Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Goes on Offense Amid Major Leadership Shake-up

It’s been a rough year for the Ethereum Foundation, the grant-giving nonprofit that helps support Ethereum, the best-known blockchain behind Bitcoin. As Ethereum loses market cap and mindshare to competitors, the foundation has been beset by scandal. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and chief figurehead, has laid out a new plan to right the ship.

“We are indeed currently in the process of large changes to EF leadership structure, which has been ongoing for close to a year,” Buterin said in an X post. “Some of this has already been executed on and made public, and some is still in progress.”

In his X post outlining the changes, Buterin listed a series of goals, including improving the “technical expertise within EF leadership” and improving “two-way communications and ties between EF leadership and the ecosystem actors” that it supports.

According to Buterin, the changes won’t be designed to centralize, corporatize or politicize the foundation. The organization won’t suddenly “[s]tart aggressively lobbying regulators and powerful political figures,” he said, nor would it “[b]ecome an arena for vested interests […] or even more of a ‘main character’ within Ethereum.”

The shake-up comes as Ethereum’s reputation among builders has soured in recent months. Members of the broader crypto community are flocking to fast and cheap competitors like Solana, which has been quicker to accommodate the recent memecoin fervor.

Some say Ethereum has lagged because it lacks an organizing vision — something the foundation, while not “in charge” of Ethereum, might have helped remedy.

Over the past 12 months, the foundation has been mired in controversy. It has weathered accusations of being ineffectual, yet also too powerful. Conflict-of-interest scandals haven’t helped, either: Payments from private companies to foundation employees recently sparked wide backlash and forced the organization to update its policies.

Some have blamed Aya Miyaguchi, the foundation’s executive director since 2018, for the foundation’s woes. Amid a pressure campaign for Miyaguchi’s removal, Buterin has stepped in as the Ethereum Foundation’s sole decision-maker. “The person deciding the new EF leadership team is me,” he stated on X. “One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to give the EF a ‘proper board’, but until that happens it’s me.”

Miyaguchi, however, has not been ousted from the foundation. Buterin lambasted some of her critics on X, accusing them of using her as a “scapegoat.” In multiple tweets, Buterin highlighted certain particularly inflammatory social media comments — including death threats and explicit calls for more bullying of Miyaguchi — and called them “pure evil.”

“If you ‘keep the pressure on’, then you are creating an environment that is actively toxic to top talent,” Buterin wrote. “Some of Ethereum’s best devs have been messaging me recently, expressing their disgust with the social media environment that people like you are creating. YOU ARE MAKING MY JOB HARDER.”