Written by: Jaleel plus six, BlockBeats

The "car" is too heavy, the "bank" is too scattered, and the price of ETH, the world's 34th largest asset, is stagnant, and Ethereum has ushered in its own "midlife crisis".

This year is a special year for Ethereum, the 10th anniversary of ICO. Looking back at the global technology companies, 10-year-old Apple almost went bankrupt, and its highest market value was only 20 billion US dollars. Microsoft, which has been listed for ten years, has grown from 670 million US dollars to 130 billion US dollars. Ethereum's market value is 321 billion US dollars. Although Ethereum's market value has grown rapidly in the first 10 years, it was even once thought to surpass Bitcoin. But in this round of encryption cycle, Bitcoin has repeatedly set new highs while Ethereum is stagnant, and Solana has "reborn from the ashes". After repeatedly reflecting on "What happened to Ethereum?", the community truly realized that Ethereum is facing a dilemma of being faced with wolves in front and tigers behind, and it is not irreplaceable.

In fact, the Ethereum Foundation has many shortcomings and its organizational structure is very chaotic. As a decentralized non-profit organization, it is not easy to handle the internal organizational structure of Ethereum. Looking back on the journey of Ethereum, the eight founding teams "separated" due to disagreements, and staged an encrypted version of "Silicon Valley's Eight Fairies Running Away". After only Vitalik was left, this decentralized non-profit organization became the "centralized" era of this prodigy, and his influence and authority were unprecedented.

And now, the complex relationships and ideological conflicts within the Ethereum Foundation continue, researchers spray each other, and the ideology has undergone subtle changes. After experiencing the changes in the crypto era, the survival and death of the Russian-Ukrainian war, and the perception of life, the 30-year-old Vitalik seems to have started a new script and played a completely different new role in Ethereum.

Phase 1: Vitalik personally selected the "Eight Kings to Discuss Politics"

The focus of this phase was the split and ideological conflict of the Ethereum founding team, which took place between 2014 and 2015. Vitalik Buterin, a programmer genius who always talks about technology, always answers "the eight co-founders" when asked what his biggest regret is in the Ethereum journey. Obviously, these eight founders who had long since left were a concern of his.

When Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first 10 developers who responded and wanted to join, and selected five of them as the leadership, namely the five founders of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie and Amir Chetrit.

“This was obviously a serious wrong decision. They looked like good people and they wanted to help, so I thought, why not let them become leaders?” Vitalik said when he looked back on his decision at the time.

Regarding the co-founders of Ethereum, this is a controversial topic. There are many versions on the Internet, and even the relevant entries on Wikipedia are constantly edited and modified. After Vitalik "personally certified the 8 co-founders", the version widely recognized by the community is: after the 5 founders, three other developers became co-founders in 2014: Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke.

So far, Ethereum has completed the formation of the early 8 core leaders, which is very similar to the "Eight Kings' Political Consultative Conference" implemented in the early Yuan and Qing dynasties to prevent the emperor (Khan) from being arbitrary.

Berlin "pilgrimage", the prequel of Ethereum

In the recently launched documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story", Vitalik recalled that he started his digital nomad life in mid-2013.

That was the prehistoric period of Ethereum, when Bitcoin was only $204, and it had been more than a year since Vitalik and Mihai Alisie founded Bitcoin Magazine. When building Ethereum, he traveled around the world because he was invited by communities around the world. In 2013 and 2014, Ethereum had headquarters in Switzerland and Berlin, the white paper came out, and Vitalik visited China to crowdfund Ethereum and visit miners.

Berlin is the city where he stays for a long time. "Pilgrimage", Vitalik described himself as being active in the Bitcoin Kiez area in Berlin at the time.

Room 77 Bar and Restaurant, photographed by Vitalik Buterin in 2013, now closed

In the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, cryptocurrency payments are very common. Within a few hundred meters, there are more than a dozen stores that accept BTC payments. The "Room 77" bar and restaurant in the heart of the community is also a community center, frequented by a variety of people such as technology developers and political activists.

Near this area, Ethereum rented an office, only 1.5 kilometers away from the "Room 77" restaurant and bar, and Vitalik could walk there in less than 20 minutes. Now if you search the address of the Ethereum office "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin" on Google Maps, you can still see that this address is marked with Ethereum Network Launch (30/07/2015), as well as a group photo of the early core members of Ethereum at that time.

In early 2014, most of the core members of Ethereum were basically around Vitalik, and the Ethereum team was in a highly cohesive state.

At the Miami Bitcoin Conference in January of that year, Vitalik and his co-founders stood together for the first time to show their project to the world, and the effect was good. Ethereum officially entered the public eye. However, this was also the eve of separation.

The first Ethereum meetup held in Miami in January 2014, source: Internet

Swiss "First Battle", a turning point for Ethereum

June 7, 2014, was destined to be a day of separation. All the leadership members of Ethereum were in Switzerland to attend an internal meeting, and the focus of the meeting was on the future direction of Ethereum.

The Spaceship house in Switzerland was chosen as the venue for the meeting. This is the origin of ETH and the first headquarters of Ethereum.

Spaceship house, source: Mihai Alisie

In fact, before this meeting, this topic had been debated internally for a long time, and even factions had already emerged. The relationship within Ethereum became tense, and "should we take venture capital funds or crowdfund from all ordinary people? Should we take the profit route and become the Google of the crypto world, or a purely non-profit organization?" became a recurring debate.

Vitalik recalled this memory and said: "I was once persuaded to take Ethereum to a more corporate route. But this matter never made me feel more comfortable, and even made me feel a little dirty."

It is said that this meeting that determined the "life and death" of Ethereum lasted a whole day, and Vitalik's decision was to choose a decentralized and non-profit route. "I tried to shirk responsibility throughout the process because I really didn't want to take responsibility, and in the end I had to clear some people."

This decision became the first turning point in the history of Ethereum, directly leading to the first major split of the team. Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin, Amir Chetrit and Anthony Di Iorio all left one after another.

Charles Hoskinson was the most obvious opponent in this conflict. He has always advocated that Ethereum should become a commercial company, obtain funds through venture capital, and then develop into a profitable technology giant. "A horizontal power structure, then the cleaners and the top management will be in the same position, which is crazy."

After leaving Ethereum, Charles founded the development company IOHK (later reorganized as a venture capital studio) and launched a Pos public chain Cardano. This has been the leader of the copycat for many years. Because of its early focus on the Japanese market, it is called "Japanese Ethereum". It is also the first generation of "Ethereum killer" and its market value has been in the top ten cryptocurrencies for many years.

Immediately after Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided not to participate in core development and turned to founding the incubator ConsenSys. In 2022, it completed a $450 million Series D financing with a valuation of $7 billion. The financing parties include ParaFi Capital, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund II, Microsoft and other top VCs. Over the years, ConsenSys has incubated a large number of blockchain startups and built a batch of rich ecological projects for Ethereum. The most successful one is the plug-in wallet MetaMask, the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, with a weekly income of $300,000 and a total income of nearly $300 million.

Similar to Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a rich second-generation with a strong family background. The reason for participating in Ethereum is to make more money. Therefore, after Ethereum established a non-profit operating model, Anthony began to gradually retreat to the second line and was in a semi-retired state. He created Decentral and developed the Jaxx digital wallet (finally decided to leave Ethereum in December 2015). The 2018 Forbes ranking estimated his net worth at $750 million to $1 billion, making him one of the top 20 richest people in the cryptocurrency field. However, in 2021, he announced that he decided to "clear" and withdraw from the circle based on personal safety considerations, and no longer funded any blockchain projects. He plans to devote himself to charity and other causes in the future.

Amir Chetrit left the Swiss conference due to criticism from other developers and founders for his lack of commitment to Ethereum, and later joined other industries. Because he has always been anonymous and focused on privacy protection, there is very little information about him.

By the end of 2014, when the dust settled, only four of the original eight co-founders, Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Mihai Alisie and Jeffrey Wilcke, remained in the team.

Vitalik also reflected that he was too eager to select the team and failed to take into account the deep-seated differences among the members, the conflict of ideas and the collision of interests, which were far more complicated than he had imagined. "It was at that time that I realized that people in the cryptocurrency field were not all fighting for their ideals like me. Many people really just wanted to make a lot of money. The relationship between people is a practical problem."

Phase 2: Ethereum staged an encrypted version of "Silicon Valley Eight Fairies"

After the first shuffle, the co-founder team had lost more than half. Fortunately for Vitalik, however, the foundation is taking over more work, and his most important technical partner Gavin Wood is still fighting side by side with him.

Not only Ethereum, but the entire 2014 was not so ordinary for the currency circle. The theft and bankruptcy of Mentougou caused the price of Bitcoin to fall sharply, from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a drop of 67%. It was also this year that CZ sold his house in Shanghai and became OK CTO at a price of $600. SBF, who had just graduated from MIT, was submitting his resume on Wall Street.

Vitalik's work continued, and Ethereum began a large-scale recruitment. On November 28, 2014, Ethereum held an important conference, DEVCON 0, in the Berlin office. Most members of the Ethereum project team gathered in Berlin. Most of the project members had previously communicated via Skype, and this was the first time they met.

DEVCON 0, source: Ethereum Foundation

At that time, Vitalik and Gavin still maintained a close cooperative relationship. In the photos left by the meeting, the two stood side by side as always, symbolizing the closeness of that period. However, no one expected that the leader of the Ethereum engineering team and the author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper would be the next to leave.

Gavin Wood chose to leave in October 2015. He believed that Ethereum needed a more centralized engineering management model to be more efficient. However, Vitalik said "NO" again. The huge disagreement eventually prompted Gavin to leave the team and founded his own company, Parity (Ethcore). Parity soon became an important node operator of the Ethereum network, and at one time controlled more than 40% of the network nodes. Subsequently, Gavin fully promoted the development of Polkadot and was one of Ethereum's important competitors for a long time.

Gavin's departure directly weakened Ethereum's ability in engineering implementation. His leadership and technical expertise were crucial in the early development of Ethereum. With his departure, the team's efficiency problems were gradually exposed. Ethereum's Geth client developers are distributed all over the world, and the team's management and coordination problems frequently occur, which affects the development progress.

Vitalik, Jeff, Gavin, source: Vitalik

However, after Gavin left, the only two remaining co-founders, Mihai Alisie and Jeffrey Wilcke, left one after another during this period.

Mihai Alisie was one of Vitalik's earliest partners. The two co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. He assisted Ethereum in establishing a legal framework in Switzerland and served as vice chairman of the foundation. Mihai's departure was relatively natural. He did not have a fierce conflict with the team, but the core force of Ethereum's early construction was further reduced.

Jeffrey Wilcke gradually withdrew after The Dao was hacked and a huge amount of ETH was stolen, causing Ethereum to fork. He handed over the development work and technical supervision of the Ethereum Go client Geth to his assistant Péter Szilágyi, and turned his attention to game development and spending time with his family. It was around March 2018.

Jeffrey Wilcke takes care of his children, source network

With the departure of these founding members, Vitalik's loneliness in Ethereum has increased day by day. A developer revealed that 2015 was a lonely and difficult year for Vitalik, and he often spent the night in his office in Berlin.

Interestingly, at the EthCC7 conference in Brussels in July this year, after Vitalik's speech, the three former core founders of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin and Gavin Wood, took a group photo of the century, which was regarded as a decent end and reconciliation for the "breakup" that had once closed the loop.

The "centralized" era of "V God"

At the same time, with the collapse of the core team, Vitalik's influence and control over Ethereum are unprecedented. If you are asked to name an Ethereum developer other than Vitalik, 90% of ordinary community members cannot do it. The authority of V God alone can represent the entire Ethereum.

Unlike Bitcoin's "off-chain technical elite governance", Ethereum relies more on Vitalik's personal leadership. Although on the surface, Ethereum adopts "off-chain founding authority governance" and technical improvements must be unanimously agreed by the community, in fact, Vitalik's appeal can often promote the rapid passage of proposals.

For example, after The DAO incident in 2016, the hard fork proposal led by Vitalik received 85% of the votes in favor, which is in stark contrast to Bitcoin's more decentralized decision-making mechanism. Ethereum has gone from a decentralized community to a "one-man show" company controlled by Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation.

Lane Rettig, one of the core developers at the time, bluntly criticized the decision-making mechanism of the foundation. The Ethereum Foundation often showed excessive caution when making important decisions, fearing favoritism, and even worrying about legal liability. This indecision caused the foundation to be slow to act on releasing new platform improvement plans, paying developers, and even failing to respond to community needs in a timely manner.

"Ethereum's governance has failed. It is actually ruled by experts: a small group of technical experts have the final say on protocol updates." Lane Rettig criticized.

Against this background, Ajian, who was once a hardcore content contributor to the Ethereum Chinese community, also said in the article "Ethereum's Hidden Concerns｜Prophet Weekly #130": "The Ethereum Foundation has never regarded itself as a patcher and maintainer of this paradigm, and never felt that there should be any restrictions on its power."

From Ajian's perspective, there is no sign that the Ethereum Foundation believes that its power should be restricted. It only sees that they arbitrarily use this power and despise other people participating in the Ethereum blockchain. Therefore, Ajian turned from the Ethereum Chinese community to the Bitcoin Chinese community BTCStudy. Lane Rettig and Ajian's attitudes represent the voices of many people in the community.

Even Consensys, which used to be extremely supportive of the Ethereum ecosystem, told the truth. In the research report paper "Interpreting the Consensys paper: Is Ethereum becoming increasingly centralized? ", the researchers used a variety of data and indicators to analyze and conclude that the results clearly show that the entire Ethereum ecosystem shows a centralized element of control, which may be much less than the community expects.

It was also from this time that people, especially in the Chinese community, began to resist calling Vitalik "V God", and centralization made him step down from the altar.

The "infant" foundation stumbles

At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation is still in a stumbling "infant stage", and many foundation members are temporarily appointed.

For example, Kelley Becker and Frithjof Weinert, who briefly served as the COO and CFO of the Ethereum Foundation, were responsible for the daily operations and financial management of the Foundation, ensuring that the Foundation had enough funds to support the development and operation of Ethereum. But their tenures were short and they soon left the Foundation.

It was not until April 10, 2015 that the Ethereum Foundation began to operate and gradually got on track, becoming an important pillar to support technical development and governance decisions. The Ethereum Foundation started the selection of the board of directors, and the foundation's initial organizational structure: the centers in Switzerland and Berlin were the largest.

In mid-2015, Ming Chan, who has many years of experience in IT and management consulting, was appointed as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation to handle the daily operations of the Foundation, standardize its management, and ensure that technology development and community operations proceed smoothly within the legal and regulatory framework.

The internal structure of the Foundation has also been further clarified. In addition to Vitalik, who remains a core figure in technology and the community, Lars Klawitter, Vadim Levitin and Wayne Hennessy-Barrett have also joined the Foundation's board of directors.

Lars Klawitter is responsible for the integration of technology and innovation in the Foundation. He was active as an entrepreneur during the Internet revolution in his early years and served as the head of innovation business for Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. Vadim Levitin is a technical expert who has worked for the United Nations and has extensive international experience, helping the Ethereum Foundation expand its influence globally. Wayne Hennessy-Barrett is another board member who brings a global perspective to the foundation and has extensive operating experience in emerging markets in Africa.

With the addition of these new members, the Ethereum Foundation has gradually improved its governance structure, and the foundation's core mission has gradually shifted from technology development to community coordination and resource allocation. At the same time, the foundation also holds a large amount of ETH assets and supports the development of the Ethereum ecosystem by funding various research projects and developer teams.

The Ethereum core developers are included in the research group of the Ethereum Foundation. July 30, 2015 marked the historic moment of the launch of the Ethereum mainnet. In the Berlin office, a historic photo was taken, recording some of the core members at the time. At this point, Ethereum has basically completed its second reshuffle.

People who appeared with Vitalik include Gustav Simonsson, Christian Reitwiessner, Christoph Jentsch, etc. Several core developers worth mentioning include:

Gustav Simonsson was an early security consultant for Ethereum and played a vital role in the security of the Ethereum mainnet. After leaving Ethereum, he joined Dfinity and continued to work on decentralized computing networks.

Christian Reitwiessner is the developer of the Solidity programming language, which provides the cornerstone for Ethereum to run smart contracts.

Liana Husikyan is also an important member of the Solidity development team. She is one of the main developers of Remix IDE. Remix is an integrated development environment for writing and deploying smart contracts, which helps simplify the development process of smart contracts.

Meanwhile, Christoph Jentzsch is the founder of Slock.it and one of the initiators of The DAO. Although it was forked in 2016 due to a security vulnerability, The DAO is still one of the most important experiments in the history of blockchain and has promoted the exploration of decentralized governance models.

In addition, there are Fabian Vogelsteller, the author of ERC 20 and ERC 725, Vlad Zamfir, who promoted the transition of Ethereum from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake, and Jutta Steiner, the head of security at the Ethereum Foundation (later became the CEO of Parity Technologies founded by Gavin).

Phase 3: Ethereum's "midlife crisis" and attempts to de-Vitalikize

The third reshuffle of Ethereum's core members began in 2018.

At this time, the currency circle had experienced the ICO explosion and the 94 crash, and the "regulatory liquidation year" of cryptocurrency began. The price of Bitcoin fell from a high of $19,870 to a low of around $3,000, and Binance became the world's largest trading platform. There are still two years until Solana, the "Ethereum killer" that focuses on high performance, high efficiency and high throughput, is released.

When people talk about Ethereum, they basically mention two things: one is the upgrade of Ethereum 2.0, and the other is that the Ethereum Foundation is selling coins again.

The supply of ETH controlled by the foundation has been decreasing and being sold off over the years, and community members have shown more negative emotions. However, some members of the Ethereum Foundation said that this is one of the manifestations of the foundation's intention to decentralize. "EF consciously wants to reduce its influence and role, which is a good thing."

Indeed, since Aya Miyaguchi succeeded Ming Chan as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation in 2018, the Foundation is no longer the central hub for all development work as it was initially, but has shifted more to supporting and coordinating communication and cooperation between different projects, as well as expanding the Foundation’s cooperation with external partners, such as ConsenSys.

After Aya Miyaguchi took office, the division of EF's responsibilities became clearer, mainly limited to:

1. Hold Devcon or Devconnect once a year;

2. Maintain an execution client Geth, but do not maintain any consensus client;

3. Provide tens of millions of dollars in unconditional funding to the wider community each year;

4. Host conference calls: such as All Core Devs (ACD) hosted by Tim Beiko, All Devs Consensus (ACDC) hosted by Alex Stokes, etc.;

5. Do research: This may be one of the departments that is still centralized, but it is possible that some EF research teams will be independent;

6. Roadmap development: Vitalik updated the roadmap icon, and then there are dozens of tasks developed in parallel by different teams;

Image source: Vitalik's tweet

The Ethereum Foundation's official website currently discloses only three members of the leadership. In addition to Aya Miyaguchi and Vitalik, there is also a board member, Patrick Storchenegger.

During this period, several new generation core developers in the Ethereum Foundation gradually emerged and became key figures in Ethereum 2.0 and the entire ecosystem. The following is a list of people I personally think are very important in Ethereum, including: Danny Rya, Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, Dankrad Feist, Solidity creators Christian Rwitqiessner and Péter Szilágyi, etc. (In my opinion, there is no particular order, and I won’t list them one by one)

Danny Ryan is a core member of the Ethereum 2.0 team and is known as the “chief engineer of Ethereum 2.0” by the community. He played a crucial role in coordinating the development of Ethereum 2.0, especially in the launch and merge upgrade of the beacon chain, and was the first Ethereum Foundation researcher to appear in the documentary “Vitalik: An Ethereum Story”. (Note: During the writing of this article, Ryan announced on September 13 that he would withdraw from Ethereum development indefinitely for personal reasons, ending his seven-year Ethereum development career)

Since joining the Ethereum Foundation in 2017, Justin Drake's main work has also been Ethereum's transition to Proof of Stake (PoS), and he has played a key role in the execution of the ETH merger. In addition, Justin Drake is also one of the main speakers in the community on Ethereum's future technical roadmap, and often participates in podcasts and interviews to educate the public, such as the Ethereum Foundation's Reddit AMA, where Justin Drake is also one of the main speakers and has a very good foundation in the community.

Tim Beiko has joined the Ethereum Foundation full-time since 2018, and became one of the core developer leaders in 2021, responsible for organizing ACD conference calls, and is an important bridge between Ethereum core developers. As a protocol engineer, his work covers the advancement of multiple Ethereum improvement proposals.

Dankrad Feist is an important researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on the research of statelessness and data availability. The concept of "Danksharding" he proposed is in the sharding technology route of Ethereum, so the expansion plan finally selected by the Ethereum mainnet is named after Dankrad Feist. At the same time, his research on the MEV (maximum extractable value) problem also provides new insights into the security of Ethereum. However, on this issue, he and Péter Szilágyi, the current development director of Geth, had a public dispute, which eventually forced Vitalik to mediate. Related reading: "The Ethereum Foundation is caught in internal and external troubles: researchers and engineers debate fiercely, and members serving as EigenLayer consultants may have conflicts of interest".

After completing the stabilization of team members, from 2018 to 2022, the expansion of the Ethereum ecosystem has gained mainstream recognition. In 2019, DEXs such as Uniswap, Compound, and SushiSwap provided generous returns to any DeFi user who provided liquidity, and DeFi Summer made Ethereum's TVL grow rapidly. In 2021, it was the "first year of the century of the metaverse". Facebook changed its name to Meta, paving the way for the explosion of NFT. In 2022, the currency circle experienced the "Lehman moment". Luna and FTX fell one after another, and the Solana ecosystem was hit hard. Ethereum successfully switched from PoW to PoS, and the Layer2 track flourished. It was unparalleled for a while and completed its own outbreak period.

Ideological Crisis: EF "Congressification"

However, the moon waxes and wanes, the water overflows, everything will decline after reaching its peak, and the yin and yang will transform, and the surplus and the emptiness will increase and decrease.

Finally, Ethereum has ushered in its own "midlife crisis".

This year marks the second anniversary of the transition to PoS, and the price of ETH has stagnated. Although the price once broke through $4,000 again at its highest, it has performed very poorly in this market cycle compared with BTC and SOL. The decline of ETH against BTC is about 48.70%, and the decline of ETH against SOL is about 63.55%.

The most obvious thing is that after Bitcoin reached a new high this year, Ethereum is still hovering between $2,300 and $3,000. As the 34th largest asset in the world, Ethereum is too heavy and too scattered. At this scale, it is very difficult for Ethereum to grow, almost fighting against "gravity".

Another rule in the financial world is that when an asset reaches $300 billion or $500 billion, it will face a "growth bottleneck". Ethereum is at this "bottleneck" stage. It is not only a price "bottleneck", but also faces the crisis of ideological change.

"Preventing Ethereum from becoming rigid" and "ideological changes in the Ethereum Foundation" have also become issues that members of the foundation often discuss.

Following up on Dankrad Feist's topic just now, the controversy caused by Dankrad Feist is not only about the MEV issue with Péter Szilágyi, but also about the neutrality of being a member of the Ethereum Foundation.

On May 21, Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist successively disclosed that they had become consultants for EigenLayer and would receive EIGEN tokens as compensation that "may exceed the total of their current wealth."

Although both researchers claimed that they participated in the consultants in their personal capacity and would be "ready to end" the consultant position if EigenLayer violated the interests of Ethereum, it is clear that the community does not buy it. When the potential income "may exceed the total of their current wealth", it is difficult for a person to guarantee that he regards money as dirt.

Obviously, in this reshuffle period, the Ethereum Foundation is like the "Congress" of Ethereum. The EIPs written by researchers can directly change the direction and pattern of Ethereum and affect the ecological industry of hundreds of millions of dollars. With the continuous growth of the number and size of ecological participants, EIP involves more and more interests. Every participant hopes to receive "special care" in the upgrade like L2, but it is impossible for everyone to align their interests with Ethereum, so EF researchers have become "councillors" that must be won over in the eyes of capital.

This explains why EigenLayer is willing to spend a lot of money to hire members of the Ethereum Foundation, because they spent money to buy a lobbyist from EF. Related reading: "EF has no dreams".

For projects, in order to gain ecological legitimacy for themselves, they must try their best to get along well with EF in various ways. At this time, if there is someone close to EF around, it will be much more convenient to do things on and off the stage. For VCs, getting along well with EF is a convenient channel to get in touch with high-quality investment targets earlier. With the projects recommended by EF researchers, it is not only easier to get shares, but also to get a layer of insurance in advance in terms of legitimacy.

Whether they like it or not, there must be various hunting capitals around EF researchers, either entrusting them with advisory positions or directly sponsoring their personal research, and the researchers themselves do not seem to be averse to this. Against the backdrop of increasingly obvious modular trends such as EigenDA and Celestia, this situation may manifest itself in a faster and more obvious way. More teams will have their own parliamentary teams in EF, and EF itself will undergo ideological changes due to the unbundling of interests of all parties and embark on the path of "parliamentarization."

Ethereum without Vitalik

While the Ethereum Foundation is moving towards "parliamentarization", there are also signs of de-Vitalikization.

In the memory of Vitalik's father, when Ethereum was first established, Vitalik did not want to be a leader. He thought more: "Hey, I came up with a cool idea, let me write it down first, and then maybe some smart and influential people will do something."

But then, things changed a bit, and many people joined the project. They told Vitalik: "You are the one who should promote this project." So people pushed him to the position of leader, but all this was not natural. For him, this was something outside his comfort zone, and it was still one of the biggest challenges he faced.

"Vitalik almost perfectly satisfied our society's deepening image of technology founders, the worship of youth, and the obsession with a kind of innocence but powerful power." As Nathan Schneider, an economics professor who has interviewed Vitalik many times, said.

But in 2024, Vitalik will be 30 years old.

When he was working as Zuzalu in Montenegro, he saw people who were a full decade younger than him taking leadership roles in various projects, as organizers or developers; at a hacker gathering of about 30 people in South Korea, he became the oldest person in the room for the first time.

Vitalik satisfies the imagination of a large number of programmers about their ideal selves, young and legendary. Vitalik is a symbol, and he is no longer young and is no longer suitable for such a role, and he himself is aware of this.

10 years ago, he wanted to do something cool, and many people praised him as one of the powerful, young prodigies who changed the world like Zuckerberg. Now, after experiencing the changes in the crypto era, the Russo-Ukrainian war, life and death, Vitalik has a new realization: "I am now playing a completely different role, and it is time for the next generation to take over the mantle that once belonged to me." Related reading: "Vitalik's 30-year-old life realization: It is time for the next generation to take over the mantle that once belonged to me."

“I’m curious if Ethereum can survive without Vitalik’s leadership?” 9 months ago, a related discussion post received a lot of discussion on the Ethereum reddit: “In the past few years, Vitalik has indeed not led Ethereum as people imagined”, “I even heard that Vitalik is not even the best person to explain the Ethereum roadmap.”

Marco Castignoli, who works at the Ethereum Foundation, also expressed his personal opinion: “Although I am not one of them, I clearly know that Vitalik is just a member of the EF research team. The research team is composed of a group of very smart brains, and Vitalik is just average among them.”

The several new core members mentioned above (Danny Rya, Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, Dankrad Feist, Christian and Péter Szilágyi, etc.) have gradually emerged and become core developers in the Ethereum community.

Moreover, according to statistics from Electric Capital, there are currently 99 active Ethereum core developers, which is far ahead of other blockchain projects such as Bitcoin, Cardano, EOS or Tron. Looking at a larger scope, the Ethereum network currently has more than 250,000 developers and researchers, making it one of the most decentralized blockchain development communities.

When young Vitalik was abandoned by Blizzard, he was able to create a new world with his own technology, and it seemed that everything was created by technology. After several rounds of reshuffles of Ethereum team members, he found himself finally powerless, and Vitalik's self began to be deconstructed from then on.

As he wrote at the end of his 30-year-old life experience: communities, ideologies, "scenes", countries, or very small companies, families or relationships - are all created by people.

Not by technology. Besides, Vitalik is no longer the youngest, smartest or even the most representative technical researcher in Ethereum. Vitalik's role will continue to weaken, and one day, Ethereum will become Ethereum without Vitalik.

Perhaps it is time to imagine Ethereum without Vitalik.

Author's note: This article attempts to summarize the changes in the core organization members of Ethereum, but the members of Ethereum are much richer than I know. Putting them all in one article structure requires omitting many details, so there are some omissions. It is best to regard this article as a rough summary rather than a detailed historical and technical explanation. Thanks to everyone who provided information and other feedback.

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