Ethereum's 10-Year Power Transition: 3 Internal Reshuffles, Now Attempting to Bid Farewell to the Vitalik Era

Author: Jaleel Jia Liu, BlockBeats

The "car" is too heavy, and the "field" is too scattered. As the 34th largest asset globally, the price of ETH has stagnated, and Ethereum is facing its own "midlife crisis."

This year is a special year for Ethereum, marking the 10th anniversary of ICOs. Looking back at global tech companies, 10-year-old Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy, with a market cap of only $20 billion at its peak. Microsoft's market cap grew from $670 million to $130 billion over its first decade. In contrast, Ethereum's market cap stands at $321 billion. Although Ethereum's first 10 years saw rapid growth, at one point it was even thought to surpass Bitcoin. However, in this cycle of cryptocurrency, while Bitcoin continues to reach new highs, Ethereum has stagnated, and Solana has "risen from the ashes." After multiple reflections on "what exactly happened to Ethereum?", the community has come to realize that Ethereum is facing a dilemma with wolves in front and tigers behind, and it is not irreplaceable.

In fact, the Ethereum Foundation has many shortcomings, and its organizational structure is quite chaotic. As a decentralized non-profit organization, managing Ethereum's internal structure is not easy. Looking back at Ethereum's journey, the eight founding teams had differing visions and "separated," resembling a crypto version of "the Eight Immortals of Silicon Valley." After only Vitalik remained, this decentralized non-profit organization entered a "centralized" era under this prodigy, with his influence and authority unprecedented.

Today, the complex relationships and ideological conflicts within the Ethereum Foundation continue, with researchers bickering and subtle changes in ideology. At 30, Vitalik has experienced the changes of the crypto era, the life-and-death struggles of the Russia-Ukraine war, and personal insights, and he seems to have begun a new script, playing a role in Ethereum that is completely different from before.

Phase One: Vitalik's Chosen "Eight Kings in Governance"

The focus of this phase is the split and ideological conflict within the Ethereum founding team, occurring between 2014 and 2015. Vitalik Buterin, the programmer genius who always speaks eloquently about technology, often responds that his biggest regret in the Ethereum journey is "the matter of the 8 co-founders." Clearly, these eight co-founders who had long since departed weigh heavily on his mind.

When Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first ten developers who responded to his call to join and selected five of them for the leadership, becoming Ethereum's five co-founders: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie, and Amir Chetrit.

"This was clearly a very serious mistake. They looked like good people, and they wanted to help, so I thought, why not let them be in leadership?" Vitalik reflected on his decision at that time.

The topic of Ethereum's co-founders is controversial, with many versions circulating online, and even the relevant Wikipedia entries are constantly edited and modified. After Vitalik "certified the eight co-founders," the widely accepted version in the community is that, following the five founders, three more developers became co-founders in 2014: Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke.

Thus, Ethereum completed the formation of its early eight-member core leadership, resembling the "Eight Kings in Governance" implemented during the early Yuan and Qing dynasties to prevent the emperor (or khan) from acting unilaterally.

Berlin "Pilgrimage," The Prequel to Ethereum

In the recently released documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story," Vitalik recalls that he began his digital nomad life in mid-2013.

That was the prehistoric period of Ethereum, when Bitcoin was only $204, more than a year after Vitalik and Mihai Alisie founded Bitcoin Magazine. While building Ethereum, he traveled globally due to invitations from various communities. In 2013 and 2014, Ethereum established headquarters in Switzerland and Berlin, released its white paper, and Vitalik visited China to crowdfund for Ethereum, meeting miners.

Berlin was the city where he stayed the longest. "Pilgrimage," Vitalik described his active presence in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin at that time.

Room 77 bar, photographed by Vitalik Buterin in 2013, now closed.

In Berlin's Bitcoin Kiez area, cryptocurrency payments were very common. Within a few hundred meters, there were dozens of stores accepting BTC payments. The community center "Room 77" bar was also a hub for various people, including tech developers and political activists.

Near this area, Ethereum rented an office just 1.5 kilometers from "Room 77," which Vitalik could walk to in under 20 minutes. Searching for Ethereum's office address "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin" on Google Maps still shows this address marked as Ethereum Network Launch (30/07/2015), along with a group photo of early core members of Ethereum.

In early 2014, most of Ethereum's core members were basically around Vitalik, and the Ethereum team was in a highly cohesive state.

At the Bitcoin conference in Miami that January, Vitalik and his co-founders stood together for the first time to showcase their project to the world, which went well, marking Ethereum's official entry into the public eye. However, this was also the eve of separation.

The first Ethereum meetup held in Miami in January 2014, image source: internet.

Switzerland "Battle," The Turning Point for Ethereum

On June 7, 2014, it was destined to be a day of separation. All leadership members of Ethereum attended an internal meeting in Switzerland, focusing on discussing the future direction of Ethereum.

The meeting was held at the Spaceship house, the origin of ETH and Ethereum's first headquarters.

Spaceship house, image source: Mihai Alisie

In fact, this topic had been debated internally for a long time before this meeting, and factions had already emerged. The internal relationships within Ethereum became tense, with ongoing debates about whether to use venture capital funds or to crowdfund from ordinary people; whether to pursue a profit-oriented route and become the Google of crypto, or to remain a purely non-profit organization.

Vitalik recalled this memory, saying, "I was once persuaded to lean towards making Ethereum more corporate. But this never made me feel comfortable; it even felt a bit dirty."

It is said that this meeting, which determined Ethereum's "life and death," lasted an entire day, and Vitalik chose 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 in the end, I had to clear out some people."

This decision became the first turning point in Ethereum's history, directly leading to the team's first major split. Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin, Amir Chetrit, and Anthony Di Iorio all left one after another.

Charles Hoskinson was the most prominent opponent in this conflict, advocating that Ethereum should become a commercial company, obtaining funding through venture capital, and later developing into a profitable tech giant. "A horizontal power structure, where janitors and executives are on the same level, is simply insane."

After leaving Ethereum, Charles founded the development company IOHK (later restructured into a venture capital studio) and launched the PoS public chain Cardano. This became a leading altcoin for several years, often referred to as "Japan's Ethereum" due to its early focus on the Japanese market, and was also the first generation "Ethereum killer," consistently ranking in the top ten by market cap.

Following Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided to stop participating in core development and shifted to founding the incubator ConsenSys, which completed a $450 million Series D funding round in 2022 at a valuation of $7 billion, with investors including ParaFi Capital, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund II, and Microsoft. Over the years, ConsenSys has incubated numerous blockchain startups and built a rich ecosystem of projects for Ethereum, with the most successful being the wallet MetaMask, the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, generating weekly revenues of $300,000 and total revenues nearing $300 million.

Similar to Joseph Lubin, Anthony is also a wealthy second-generation individual, and his involvement in Ethereum was primarily to make more money. Therefore, after Ethereum established a non-profit operating model, Anthony gradually retreated to the background, entering a semi-retirement state, creating Decentral, and developing the Jaxx digital wallet (ultimately confirming his departure from Ethereum in December 2015). In 2018, Forbes estimated his net worth to be between $750 million and $1 billion, ranking him among the top 20 wealthiest individuals in the cryptocurrency field. However, in 2021, he announced that for personal safety reasons, he decided to "liquidate" and exit the space, no longer funding any blockchain projects, and plans to focus on charity and other endeavors.

Amir Chetrit left due to a lack of investment in Ethereum and was criticized by other developers and founders during the Swiss meeting, later venturing into other industries. He has remained anonymous and focused on privacy protection, with very little information available about him.

By the end of 2014, only four of the original eight co-founders remained in the team: Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Mihai Alisie, and Jeffrey Wilcke.

Vitalik also reflected that he was too hasty in selecting the team and did not consider the deep-seated differences among the members; the ideological conflicts and clashes of interests were far more complex than he initially imagined. "I did realize at that time that not everyone in the cryptocurrency field is like me, striving for ideals; many people just want to make a lot of money. The relationships between people are a real issue."

Phase Two: Ethereum's Crypto Version of "The Eight Immortals of Silicon Valley"

After the first reshuffle, the co-founder team had lost more than half. However, for Vitalik, the fortunate thing was that the foundation was taking on more work, and his most important technical partner, Gavin Wood, was still fighting alongside him.

Not only Ethereum, but the entire year of 2014 was also not ordinary for the crypto space. The Mt. Gox hack led to a severe drop in Bitcoin's price, plummeting from a peak of $951.39 to $309.87, a decline of 67%. It was also the year when CZ sold his house in Shanghai and bet everything on Bitcoin at $600 to become the CTO of OK. SBF, fresh out of MIT, was applying for jobs on Wall Street.

Vitalik's work continued to unfold, and Ethereum began large-scale recruitment. On November 28, 2014, Ethereum held an important meeting, the DEVCON 0 developer conference, at its Berlin office, gathering most of the Ethereum project team members, who had previously communicated via Skype, for the first time.

DEVCON 0 conference, image source: Ethereum Foundation.

At that time, Vitalik and Gavin still maintained a close working relationship. In the photos from the meeting, the two stood side by side as always, symbolizing their close bond during that period. However, no one anticipated that the leader of this Ethereum engineering team and the author of the Ethereum yellow paper would be one of the next to leave.

Gavin Wood chose to leave in October 2015, believing that Ethereum needed a more centralized engineering management model for greater efficiency. However, Vitalik once again said "NO." The significant divergence ultimately led Gavin to leave the team and establish his own company—Parity (Ethcore). Parity quickly became an important node operator in the Ethereum network, at one point controlling over 40% of the network nodes. Subsequently, Gavin fully promoted the development of Polkadot, which became one of Ethereum's significant competitors for a long time.

Gavin's departure directly weakened Ethereum's engineering capabilities; his leadership and technical expertise were crucial in the early development of Ethereum. With his exit, the team's efficiency issues gradually surfaced. The developers of Ethereum's Geth client were distributed globally, leading to frequent management and coordination problems, which affected development progress.

Vitalik, Jeff, Gavin, image source: Vitalik.

However, after Gavin's departure, the remaining two co-founders, Mihai Alisie and Jeffrey Wilcke, also left during this period.

Mihai Alisie was one of Vitalik's earliest partners, co-founding Bitcoin Magazine with him. He assisted Ethereum in establishing its legal framework in Switzerland and served as the foundation's vice-chairman. Mihai's departure was relatively natural; he did not have intense conflicts with the team, but the core strength of Ethereum's early construction further diminished.

Jeffrey Wilcke gradually exited after the DAO was hacked, leading to a significant ETH theft that caused Ethereum to fork. He handed over the development work and technical oversight of the Ethereum Go client Geth to his assistant Péter Szilágyi, redirecting his focus to game development and spending time with family, around March 2018.

Jeffrey Wilcke taking care of his child, image source: internet.

With the departure of these founding members, Vitalik's sense of loneliness within Ethereum grew day by day. Developers revealed that 2015 was a lonely and challenging year for Vitalik, who often spent nights in the Berlin office.

Interestingly, at the EthCC7 conference in Brussels this July, after Vitalik's speech, the three core founders of Ethereum—Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, and Gavin Wood—came together for a historic group photo, marking a dignified closure and reconciliation for the past "rupture."

The "Centralized" Era of "Vitalik"

Meanwhile, with the disintegration of the core team, Vitalik's influence and control over Ethereum became unprecedented. If you were to name an Ethereum developer other than Vitalik, 90% of ordinary community members would be unable to do so; Vitalik's authority alone could represent the entire Ethereum.

Unlike Bitcoin's "off-chain technical elite governance," Ethereum relies more on Vitalik's personal leadership. Although on the surface, Ethereum adopts "off-chain founder authority governance," where technical improvements must receive community consensus, in reality, Vitalik's charisma often facilitates the rapid passage of proposals.

For instance, after the 2016 DAO incident, the hard fork proposal led by Vitalik received 85% voting support, contrasting sharply with Bitcoin's more decentralized decision-making mechanism. Ethereum has transformed from a decentralized community into a "one-man show" company controlled by Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation.

Lane Rettig, one of the core developers at the time, openly criticized the foundation's decision-making mechanism, stating that the Ethereum Foundation often displayed excessive caution when making important decisions, fearing to favor one side or even worrying about legal liabilities. This indecisiveness led to delays in the foundation's actions on new platform improvement proposals and compensating developers, even failing to respond promptly to community needs.

"The governance of Ethereum has failed; it is essentially expert rule: a small group of technical experts has the final say on protocol updates," Lane Rettig criticized.

In this context, A Jian, a hardcore content contributor from the Ethereum Chinese community, also expressed in his article "The Hidden Worries of Ethereum | Oracle Weekly #130" that "the Ethereum Foundation has never regarded itself as a maintainer of this paradigm, nor has it ever felt that its power should be limited."

From A Jian's perspective, there are no signs that the Ethereum Foundation believes its power should be restricted; instead, they seem to wield this power arbitrarily, disregarding others involved in the Ethereum blockchain. Consequently, A Jian shifted from the Ethereum Chinese community to the Bitcoin Chinese community BTCStudy. The attitudes of Lane Rettig and A Jian represent the sentiments of many in the community.

Even ConsenSys, which had previously been extremely supportive of the Ethereum ecosystem, has spoken candidly. In the research report "Interpreting the ConsenSys Paper: Is Ethereum Becoming Increasingly Centralized?", researchers analyzed various data and indicators, concluding that the findings clearly indicate that the entire Ethereum ecosystem shows elements of concentrated control, which may be far less than the community expects.

It was also from this time that, particularly in the Chinese community, people began to resist calling Vitalik "V God," as centralization brought him down from the pedestal.

The Stumbling "Infancy" of the Foundation

Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation was still in a "baby stage," with many members being temporarily appointed.

For example, Kelley Becker and Frithjof Weinert briefly served as the chief operating officer and chief financial officer of the Ethereum Foundation, respectively, managing the foundation's daily operations and finances to ensure sufficient funding for Ethereum's development and operations. However, their tenures were short-lived, and they soon left the foundation.

By April 10, 2015, the Ethereum Foundation began to operate more smoothly, becoming an important pillar supporting technical development and governance decisions. The Ethereum Foundation initiated board elections, with the initial organizational structure centered in Switzerland and Berlin.

In mid-2015, Ming Chan, who had years of experience in IT and management consulting, was appointed as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, handling the foundation's daily operations to ensure standardized management and that technical development and community operations proceeded smoothly within legal and regulatory frameworks.

The internal structure of the foundation was further clarified. Besides Vitalik remaining as the core figure for technology and community, Lars Klawitter, Vadim Levitin, and Wayne Hennessy-Barrett also joined the foundation's board.

Lars Klawitter was responsible for integrating technology and innovation within the foundation. He was active as an entrepreneur during the internet revolution and had served as the head of innovation for Rolls-Royce. Vadim Levitin was a technical expert with extensive international experience, having worked for the United Nations, helping the Ethereum Foundation expand its influence globally. Wayne Hennessy-Barrett was another board member who brought a global perspective to the foundation, with rich operational experience in emerging markets in Africa.

With the addition of these new members, the Ethereum Foundation gradually improved its governance structure, shifting its core tasks from technical development to community coordination and resource allocation. Meanwhile, the foundation held a significant amount of ETH assets and supported the development of the Ethereum ecosystem by funding various research projects and developer teams.

Ethereum's core developers were categorized into the Ethereum Foundation's research group. On July 30, 2015, a historic moment marked the launch of the Ethereum mainnet. A highly significant photo was taken in the Berlin office, capturing some core members at that time, thus completing the second reshuffle of Ethereum.

Among those in the photo with Vitalik were Gustav Simonsson, Christian Reitwiessner, Christoph Jentsch, and several notable core developers, including:

Gustav Simonsson was an early security advisor for Ethereum, playing a crucial role in the security of the Ethereum mainnet. After leaving Ethereum, he joined Dfinity, continuing to delve into the field of decentralized computing networks.

Christian Reitwiessner was the developer of the Solidity programming language, providing the foundation for running smart contracts on Ethereum.

In the Solidity development team, Liana Husikyan was also an important member, being one of the main developers of Remix IDE. Remix is an integrated development environment for writing and deploying smart contracts, helping to simplify the development process of smart contracts.

At the same time, Christoph Jentzsch was the founder of Slock.it and one of the initiators of The DAO. Although it forked in 2016 due to security vulnerabilities, The DAO remains one of the most important experiments in blockchain history, promoting the exploration of decentralized governance models.

Additionally, there were authors of ERC 20 and ERC 725, Fabian Vogelsteller, Vlad Zamfir, who facilitated Ethereum's transition from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS), and Jutta Steiner, who was the security head of the Ethereum Foundation (later became the CEO of Parity Technologies founded by Gavin).

Phase Three: Ethereum's "Midlife Crisis" and Attempts at De-Vitalikization

The third reshuffle of Ethereum's core members began in 2018.

By this time, the crypto space had experienced the explosive growth of ICOs and the significant downturn of 94, entering a year of "regulatory liquidation" for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin's price dropped from a peak of $19,870 to around $3,000, and Binance emerged as the largest trading platform globally. It would be another two years before the "Ethereum killer" Solana, which emphasizes high performance, efficiency, and throughput, was launched.

When people talked about Ethereum, they generally mentioned two things: the upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 and that the Ethereum Foundation was selling tokens again.

The ETH supply controlled by the foundation has been continuously decreasing and selling off over the years, leading to predominantly negative sentiments among community members. However, some members of the Ethereum Foundation stated that this was one of the signs of the foundation's intentional decentralization, "EF consciously wants to weaken its influence and role, which is a good thing."

Indeed, since Aya Miyaguchi took over as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation in 2018, the foundation no longer served as the central hub for all development work as it once did, shifting more towards supporting and coordinating communication and collaboration between different projects, as well as expanding partnerships with external collaborators like ConsenSys.

After Aya Miyaguchi took office, the EF's responsibilities became clearer, mainly limited to:

1. Hosting an annual Devcon or Devconnect;
2. Maintaining an execution client Geth, but not maintaining any consensus clients;
3. Providing tens of millions of dollars in unconditional funding to the broader community each year;
4. Hosting conference calls: such as All Core Devs (ACD) led by Tim Beiko, and All Devs Consensus (ACDC) led by Alex Stokes, etc.;
5. Conducting research: this may still be one of the centralized departments, but some EF research teams may become independent;
6. Roadmap formulation: Vitalik updated the roadmap diagram, with dozens of tasks being developed in parallel by different teams;

Image source: Vitalik's tweet.

Currently, the Ethereum Foundation's publicly listed leadership members include only three: Aya Miyaguchi, Vitalik, and a board member, Patrick Storchenegger.

During this period, several new-generation core developers within the Ethereum Foundation gradually emerged, becoming key figures in Ethereum 2.0 and the entire ecosystem. Below is a list of individuals I personally consider important within Ethereum: Danny Ryan, Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, Dankrad Feist, Solidity creator Christian Rwitqiessner, and Péter Szilágyi, among others (not listed in any particular order).

Danny Ryan is a core member of the Ethereum 2.0 team, hailed by the community as the "chief engineer of Ethereum 2.0," playing a crucial role in coordinating the development process of Ethereum 2.0, especially during the launch of the beacon chain and the merge upgrade. He was the first Ethereum Foundation researcher to appear in the documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story." (Note: While writing this article, Ryan announced on September 13 that he would indefinitely withdraw from Ethereum development for personal reasons, ending his seven-year development career with Ethereum.)

Since joining the Ethereum Foundation in 2017, Justin Drake's main work has also focused on Ethereum's transition to proof of stake (PoS), playing a key role in the execution of the ETH merge. Additionally, Justin Drake is one of the main spokespersons in the community regarding Ethereum's future technical roadmap, frequently participating in podcasts and interviews to educate the public, such as the Ethereum Foundation's Reddit AMA, where he is also one of the key speakers, enjoying a solid foundation in the community.

Tim Beiko joined the Ethereum Foundation full-time in 2018 and became one of the leaders among core developers in 2021, responsible for organizing ACD conference calls, serving as an important bridge between Ethereum core developers. As a protocol engineer, his work covers the advancement of multiple Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

Dankrad Feist is an important researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on research related to statelessness and data availability. The "Danksharding" concept he proposed is part of Ethereum's sharding technology roadmap, and the expansion plan ultimately selected for the Ethereum mainnet is named after Dankrad Feist. Additionally, his research on MEV (maximum extractable value) has provided new insights into Ethereum's security, although he has had public disputes with Péter Szilágyi, the current head of Geth development, ultimately forcing Vitalik to mediate.

After stabilizing the team members, from 2018 to 2022, Ethereum's ecosystem expansion gained mainstream recognition. In 2019, DEXs like Uniswap, Compound, and SushiSwap provided lucrative yields for any DeFi users providing liquidity, leading to a rapid increase in Ethereum's TVL during DeFi Summer. The year 2021 marked the "century of the metaverse," with Facebook rebranding as Meta, paving the way for the explosion of NFTs. In 2022, the crypto space experienced a "Lehman moment," with Luna and FTX collapsing one after another, while the Solana ecosystem was hit hard, yet Ethereum successfully transitioned from PoW to PoS, and the Layer 2 sector flourished, achieving a period of glory and completing its explosive growth phase.

Ideological Crisis: EF's "Congressionalization"

However, as the moon waxes and wanes, and water overflows, everything that peaks must decline, and extremes must revert; yin and yang transform, and abundance and scarcity fluctuate.

Finally, Ethereum has entered its "midlife crisis."

This year marks the second anniversary of the transition to PoS, and the price of ETH has stagnated. Although the price once briefly surpassed $4,000, its performance in this market cycle has been poor compared to BTC and SOL. The decline of ETH against BTC is approximately 48.70%, and against SOL, it is about 63.55%.

The most obvious sign is that after Bitcoin reached new highs this year, Ethereum still hovers around the $2,300-$3,000 price range. As the 34th largest asset globally, Ethereum's "car" is too heavy, and its "field" is too scattered. At this scale, Ethereum's growth is very challenging, almost struggling against "gravity."

Another rule in finance is that when an asset's scale reaches $300 billion or $500 billion, it faces a "growth bottleneck." Ethereum is currently at this "bottleneck" stage, facing not only a price "bottleneck" but also a crisis of ideological change.

"Preventing Ethereum from stagnating" and "the ideological changes within the Ethereum Foundation" have also become common topics of discussion among foundation members.

Continuing from the earlier topic of Dankrad Feist, the controversy he sparked was not just with Péter Szilágyi over the MEV issue; it also escalated to questions of neutrality among Ethereum Foundation members.

On May 21, Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist disclosed that they had previously become advisors to EigenLayer and would receive EIGEN tokens as compensation, "potentially exceeding their existing total wealth."

Although both researchers claimed they were participating in their personal capacities and would be "ready to end" their advisory roles if EigenLayer acted against Ethereum's interests, it was evident that the community was not convinced. In the face of potential income "possibly exceeding their existing total wealth," it is difficult for an individual to guarantee that they regard money as worthless.

Clearly, during this reshuffle period, the Ethereum Foundation resembled Ethereum's "Congress," where the EIPs written by researchers could directly alter Ethereum's direction and landscape, impacting billions of dollars in the ecosystem. As the number and scale of ecosystem participants continue to grow, EIPs involve an increasing number of interests. Each participant hopes to receive "special treatment" in upgrades, like L2, but it is impossible for all parties to align their interests with Ethereum's, leading EF researchers to become "members" that capital must court.

This explains why EigenLayer is willing to spend heavily to hire Ethereum Foundation members, as they are effectively buying a lobbyist within the EF.

For projects, to secure their ecological legitimacy, they must strive to maintain good relations with the EF in various ways. Having someone close to the EF makes it much easier to operate both on and off the stage. For VCs, maintaining good relations with the EF provides a convenient channel for early access to quality investment targets. Projects recommended by EF researchers are not only easier to secure shares but also provide an extra layer of insurance regarding legitimacy.

Whether they like it or not, EF researchers are inevitably surrounded by various capital hunting for opportunities, either offering advisory positions or directly sponsoring the researchers' personal studies, and the researchers themselves seem not to mind this. Against the backdrop of increasingly evident modular trends like EigenDA and Celestia, this situation may manifest in even faster and more obvious ways, with more teams establishing their own lobbying teams within the EF, while the EF itself will undergo ideological changes due to the disentanglement of various interests, moving towards "Congressionalization."

Ethereum Without Vitalik

As the Ethereum Foundation moves towards "Congressionalization," there are also signs of de-Vitalikization.

In the recollections of Vitalik's father, when Ethereum was first established, Vitalik did not aspire to be a leader; his thoughts were more along the lines of, "Hey, I came up with a cool idea; let me write it down, and maybe some smart and influential people will do something."

However, then things changed; many people joined the project, telling Vitalik, "You should be the one to push this project forward." Thus, people pushed him into a leadership position, but this was not a natural progression for him; it was outside his comfort zone and remains one of his greatest challenges.

"Vitalik almost perfectly satisfied our society's deepened image of tech founders, the youthful admiration, and the obsession with a certain innocence combined with immense power," as Nathan Schneider, an economics professor who has interviewed Vitalik multiple times, stated.

But in 2024, Vitalik will be 30 years old.

While in Montenegro for Zuzalu, he saw people ten years younger than him taking on leadership roles in various projects, either as organizers or developers; at a hacker gathering in Korea with about 30 people, he was the oldest person in the room for the first time.

Vitalik fulfilled the imaginations of many programmers about their ideal selves—young and legendary. Vitalik is a symbol; no longer young, he is no longer suited to play such a role, and he is aware of this.

Ten years ago, he thought about doing something cool, and many praised him as one of those world-changing, brilliant, young prodigies like Zuckerberg. Now, after experiencing the changes of the crypto era, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the struggles of survival and death, Vitalik has gained new insights: "I am now playing a completely different role; it is time for the next generation to take over what once belonged to me."

"I am curious if Ethereum could survive without Vitalik's leadership?" Nine months ago, a related discussion post on Ethereum's Reddit sparked much debate: "In recent years, Vitalik has not led Ethereum as people imagined," and "I even heard that Vitalik is not even the best person to explain Ethereum's roadmap."

Marcocastignoli, who works at the Ethereum Foundation, also expressed his personal view: "Although I am not one of them, I clearly know that Vitalik is just one member of the EF research team; the research team is composed of a group of very smart minds, and Vitalik is just average among them."

The previously mentioned new core members (Danny Ryan, Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, Dankrad Feist, Christian, and Péter Szilágyi) are gradually emerging as core developers within the Ethereum community.

Moreover, according to statistics from Electric Capital, there are currently as many as 99 active core developers in Ethereum, a figure far ahead of other blockchain projects like Bitcoin, Cardano, EOS, or Tron. Looking at a broader scope, the Ethereum network now has over 250,000 developers and researchers, making it one of the most decentralized blockchain development communities.

When the young Vitalik was abandoned by Blizzard, he could create a new world with his technology, as if everything was created by technology. After experiencing several rounds of major reshuffles among Ethereum team members, he finally found himself powerless. Vitalik's self began to be deconstructed from this point.

As he concluded his reflections on turning 30: communities, ideologies, "scenes," nations, or very small companies, families, or relationships—are all created by people.

Not by technology. Moreover, Vitalik is no longer the youngest, smartest, or even the most representative technical researcher of the roadmap within Ethereum. Vitalik's role will continue to diminish, and one day, Ethereum will become Ethereum without Vitalik.

Perhaps it is time to imagine an Ethereum without Vitalik.