The Lament of the Ethereum "Leftists"

Author: Jaleel Jia Liu, BlockBeats

Vitalik feels bad.

When he hears people on crypto Twitter and venture capital firms telling him that a PVP KOL gambling casino that causes over 99% of users to lose money is the best market fit the crypto industry can achieve, and that wanting something better is seen as "condescending and elitist," Vitalik feels bad.

When those who know nothing about the internal workings of the Ethereum Foundation tell him who should be kicked out of the organization and who should be let in, and expect him to make all these adjustments within two weeks, Vitalik feels bad.

For all Ethereum teams and the community, 2024 is a tough year. The community's dissatisfaction has fallen into a cyclical rage loop, erupting from time to time, and the memes mocking the ETH price have been updated wave after wave.

Besides 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 transitioning from executive director to chair of the foundation, and today that idea has come to fruition, with Vitalik officially announcing Aya's promotion to chair of the Ethereum Foundation. This has left the Ethereum community very dissatisfied.

The Controversial New Chair of the Ethereum Foundation

In fact, over the past year, Aya has faced much criticism from the Ethereum community, being a controversial figure in both the Chinese and English-speaking Ethereum communities.

In the past year, Solana, Ethereum's biggest competitor, has risen from the dead. Besides founder Toly's efforts to promote various "Solana casino culture memes," the work of Solana Foundation chair Lily Liu has also gained community recognition, such as proposing the PayFi concept of "using on-chain staking to pay for off-chain real transactions," hosting many high-quality hackathons, and investing in several quality projects within the Solana ecosystem.

In the eyes of many in the Ethereum community, Aya's seven years as executive director of the Ethereum Foundation have yielded almost no "results."

"Being hired for a job you are unqualified for for seven years, receiving pay without doing any work," is the sentiment most deeply felt by traders and KOLs in the English community, led by CoinMamba.

They even attempted to pressure Aya to leave through public opinion: making statements like "The day Aya leaves is Ethereum's liberation day," "ETH will hit a new high within two weeks of Aya's departure," and "If we keep the pressure on, she will resign." Some even directed irrational insults and death threats at her.

If everyone remembers the time around the New Year when Vitalik was emotionally vulnerable on Twitter, such as his abstract references to Milady and even contemplating leaving Ethereum, it was during that time that Vitalik faced immense public pressure from the community.

Faced with the momentum of CoinMamba and others calling for "Aya's dismissal," Vitalik seemed somewhat overwhelmed, tweeting seven or eight times, stating, "Only I, Milady, can decide who leads the Ethereum Foundation!" "I hope everyone can be a bit kinder, Milady!" "Those who speak abusive words are demons, Milady!" "Milady!"

Aya's Seven Years: Did She Do Nothing?

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Ethereum's ICO, and Aya has served as executive director of the Ethereum Foundation for seven years.

Before Aya, the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation was also an Asian, named Ming Chan, who had years of experience in IT and management consulting. From 2015 to 2018, she handled the daily operations of the foundation, ensuring its management was standardized and that technical development and community operations proceeded smoothly within legal and regulatory frameworks.

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

"To say that Aya has done nothing during her tenure is somewhat subjective," Lida, a protocol researcher in the Ethereum ecosystem, told Rhythm BlockBeats. "The most concrete work she can be credited with is the annual ETH Devcon or Devconnect conferences, which are all thanks to Aya's efforts. Moreover, it is evident that ETH events have spread to various parts of the world, providing unconditional funding for community activities globally."

In addition, the foundation's responsibilities include maintaining an execution client (Geth), hosting various conference calls (such as All Core Devs led by Tim Beiko, All Devs Consensus led by Alex Stokes, etc.), conducting various Ethereum technical research, and roadmap formulation.

"However, under the adjustments in recent years, the Ethereum research team has essentially become an independent department within the foundation, formulating roadmaps with dozens of tasks being developed in parallel by different teams, and conducting Reddit AMAs twice a year," Lida said.

In the latest reshuffle of Ethereum Foundation members, a significant reorganization of the research team can also be seen, with that part divided into five categories of research groups, and Stokes and Barnabe jointly serving as co-leads of the Ethereum Foundation research team.

"That said, aside from Aya's lack of visible achievements, a major criticism against her is her limited management experience," Lida noted. Unlike Ming Chan's background in IT and management, Aya was a high school teacher in Japan, working in the education sector for over a decade.

Realizing the significant impact her work in education had on children's futures, Aya developed a sense of "impostor syndrome."

"To convey what we as humans need to communicate, rather than simply teaching a subject according to a manual, doesn't one need to learn first? So, I was stuck for a long time. Therefore, I decided to resign." This is how Aya explained her departure from the education sector in an interview.

After leaving the education sector, Aya enrolled in a graduate program at a business school in the U.S., studying microfinance, but she was not interested in making money itself. "I needed a job to stay in the U.S. long-term, and it was hard to find one 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 with Jesse Powell, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, and I felt that blockchain could connect with the financial inclusion and microfinance I was researching. At that time, the founder asked me if I would like 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.

That was in 2013, when Vitalik was still a writer for Bitcoin Magazine, and during interviews with various individuals, he would take the opportunity to share his thoughts, such as areas where Bitcoin needed improvement, which laid the groundwork for Ethereum.

"It is said that the founding members of Kraken wanted to support such new technologies and talents and greatly admired Vitalik. Therefore, when Vitalik was writing the Ethereum white paper, he spent some time in Kraken's office, and even the founder of Kraken let Vitalik stay in one of his spare rooms."

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

Ethereum is Primarily a Cultural Group

Recently, while chatting with a friend, he proposed a viewpoint: "All team members are essentially extensions of the founder's values; even if the power distribution in web3 becomes more decentralized, this will not change."

He makes a valid point. Stokes, who was just appointed as one of the co-leads of the Ethereum Foundation research team, pinned a statement he wrote in 2022 on his Twitter: "Ethereum is primarily a cultural project; we just happen to leverage software to exert its influence."

Even under immense public pressure from the community, Aya, who not only was not dismissed by Vitalik but was instead given a larger title, is a steadfast guardian of Ethereum's culture, positioning Ethereum as an "infinite garden": "Ethereum's mission is not to quickly gain short-term profits but to promote the dissemination and development of decentralization concepts in the long run."

This is all an extension of Vitalik's values.

So when the community speaks harshly against Aya, Vitalik feels overwhelmed because it is not just Aya being criticized, but himself as well.

In the early prelude to Ethereum, when Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first ten developers who responded to his invitation to join and selected five of them to form the leadership, which became the five founders of Ethereum. After these five founders, three more developers became co-founders in 2014.

At that time, there was no Ethereum Foundation, only eight core leaders. It wasn't until 2014 that internal relations within Ethereum became tense, with debates arising over whether to use venture capital funds or crowdsource funds from ordinary people; whether to pursue a profit-oriented route and become the Google of crypto or to remain a purely non-profit organization. The future direction of the Ethereum Foundation became a recurring topic of debate, leading to factionalism.

Reflecting on this memory, Vitalik said, "I was once persuaded to lean towards a more corporate route for Ethereum. But this never made me feel comfortable; in fact, it made me feel a bit dirty."

After the final co-founders' meeting, Vitalik ultimately chose the path of decentralization and non-profit. "Throughout the process, I was trying to shirk responsibility because I really didn't want to take on that burden, and in the end, I had to clear out some people."

Ultimately, aside from Vitalik, the other co-founders left Ethereum, leading to the establishment of the Ethereum Foundation.

The Lament of Ethereum's "Leftist People"

Some say that the original sin lies in the unsatisfactory price trend of ETH.

"But I believe the original sin lies in the increasingly right-leaning crypto industry, while Ethereum insists on going left." In Lida's view, Ethereum's values have not changed since then; what has changed is the industry. From the U.S. political landscape to the entire crypto industry, people no longer discuss ideals but instead support PVP casinos, making Ethereum appear very out of place.

From the beginning, Ethereum's founders and team have adhered to an ideal: decentralization, de-financialization, and the pursuit of social value realization. In a market filled with bubbles and speculation, this ideal stands out starkly.

"Aya's criticism this time is actually a long-standing emotional outlet for the community; to some extent, she serves as a scapegoat. After all, over the past year, the Ethereum Foundation's continuous selling of tokens has left the community feeling very unhappy," Lida said.

When community sentiment was not good, Vitalik continued to emphasize a "leftist wind" of peace and love, which further angered the community and even drew dissatisfaction from early Ethereum developer Eric: "Hearing someone use phrases like 'don't be too harsh' to ignore the community's demands is truly exhausting. 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 yielding to the ever-changing market. Often, leaders should take a long-term perspective and listen to the voices from the community.

"Ultimately, I lost my passion for something I was once so enthusiastic about because those in charge did not recognize the importance of the community and the need for change, but were more willing to focus on our proposed 'goodwill' and who was hurt, rather than understanding a large community."

The values among early Ethereum members have also been constantly colliding and reflecting. It all seems to have returned to the split in the Ethereum community in 2014. Faced with the industry's rightward trend, more and more voices are calling for Ethereum to also take a "capitalization route."

This has also been a hot topic of discussion recently, with many saying that Ethereum's revenue at the protocol level is too low. "If I could take over the Ethereum Foundation, ETH would rise to $10,000. The first thing I would do after taking over is optimize revenue," Sun Yuchen's viewpoint has gained recognition from most of the Chinese community.

Arbitrum is charging a 10% fee for its own L3, while as an L2, it only gives Ethereum a 2% "tax," which has raised doubts among many investors and ecosystem developers, as this ratio is indeed too low.

So what would be a reasonable tax rate? To this question, Rhythm BlockBeats once again inquired about Sun Yuchen's opinion.

"I personally suggest that the annual dollar tax for Base and Polygon should not be less than $200 million." In Sun Yuchen's view, although the prosperity of the L2 ecosystem will directly enhance Ethereum's value, Ethereum is currently indeed over-subsidizing L2. A 2% tax may be too low, but if raised to 8%, it could provide Ethereum with more stable revenue, increasing income by at least over $1 billion annually, without stifling Layer 2 development.

"If Layer 2 is in its early development stage, some subsidies can be provided. However, for already established large L2s like Base and Polygon, I recommend imposing heavy taxes. This is also common at the national level, where ordinary people are tax-exempt or taxed at 10%, but super-rich individuals need to pay higher tax rates of 20-30%," Sun Yuchen further analyzed.

In addition to increasing efficiency, costs also need to be reduced.

For example, AAVE founder Stani has also proposed his suggestions in this regard: "As an organization, the Ethereum Foundation should be a streamlined and efficient organization. Anyone who does not put in 100% effort should leave the foundation."

However, there is a huge gap between the left and right, and change will not come quickly. Everything takes time, and the Ethereum Foundation's reforms are ongoing, including a series of financial and administrative reforms, introducing more standardized measures.

"As for the topic everyone is most concerned about, changes in price levels will definitely have a lag, so just wait," Lida said.