Author: Jaleel Gallior

Vitalik feels bad.

Vitalik felt bad when he heard people on crypto Twitter tell him that a PVP KOL gambler casino that made more than 99% of users lose money is the best market fit that the crypto industry can get, and that hope for something better is seen as “condescending and elitist”.

Vitalik feels bad when people who know nothing about the internal operations of the Ethereum Foundation, tell him who should kick out of the organization, who should come in, and also count on him to complete all these adjustments in two weeks.

2024 has been a tough year for all Ethereum teams and communities.The community’s dissatisfaction has fallen into a periodic cycle of anger, which will explode from time to time, and the community’s memes of mocking ETH prices have also been updated one after another.

In addition to Vitalik, there is another person who also feels bad.

That is Aya Miyaguchi (Riko Miyaguchi), former executive director of the Ethereum Foundation.A year ago, Aya proposed to Vitalik the idea of ​​transferring from executive director to foundation chairman. This idea was implemented today. Vitalik officially announced that Aya was officially promoted to chairman of the Ethereum Foundation.This made the Ethereum community very unsatisfied.

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 role in the Chinese and English areas of Ethereum.

In the past year, Solana, the biggest killer of Ethereum, has been killed. In addition to the founder Toly’s efforts 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 pledge interest-generating payment off-chain real transactions”, hosting many extremely 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 seven years she served as executive director of the Ethereum Foundation.

“Hold to be hired to do an ineligible job for 7 years, and get paid without doing anything.” The traders and KOLs, led by CoinMamba, in the English community, have the deepest resentment towards her.

They even tried to let Aya leave through public pressure: they made remarks such as “The day Aya left is Ethereum’s liberation day”, “The ETH will be a new high within two weeks of Aya’s departure”, “We continue to put pressure on her and she will resign”.Some even irrationally abused and died threats to her.

If you still remember Vitalik’s various defense-breaking Twitter periods during the Chinese New Year, such as the abstract words of cc Milady, and even thought about leaving Ethereum and other “good mental state” 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 broken and posted seven or eight tweets in a row, saying, “I can only decide the leadership team of the Ethereum Foundation, Milady!”, “I hope everyone doesn’t speak too harshly, Milady!”, “The people who say insulting words are all demons, Milady!”, “Milady!”

Aya’s 7 years did nothing?

By this year, it is the 10th anniversary of the Ethereum ICO, and Aya has served at the Ethereum Foundation for 7 years.

Previously, 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.During the three years from 2015 to 2018, the Foundation’s daily operations were handled, allowing its standardized management, and ensuring that technology development and community operations were carried out smoothly under the legal and regulatory framework.

Since Aya took over Ming Chan as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation in 2018, she has redefined the responsibilities of the Ethereum Foundation.

“It’s a bit unobjective to say that Aya has done nothing in the past years,” Lida, a protocol researcher for the Ethereum ecosystem, said to rhythmic BlockBeats. “The most specific work that can be expressed is the ETH Devcon or Devconnect conference held every year, which is inseparable from Aya’s efforts. And to the naked eye, ETH activities have spread around the world over the years, providing unconditional funding to community events around the world.”

In addition, the foundation’s responsibilities include maintaining an executive 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.), doing research on various Ethereum technologies, roadmap formulation, etc.

“However, with the adjustments over the past few years, the Ethereum research team is basically an independent department in the foundation, developing a roadmap, and dozens of tasks are developed in parallel by different teams, 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,stokesandbarnabeCo-director of the Ethereum Foundation research team.

“Let’s say that, in addition to the fact that Aya’s work results are not obvious, there is another big criticism of her that she does not have much management experience.” Lida said that unlike Ming Chan’s previous experience in IT and management, Aya was a Japanese high school teacher and worked in the education industry for more than ten years.

Aya has a little “unworthy” when she realizes that her education industry has a huge impact on her children’s future.

“Don’t you need to learn first in order to convey what we need to communicate as humans, rather than simply teaching the content of a subject according to the manual? So I was in trouble for a long time. So, I decided to quit.” This is why Aya explained why she left the education industry in an interview.

After leaving the education industry, Aya enrolled in a graduate student at the American Business School and studied 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 would be difficult to find a job without going to graduate school.”

It was also during this period that Aya entered the crypto industry.

“It was probably at 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 microfinance I was working on. The founder asked me if I would help, so I joined Kraken,” Aya recalled in an interview that she was in charge of Kraken’s business in Japan and later became managing director of Kraken Japan.

That was 2013. Vitalik was also a contributor to Bitcoin magazine. When interviewing various people, he would also take the opportunity to talk about his ideas, such as where Bitcoin needs improvement, which is the prototype of Ethereum.

“It is said that Kraken’s founding members wanted to support such new technologies and talents and admire Vitalik, so when Vitalik was writing the Ethereum white paper, he stayed in Kraken’s office for a while, and even Kraken’s founder let Vitalik live in one of his own spare room.”

It is also here that Vitalik met Aya who worked in Kraken.

Ethereum is first a cultural group

When chatting with a friend recently, he made a point: “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 was just appointed as one of the co-heads of the Ethereum Foundation research team, tweeted his 2022 words: “Ethereum is first and foremost a cultural project, and we just happen to use software to leverage its leverage.”

Even under the pressure of the community, not only was it not fired by Vitalik, but was awarded a larger Tittle Aya, but also a firm guardian of Ethereum culture. It has planned Ethereum’s positioning and planning as an “infinite garden”: “Ethereum’s mission is not to quickly obtain short-term benefits, but to promote the popularization and development of decentralization concepts in the long run.”

These are all extensions of Vitalik’s values.

So when the community verbs at Aya, Vitalik is so breached because he is scolded not only Aya, but also Vitalik himself.

In the earliest Ethereum prequel story, when Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the top 10 developers who wanted to join and selected five of them as leadership, namely the five founders of Ethereum. After the five founders, three other developers became co-founders in 2014.

At that time, there was no Ethereum Foundation, only eight core leaders. Until 2014, the relationship within Ethereum became tense. “Are you taking the money from venture capital funds or crowdfunding funds from all ordinary people? Should you take the profit route and become Google in the crypto industry, or a pure non-profit organization?” The future direction of the Ethereum Foundation has become a topic of constant debate and has led to factions.

“I was once convinced to take Ethereum to a more corporate route. But it never made me feel more comfortable, and even made me feel a little dirty,” Vitalik said in a recollection of this memory.

After the final co-founders 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 eventually I had to clear some people.”

In the end, except for Vitalik, several other Lianchuang left Ethereum, which led to the Ethereum Foundation.

The sad song of “Leftist” on Ethereum

Some people say that all original sins are ultimately the price trend of ETH is not ideal.

“But I think the original sin of all is in the increasingly right-handed crypto industry, while Ethereum insists on going left.” In Lida’s view, Ethereum’s values ​​have not changed since then. What has changed is this industry. From the political situation in the United States to the entire crypto industry, everyone no longer talks about ideals but stands for the pvp casino, which makes Ethereum very outlier.

From the very beginning, the founders and team of Ethereum have adhered to an ideal: decentralization, definitiveization, and the pursuit of the realization of social value.In a bubble and hype market, this ideal seems particularly abrupt.

“Aya’s scolding this time is actually a long-term emotional outlet for the community. To a certain extent, she is a scapegoat. After all, the Ethereum Foundation has continued to sell coins over the past year, which has made the community feel very bad.” Lida said.

When the community is not in good mood, Vitalik always emphasizes that peace and love’s “leftist style” has annoyed the community even more, and even caused dissatisfaction with Eric, the early development of Ethereum: “It’s exhausting to hear someone ignore the community’s commands 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, not concessions to the ever-changing market.Many times, leaders should start from a long-term perspective and listen to the voices from the community.

“Ultimately, I lost my enthusiasm for what I used to be so passionate about, because those in charges did not realize the importance of the community and the need for change, but were more willing to focus on the “good intentions” we proposed and whose feelings we hurt, rather than understanding a huge community.”

The values ​​between early Ethereum members are also constantly colliding and reflecting.All of this seems to be back to the division of the Ethereum community in 2014.Faced with the trend of the industry’s continuous right-leaning trend, more and more voices are calling for Ethereum to also take the “capitalization route”.

This is also a topic that everyone has discussed a lot a while ago. Ethereum’s revenue at the protocol level is too low.”If I can take over the Ethereum Foundation, ETH will rise to $10,000. The first thing I do after taking over is to optimize the returns.” Justin Sun’s view has been recognized by most Chinese communities.

Arbitrum charges a 10% handling fee for its L3, but as L2, it only gives Ethereum a 2% “tax”, which has caused many investors and ecological developers to question, and this proportion is really too low.

So how much tax is to be reasonable?In response to this question, BlockBeats asked Sun again what he thought.

“I personally recommend that the annual USD tax revenue for Base and Polygon should not be less than US$200 million.” In Sun Yuchen’s view, although the prosperity of the L2 ecosystem will directly increase the value of Ethereum, Ethereum has indeed oversubsidized for L2 at present.The 2% tax may be too low, but if it is raised to 8%, it will not only provide more stable revenue for Ethereum, increase revenue by at least $1 billion a year, nor will it suppress Layer 2’s development.

“If Layer 2 is in its early stages of development, some subsidies can be made. However, for the already rising large L2, similar to Base and polygon, it is recommended to charge heavy taxes. This is also common at the national level. Ordinary people are exempt from taxes or 10% taxes, but the super rich need to pay a higher level of 20-30%,” Sun said further.

In addition to increasing efficiency, you also need to reduce costs.

For example, AAVE founder Stani once made his own suggestions on this: “As an organization, the Ethereum Foundation should be a streamlined and efficient organization. Anyone who has not put in 100% of his efforts should leave the foundation.”

However, there is a huge gap between the left and right, and changes will not come very quickly.Everything takes time, and the rectification of the Ethereum Foundation is also continuing, including some fiscal and administrative reforms, introducing more standardized measures.

“As for the topics that everyone is most concerned about, the changes in the price level must be lagging, so just wait.” Lida said.