Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has announced a significant shift in the leadership structure of the Ethereum Foundation. The move aims to emphasize greater technical expertise and revitalize communication channels between the governing body and those expanding the Ethereum ecosystem.
Buterin’s announcement, made on Jan 18, expressed several key objectives for this transformation. These included strengthening support for decentralized application developers, backing decentralization, resistance to censorship, and advocacy for privacy. In line with maintaining its focus on these technical goals, Buterin also stressed that the Ethereum Foundation will refrain from participating in political lobbying, promoting ideological biases, or assuming a more centralized role in Ethereum ecosystem development.
This proposed change in leadership comes on the heels of a turbulent 2024 for the Ethereum Foundation. Various issues, such as the organization’s spending, developmental agendas, and staffing practices, came under intense scrutiny from the Ethereum community.
May 2024 saw the Ethereum Foundation implementing a conflict of interest policy in response to several prominent Foundation researchers taking on paid advisory positions at the EigenLayer Foundation, responsible for the development of the re-staking protocol. Both Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist accepted these roles but later resigned amidst controversy. Drake, in particular, issued an apology to the Ethereum community and pledged not to accept any similar positions in the future.
Furthermore, the launch of the Dencun upgrade in March 2024 resulted in Ethereum’s layer-2 networks witnessing a decrease of close to 99% in transaction fees. This led to a surge in Ethereum layer-2 networks, with 55 currently available according to L2Beat. However, this development also sparked concerns about potential revenue cannibalization at the base level. Statistics from Token Terminal show that revenues at the Ethereum base layer dropped by a staggering 99% in the summer of 2024, though recovered to pre-Dencun upgrade levels by the year’s end.