storm of multiple pressures. On the one hand, the underperforming price of ETH and the departure of the ETH ecosystem from the high - growth period urgently need to be changed. On the other hand, the EF core team is also facing a transformation pain period. With "EF researchers Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist joining Eigenlayer, and core researcher Danny Ryan leaving the EF last year" as landmark events, the past "revolutionary friendship" is facing a test.

Recently, the news that Eric Conner, an early core developer of Ethereum, announced his withdrawal from the Ethereum community has also caused heated discussions (although, according to an Ethereum community member, this is not the first time he has made such a "farewell"). But different from before, he also said that as Vitalik Buterin gradually stepped back, the opacity of the EF and its sense of disconnection from the community became stronger. He pointed out that the EF currently shows an "anti - victory and competitive mindset," which has led many community members to question whether to continue to stay (this coincides with the non - goals mentioned in Vitalik's previous "reform declaration").

According to the information on the Rootdata website, a total of 11 employees have left the EF so far, including early BD personnel and Danny Ryan, who led the transition to POS. According to a chart in May last year, most of the EF departing members chose to start their own projects, and most of them are still within the EVM ecosystem.

Vitalik Fires the First Shot of “Reform”: Where is the Ethereum Foundation Heading?

EF - related member information in May 2024

Vitalik Fires the First Shot of “Reform”: Where is the Ethereum Foundation Heading?

EF Departed Employees List

At the same time, the EF's current employees include Aya, the executive director, protocol support leaders including Tim Beiko, and many researchers including Justin Drake. However, the chaos of organizational management is also revealed. Not long ago, Alex Stokes, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, announced that he and barnabe.eth would jointly serve as the co - heads of the EF research department. Only then did many people know for the first time that the EF's research department includes five teams: the applied research group, consensus R & D, cryptography, protocol security, and RIG. This is the same as when Tim Beiko posted information about new department members on his X platform account, and people only then knew how rigid the EF's personnel flow was.

Vitalik Fires the First Shot of “Reform”: Where is the Ethereum Foundation Heading?

EF Current Employees, a total of 16 people

The complex organizational management has brought overwhelming doubts and disputes, and many people directly point the finger at Aya, the executive director of the EF.

In order to protect his "comrades - in - arms" of many years, the always - composed Vitalik had to step forward and "play the role of a dictator." On January 21st, he posted a response to community questions, saying, "I am the one who decides the new EF leadership team. One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to provide the EF with a 'proper board of directors,' but until then, it's just me. If community members put pressure on the EF leadership, they are creating an environment harmful to top - notch talents."

The Doctrine of the Mean of Aya, the Executive Director of the EF: Opposing Speculation, Advocating the “Zen” Way

Many people may not know much about Aya, the executive director of the EF, but she is a key member accompanying the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the article "Where is the Road? An Analysis of the Three Abstract Problems Facing the Ethereum Ecosystem," we briefly introduced her. In a 2019 interview, she said, "When it comes to a blockchain full of infinite possibilities (such as Ethereum now), the way forward may include not just one, two, or three voices, but many voices. Our (referring to the EF) job is to coordinate, not to make actual decisions. Decisions can be made by our members, and of course, they can also be part of the decision - making process, not necessarily all of it."

In a June 2023 interview with Wired magazine, Aya reiterated, "Regarding the cryptocurrency speculation craze, if I'm the only one saying 'no,' it doesn't make much sense. So I try to spread the same mindset among others, just like I'm a Zen believer. Once this mindset takes root, people can be motivated without money, punishment, rules, or laws. This is because we are considering how to protect the Ethereum culture after we and the EF leave. If this mindset becomes the 'Zen' way, that would be great."

In this regard, Aya's view is highly consistent with Vitalik's, which has also attracted strong criticism from the current market. Countless people have attacked Aya through this, calling for her to step down as soon as possible. Some people proposed that Danny Ryan should take over as the executive director of the EF, forcing Ryan to come forward and clarify, "Aya, the executive director of the EF, has contributed a lot to the development of Ethereum. Please don't slander her casually," and reiterated, "Whether I'm there or not, the EF is constantly developing and getting better. I believe the Ethereum community will be a community that develops in a respectful and rational way."