Author: Jaleel Jialiu

Vitalik feels bad.

Vitalik feels bad when he hears people on crypto Twitter and venture capital firms telling him that a PVP KOL gambler casino that makes more than 99% of users lose money is the best market fit the crypto industry can get, and that hoping for something better is seen as "condescending and elitist."

Vitalik feels bad when people who know nothing about the inner workings of the Ethereum Foundation tell him who to kick out of the organization and who to let in, and expect him to make all these adjustments in two weeks.

2024 is a difficult year for all Ethereum teams and communities. The community's dissatisfaction has fallen into a cyclical cycle of anger, erupting from time to time, and the community's memes mocking the price of ETH have been updated in waves.

In addition to Vitalik, there is another person who 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.

The controversial new chairman of the Ethereum Foundation

In fact, over the past year, Aya has been criticized by the Ethereum community and is a controversial character in both the Chinese and English areas of Ethereum.

In the past year, Solana, the biggest killer of Ethereum, has survived from the brink of death. In addition to the efforts of founder Toly to support various "solana casino culture memes", the work of Lily Liu, chairman of the Solana Foundation, has also been recognized by the community, such as proposing the PayFi concept of "using on-chain staking to generate interest to pay for off-chain real transactions", holding many high-quality hackathon competitions, and investing in many high-quality projects in the Solana ecosystem.

In the eyes of many people in the Ethereum community, Aya has almost no "results" in the 7 years she has been the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation.

"Being hired to do a job she is not qualified for for 7 years, and getting paid without doing any work", traders and KOLs in the English community, led by CoinMamba, have the deepest resentment towards her.

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 Aya leaving", "If we continue to put pressure on her, she will resign", etc. Some people even made irrational insults and death threats to her.

If you still remember Vitalik's various tweets during the Chinese New Year, such as copying Milady's abstract terms, and even thinking about leaving Ethereum and other "mentally healthy" speeches, it was during that time that Vitalik was under great public pressure from the community.

Faced with the momentum of CoinMamba and others to "fire Aya", Vitalik seemed a little overwhelmed, 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 won't be too harsh, Milady!", "People who make insulting remarks are all demons, Milady!", "Milady!"

Aya did nothing in her 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 technical development and community operations were carried out smoothly within the legal and regulatory framework.

Since 2018, Aya has replaced Ming Chan as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation and redefined the responsibilities of the Ethereum Foundation.

"It's 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 concrete work that can be mentioned is the annual ETH Devcon or Devconnect conference, which are inseparable from Aya's efforts. And it is obvious that ETH's activities have spread all over the world in recent years, and unconditional funding has been provided to community activities around the world."

In addition, the foundation's responsibilities also 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 the adjustments in the past few years, the Ethereum research team is basically an independent department in the foundation, formulating roadmaps, with dozens of tasks being developed in parallel by different teams, and doing Reddit AMA twice a year, etc." Lida said.

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 co-directors of the Ethereum Foundation research team.

"In addition to Aya's lack of obvious work results, another major criticism of her is that she does not have much management experience." Lida said that unlike Ming Chan's previous experience in IT and management, Aya was a high school teacher in Japan and has worked in the education industry for more than ten years.

When Aya realized that her education industry had a great impact on the future of children, she had some "unworthy feelings".

"In order to convey the content that we need to communicate as human beings, rather than simply teaching the content of a certain subject according to the manual, don't you need to learn first? So I was in trouble for a long time. So, I decided to resign." This is Aya's explanation in an interview why she left the education industry.

After leaving the education industry, Aya enrolled in a graduate school at an American business school to study the field of microfinance, but she was not interested in making money itself, "I need a job to stay in the United States for a long time, and it is 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 to Jesse Powell, the founder of the virtual currency exchange Kraken, and felt that blockchain could be linked to the financial inclusion and microcredit that I was studying. The founder asked me if I was willing to help, so I joined Kraken," Aya recalled in an interview. Initially, she was responsible for Kraken's business in Japan, and later became the managing director of Kraken Japan.

It was 2013, and Vitalik was still a writer for Bitcoin Magazine. When interviewing various people, he would also take the opportunity to talk about his ideas, such as where Bitcoin needed to be improved, which was the prototype of Ethereum.

"It is said that the founding members of Kraken wanted to support such new technologies and talents, and they admired Vitalik very much. Therefore, when Vitalik was writing the Ethereum white paper, he stayed in Kraken's office for a while, and the founder of Kraken even let Vitalik live in one of his spare rooms."

It was here that Vitalik met Aya, who worked at Kraken.

Ethereum is first and foremost a cultural group

When chatting with a friend recently, he put forward a point of view: "All members of the team are actually extensions of the founder's values. Even if the power distribution of web3 is decentralized, this will not change."

What he said makes sense. Stokes, who has just been appointed as one of the co-leaders of the Ethereum Foundation's 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 the heavy pressure of public opinion in the community, Aya, who was not fired by Vitalik but was given a bigger title, 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 benefits, but to promote the popularization and development of decentralized concepts in the long run." This is an extension of Vitalik's values. So when the community spoke ill of Aya, Vitalik was so upset because it was not just Aya who was 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, that is, the 5 founders of Ethereum. After 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 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 pure non-profit organization?" The future direction of the Ethereum Foundation has become a constantly emerging topic of debate and has spawned factions.

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

After the final co-founder meeting, Vitalik decided to choose the decentralized and non-profit route. "I was trying to shirk responsibility throughout the process because I really didn't want to take responsibility, and I had to clear some people in the end."

In the end, except for Vitalik, several other co-founders left Ethereum, and the Ethereum Foundation was derived.

The Elegy of Ethereum's "Leftists"

Some people say that the original sin of everything, in the final analysis, is 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, but the industry has changed. 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 very different.

From the beginning, the founder and team of Ethereum insisted on 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, which is actually the community's long-term emotional outlet. To a certain extent, it can be regarded as a scapegoat. After all, the Ethereum Foundation has continued to sell coins over the past year, which has made the community very upset." Lida said.

When the community sentiment was not good, Vitalik’s “leftist style” of always emphasizing peace and love further annoyed the community and even caused dissatisfaction from Eric, an early Ethereum developer: “It’s exhausting to hear someone ignore the community’s orders with words like ‘don’t be too mean’. We are here to change the world, not to create a safe space.”

In Eric’s view, the power of ideals is the source of social change, rather than giving in to the ever-changing market. Many times, leaders should take a long-term perspective and listen to the voices from the community.

"In the end, I lost my passion for things that I was once so passionate about because those in charge did not realize the importance of the community and the need for change, but were more willing to focus on the "goodwill" we proposed and whose feelings were hurt, rather than understanding a large community."

The values ​​​​among the early members of Ethereum are also constantly colliding and reflecting. All this seems to have returned to the split of the Ethereum community in 2014. Faced with the industry's 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. Ethereum's 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 to do after taking over is to optimize the income." Sun Yuchen's point of view has been recognized by most Chinese communities.

Arbitrum charges 10% of its L3 fees, but as L2, it only pays 2% of Ethereum's "tax", which has caused many investors and ecosystem developers to question that this ratio is too low.

So how much tax is reasonable? In response to this issue, 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 Yuchen's view, although the prosperity of the L2 ecosystem will directly increase the value of Ethereum, Ethereum is indeed over-subsidizing L2 at present. 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 US dollars 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 large L2s that have already emerged, such as Base and Polygon, it is recommended to collect heavy taxes. This is also common at the national level. Ordinary people are exempt from tax or levied 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, costs must also be reduced.

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 at the price level will definitely be delayed, so just wait." Lida said.