Vitalik feels bad.
Vitalik felt bad when he heard people on crypto Twitter and VCs telling him that a PVP KOL gambler casino that made 99%+ of its users lose money was the best market fit the crypto industry could get, and that hoping for something better was seen as condescending and elitist.
Vitalik felt bad when people who knew nothing about the inner workings of the Ethereum Foundation told him who to kick out of the organization and who to let in, and expected him to make all these adjustments within two weeks.
2024 has been a difficult year for all Ethereum teams and communities. The community’s discontent has fallen into a cyclical cycle of anger, which erupts from time to time, and the community’s memes mocking ETH prices have been updated in waves.
In addition to Vitalik, there is another person who also feels bad.
That is Aya Miyaguchi, the former executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. A year ago, Aya proposed to Vitalik the idea of switching from executive director to chairman of the foundation. This idea came to fruition today, and Vitalik officially announced that Aya was officially promoted to chairman of the Ethereum Foundation. This made the Ethereum community very dissatisfied.
Controversial new chairman of the Ethereum Foundation
In fact, over the past year, Aya has been the subject of much criticism from the Ethereum community and has become a controversial figure in both the Chinese and English communities of Ethereum.
Over the past year, Solana, Ethereums biggest killer, has survived a desperate situation. In addition to the efforts of its founder Toly to promote various Solana Casino Culture Memes, the work of Lily Liu, chairman of the Solana Foundation, has also been recognized by the community. For example, she proposed the PayFi concept of using on-chain staking to generate interest to pay for off-chain real-world transactions, held many high-quality hackathon competitions, and invested in many high-quality projects in the Solana ecosystem.
In the eyes of many people in the Ethereum community, Aya has achieved almost no results in the seven years she has served as executive director of the Ethereum Foundation.
She was hired for a job she was not qualified for for seven years and was paid for doing no work, said traders and KOLs in the English community, led by CoinMamba, who resented her the most.
They even tried to force Aya to leave through public pressure: they said, The day Aya leaves is the day Ethereum is liberated, ETH will reach a new high within two weeks of Ayas departure, and If we continue to put pressure on her, she will resign. Some people even made irrational insults and death threats to her.
If you still remember Vitalik’s various damaging tweets during the Chinese New Year, such as copying Milady’s abstract terms, and even thinking about leaving Ethereum and other “mentally good” statements, it was during that time that Vitalik was under tremendous pressure from the community.
Faced with the momentum of CoinMamba and others to fire Aya, Vitalik seemed a little bit upset, and sent seven or eight tweets in a row, saying The only person who can decide the leadership team of the Ethereum Foundation is me, Milady!, I hope everyone will not be too harsh, Milady!, People who say insulting remarks are demons, Milady!, Milady!
Aya did nothing for 7 years?
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Ethereum ICO, and Aya has served in the Ethereum Foundation for 7 years.
Before Aya, the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation was also an Asian named Ming Chan, who has many years of experience in IT and management consulting. From 2015 to 2018, she handled the daily operations of the foundation, managed it in a standardized manner, and ensured that technology development and community operations were carried out smoothly within the legal and regulatory framework.
Since Aya succeeded Ming Chan as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation in 2018, she has redefined the responsibilities of the Ethereum Foundation.
Its a bit biased to say that Aya has done nothing during her tenure, Lida, a protocol researcher in the Ethereum ecosystem, told BlockBeats. The most notable work is the annual ETH Devcon or Devconnect conferences, which are all due to Ayas efforts. And its obvious that ETHs activities have spread all over the world in recent years, providing unconditional funding to community activities around the world.
In addition, the foundations responsibilities include maintaining an execution client Geth, hosting various conference calls (such as All Core Devs (ACD) hosted by Tim Beiko, All Devs Consensus (ACDC) hosted by Alex Stokes, etc.), conducting research on various Ethereum technologies, formulating roadmaps, etc.
“However, after adjustments over the past few years, Ethereum’s research team is basically an independent department within the foundation. It formulates roadmaps, has dozens of tasks developed in parallel by different teams, and holds Reddit AMAs twice a year, etc.” said Lida.
In the latest transfer of Ethereum Foundation members, we can also see that the research team has undergone a relatively large reorganization. In addition to dividing the part into 5 categories of research groups, Stokes and Barnabe jointly serve as co-directors of the Ethereum Foundation research team.
In addition to Ayas lack of obvious work results, another major criticism of her is that she does not have much management experience. Lida said that unlike Ming Chans previous experience in IT and management, Aya was a high school teacher in Japan and had worked in the education industry for more than ten years.
When Aya realized that her career in education had a significant impact on childrens future, she began to feel a sense of unworthiness.
In order to convey what we need to communicate as humans, rather than simply teaching the content of a subject according to a manual, dont you need to learn first? So I was stuck in this dilemma for a long time. So, I decided to resign. This is how Aya explained in an interview why she left the education industry.
After leaving the education industry, Aya enrolled in a graduate program at an American business school to study microfinance, but she was not interested in making money itself. I needed a job to stay in the United States for a long time, and it would be difficult to find a job without going to graduate school.
It was during this time that Aya entered the crypto industry.
“It was around that time that I had the opportunity to talk with Jesse Powell, the founder of the virtual currency exchange Kraken, and felt that blockchain could be linked to the financial inclusion and microcredit I was researching. The founder asked me if I would like to help, so I joined Kraken,” Aya recalled in the interview. Initially, she was responsible for Kraken’s business in Japan, and later became the managing director of Kraken Japan.
That was in 2013, and Vitalik was still a writer for Bitcoin Magazine. When interviewing various people, he would take the opportunity to talk about his ideas, such as where Bitcoin needed improvement. This was the prototype of Ethereum.
“It is said that the founding members of Kraken wanted to support such new technologies and talents and admired Vitalik. Therefore, when Vitalik was writing the Ethereum white paper, he stayed in Kraken’s office for a while. The founder of Kraken even let Vitalik live in one of his spare rooms.”
It was also here that Vitalik met Aya, who worked at Kraken.
Ethereum is first and foremost a cultural group
When I was chatting with a friend recently, he raised a point: All members of the team are actually extensions of the founders values. Even if the power distribution of web3 is decentralized, this will not change.
He has a point. Stokes, who has just been appointed as one of the co-leaders of the Ethereum Foundations research team, pinned a sentence he wrote in 2022 on his Twitter: Ethereum is first and foremost a cultural project, and we just happen to use software to leverage it.
Even under heavy pressure from the community, Aya was not fired by Vitalik but was given a bigger title. She is a staunch guardian of Ethereum culture and compares Ethereum’s positioning planning to an “infinite garden”: “Ethereum’s mission is not to quickly obtain short-term profits, but to promote the popularization and development of the concept of decentralization in the long run.”
These are all extensions of Vitaliks values.
So when the community spoke ill of Aya, Vitalik was so upset because it was not just Aya who was being scolded, but Vitalik himself.
In the earliest prequel story of Ethereum, when Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first 10 developers who responded and wanted to join, and selected 5 of them as the leadership, the 5 founders of Ethereum. Following the 5 founders, another three developers became co-founders in 2014.
At that time, there was no Ethereum Foundation, only 8 core leaders. Until 2014, the relationship within Ethereum became tense. Should we take money from venture capital funds, or crowdfund from all ordinary people? Should we take the profit route and become the Google of the crypto industry, or a purely non-profit organization? The future direction of the Ethereum Foundation has become a recurring topic of debate and has spawned factions.
Vitalik recalled this memory: “I was once persuaded to take Ethereum towards a more corporate route. But this never made me feel more comfortable, and even made me feel a little dirty.”
After the final co-founder meeting, Vitalik decided to go the decentralized and non-profit route. “I was trying to shirk responsibility the whole time because I really didn’t want to take responsibility, and in the end I had to clear some people out.”
In the end, except for Vitalik, the other co-founders left Ethereum, and the Ethereum Foundation was derived.
The Tragedy of Ethereum’s “Leftists”
Some people say that the original sin of all is, in the final analysis, the unsatisfactory price trend of ETH.
“But I think the original sin of everything is that the crypto industry is increasingly moving to the right, but Ethereum insists on moving to the left.” In Lida’s view, Ethereum’s values have not changed since then. What has changed is the industry, from the US political situation to the entire crypto industry. Everyone no longer talks about ideals but stands up for pvp casinos, which makes Ethereum seem very different.
From the beginning, the founder and team of Ethereum have adhered to an ideal: decentralization, de-financialization, and the pursuit of social value. In a market full of bubbles and hype, this ideal is particularly abrupt.
“Aya was scolded this time because it is actually an outlet for the community’s long-standing emotions. To a certain extent, she is a scapegoat. After all, the Ethereum Foundation has been selling coins continuously over the past year, which has made the community very upset,” said Lida.
When the community sentiment was not good, Vitaliks leftist style of always emphasizing peace and love further annoyed the community and even caused dissatisfaction from Eric, an early Ethereum developer: It is exhausting to hear people ignore the communitys orders by saying things like dont be too mean. We are here to change the world, not to create a safe space.
In Erics view, the power of ideals is the source of social change, rather than succumbing to the ever-changing market. In many cases, leaders should take a long-term perspective and listen to the voices of the community.
“Ultimately, I lost my passion for something I was once so passionate about because those in charge, instead of recognizing the importance of community and the need for change, were more willing to focus on the ‘good intentions’ we offered and whose feelings were hurt rather than understanding a large community.”
The values of the early members of Ethereum are constantly colliding and reflecting. It seems that this is a return to the split of the Ethereum community in 2014. Faced with the industrys continuous rightward trend, more and more voices are calling for Ethereum to take the capitalization route.
This is also a topic that everyone discussed a lot some time ago. Ethereums income at the protocol layer is too low. If I can take over the Ethereum Foundation, ETH will rise to $10,000. The first thing I will do after taking over is to optimize the income. Sun Yuchens point of view has been recognized by most Chinese communities.
Arbitrum charges a 10% handling fee to its own L3, but as L2 it only pays a 2% tax to Ethereum. This has caused many investors and ecosystem developers to question whether this ratio is too low.
So how much tax is reasonable? In response to this question, BlockBeats once again asked Sun Yuchen for his opinion.
I personally suggest that the US dollar tax for Base and Polygon should not be less than 200 million US dollars a year. In Sun Yuchens view, although the prosperity of the L2 ecosystem will directly increase the value of Ethereum, Ethereum is currently over-subsidizing L2. The 2% tax may be too low, but if it is increased to 8%, it can provide Ethereum with more stable income, at least $1 billion a year, and will not suppress the development of Layer 2.
“If Layer 2 is in the early stages of development, some subsidies can be provided. However, for the large L2s that have already emerged, such as Base and polygon, it is recommended to impose heavy taxes. This is also common at the national level. Ordinary people are tax-free or subject to 10% tax, but the super-rich need to pay a higher tax rate of 20-30%,” Sun Yuchen further analyzed.
In addition to increasing efficiency, we also need to reduce costs.
For example, AAVE founder Stani has also made his own suggestions in this regard: As an organization, the Ethereum Foundation should be a streamlined and efficient organization. Anyone who does not give 100% effort should leave the foundation.
However, there is a huge gap between the left and the right, and change will not come quickly. Everything takes time, and the rectification of the Ethereum Foundation is also ongoing, including a series of financial and administrative reforms, and the introduction of more standardized measures.
As for the topic that everyone is most concerned about, changes in prices will definitely have a lag, so just wait, said Lida.
