Is there a ‘serious disconnect’ between the Ethereum Foundation and the crypto community?

Author: Katherine Ross, Blockworks; Translated by Wuzhu, Golden Finance

ETH is having a rough time.

This didn’t start with the sell-off this weekend. We have “wartime” Vitalik Buterin, criticism of the Ethereum Foundation, not to mention price action (down 10% in the past week).

On the positive side, at least Eric Trump still seems optimistic, and — in a now-edited post on X — initially encouraged people to buy ETH, adding “you can thank me later”. But I’m not sure that’s the type of support anyone wants right now.

There’s a lot of discussion about what went wrong and how to correct it. Tribe Capital’s Evan Park told me that the recent sentiment is nothing new.

“When I was at Devcon, I noticed a huge disconnect between foundations focusing on infrastructure and retail users and the broader crypto community demanding exciting new applications. On one hand, ETH L2s like Base, Ink, and MegaETH are positioned to bring in new applications and users. However, what Ethereum leaders need to realize is that they face accelerating competition from both established L1s like Solana and newer L1s like Berachain and Monad that are poised to dominate in the year ahead,” he explained.

Even with Buterin signaling a “greater sense of urgency,” we’re still at a point in the market where ‘can’t stop, won’t stop.’ Just yesterday, Berachain announced that its mainnet will launch tomorrow.

In my conversation with Ryan Connor of Blockworks Research, he explained that he and his team were initially “excited” about Max Resnick’s potential cultural impact on ETH. But when that didn’t work out and Resnick jumped ship to Solana, the excitement dissipated.

Things are now “pretty bad” with Resnick gone, but Connor told me there’s still a way to make ETH great again.

“Bring execution back to the base layer is the simplest way to put it.How do you do that? You scale it technically. You compete with L2. You change the culture of the ETH organization, the people who release upgrades, and the application developers who live on that chain. [It’s] easier said than done. You have to basically abandon these very niche political, philosophical views that many people in the ecosystem hold, [although] I think it’s been clear over the years that they’re not willing to do that,” he explained.

That includes putting the focus on “hardware requirements” aside.

While there are some technical things that can be done, it ultimately comes down to changing the culture. It’s not an easy battle to win, Connor admitted.

Connor compared it to the Department of Motor Vehicles: whoever is in charge of the department, they can’t turn on “wartime” mode and change everything. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

Whether Buterin and EF are politicized to the point where they are similar to government departments remains to be seen.