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The Ethereum Foundation said it is preparing an update on how it plans to address ethics concerns after two members of its core developer team took on roles in the staking protocol and were rewarded with valuable tokens.
“We are aware of the current conversation about potential conflicts of interest and share the community’s concerns,” Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, tweeted on Friday.
She added: “It is clear that relying on culture and individual judgment is not enough and we have had formal policies in place for some time to address this issue.”
The Ethereum Foundation’s trusted neutrality is critical to our role in the ecosystem. We are aware of current conversations about potential conflicts of interest and share our community’s concerns.
It is clear that it depends on culture and individual judgment…
— Aya Miyaguchi (ayamiya.eth) (@AyaMiyagotchi) May 24, 2024
The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization that funded and operates the early development of Ethereum and still has significant influence on the direction of the protocol today. In addition to Miyaguchi, the foundation’s board of directors includes Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Buterin was asked last week by prominent cryptocurrency trader Jordan Fish about the financial relationships between the foundation’s core developers and other projects built within the Ethereum ecosystem. Fish specifically requested a connection with EigenLayer, a protocol for back-staking Ether to secure the Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain, which currently holds $18.1 billion in TVL, according to DeFiLlama.
Days later, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake confirmed that he had established a multi-million dollar advisory relationship with EigenLayer, through which he received “significant EIGEN token incentives” worth millions of dollars, equivalent to nearly half of his net worth.
fellow researcher Dankrad paste also confirmed a similar relationship.
Online critics were concerned that accepting money from EigenLayer could affect the expert’s re-staking risk analysis (a cautious trend) or affect his work on the core Ethereum protocol.
Is the Ethereum core developer working at EigenLayer the same as the US Secretary of Defense working at the largest private defense company in the US? Is that acceptable?
I’m seriously asking what the best analogy is here.
“(The Ethereum Foundation) are some of the highest integrity people I know and I don’t see 1% of (members) officially involved in EigenLayer as compromising their morals,” Drake asserted last week. As far as he knows, he said three out of 300 people at the Ethereum Foundation are officially involved with EigenLayer.
Feist also said his token allocation “will not change or influence my position on how the core protocol is developed.”
In an interview with decryption“We will not restrict the Ethereum Foundation or anyone in the ecosystem from supporting more projects,” said Joseph Lubin, Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO.
Lubin noted that his company, a leading Ethereum wallet infrastructure provider, has had many members move to other ecosystem projects for financial rewards. Consensys said it has no problem with such relationships as long as they are disclosed and there is no conflict of interest with respect to decisions involving Consensys. (Consensys is one of the 22 investors. decryption.)
“There will be so many opportunities to make things good or great or to corrupt things,” he noted. “We must be vigilant.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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