The Ethereum Foundation said it is preparing an update on how it plans to address ethical concerns after two members of the core development team played roles in the staking protocol and were rewarded with valuable tokens.
“We are aware of the ongoing discussions regarding potential conflicts of interest and share the community's concerns,” Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi tweeted on Friday.
“It's clear that relying on culture and individual judgement is not enough and we have been working for some time on formal policies to address this issue,” she added.
The Ethereum Foundation is the nonprofit organization responsible for funding and guiding Ethereum's early development and still wields considerable influence over the protocol's direction today. In addition to Miyaguchi, the foundation's board of directors also includes Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Buterin was questioned last week by popular crypto trader Jordan Fish about the financial ties of the foundation's core developers to other projects being built within the Ethereum ecosystem. Fish specifically pointed out the ties to EigenLayer, a protocol that restakes Ether to secure Ethereum's Layer 2 blockchain, which currently has a TVL of $18.1 billion, according to DeFiLlama.
A few days later, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake confirmed that he had formed a multi-million dollar advisory relationship with Eigenlayer and received “significant EIGEN token incentives” in return, amounting to millions of dollars, roughly half of his net worth.
Research Fellow Dankrad Feist also confirmed a similar relationship.
Online critics worry that accepting funds from EigenLayer could influence his expert analysis of the risks of restaking, which he tends to be cautious about, or affect his work on the core Ethereum protocol.
“[The Ethereum Foundation] They are some of the most honest people I know. [members] “Formally associating themselves with EigenLayer would undermine their moral values,” Drake argued last week, saying that to his knowledge, three out of 300 people at the Ethereum Foundation are formally involved with EigenLayer.
Feist also stated that his token allocation “does not change or affect my position on how the core protocol should be developed.”
In an interview DecryptionEthereum co-founder and ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin said in a statement that the move “will not restrict the Ethereum Foundation or anyone in the ecosystem from supporting more projects.”
Lubin noted that his company, a leading provider of Ethereum wallet infrastructure, has seen many members move to other ecosystem projects to reap financial rewards. ConsenSys said it has no problem with such relationships as long as they are disclosed and there are no conflicts of interest regarding ConsenSys-related decisions. Decryption.
“There will be plenty of opportunities to build good and great things, or to corrupt things,” he noted. “We need to be vigilant.”
Editor: Ryan Ozawa.
