Can the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation save ETH?

Author: Jaleel Gallior, BlockBeats

This is the foundation's largest personnel change in the past five or six years, and it happened during the cycle of ETH's lowest price.

The Ethereum Foundation welcomes a new appointment after Aya Miyaguchi's promotion to chairman of the Ethereum Foundation caused dissatisfaction among some community members. On March 1, the Ethereum Foundation announced two new co-executive directors to replace Aya’s original positions - Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak .

Compared with Aya, the two new executive directors have extremely deep technical backgrounds, and BlockBeats will introduce the information of the two in this article in detail.

Hsiao-Wei Wang

At a critical moment when the Ethereum Foundation ushered in a major leadership adjustment, Hsiao-Wei Wang officially became one of the foundation's co-executive directors with his deep technical background and outstanding community influence. This blockchain pioneer from Taiwan, China, has been focusing on core Ethereum research for 7 years and has made important contributions to Sharding and Beacon Chain.

Hsiao-Wei Wang was a back-end engineer at the beginning. In 2016, he was attracted by this world full of decentralized ideals because of accidental contact with blockchain. He resolutely decided to join in it. At that time, Ethereum founder Vitalik was looking for contributors who were interested in Ethereum research. Hsiao-Wei took the initiative to apply without any hesitation, and finally successfully joined the Ethereum team and became one of the core developers.

From that moment on, she devoted herself to the research of Ethereum’s technology, and the most representative contribution was the development of sharding technology. Sharding technology is a key upgrade to solve the scalability problem of Ethereum, significantly improving network throughput and making Ethereum more efficient and smooth when handling large amounts of transactions.

In addition to sharding technology, she has also been deeply involved in the research and development of Casper, Beacon Chain and Sharding P2P networks to ensure the technical robustness of these core infrastructures. In addition, she has long been responsible for the review and proof of concept (PoC) development of the Ethereum protocol, laying a solid technical foundation for the advancement of Ethereum 2.0 (i.e. Eth2).

Despite years of hard work in the field of technology, Hsiao-Wei has not limited itself to the code world, but has actively devoted itself to community construction. She often participates in and organizes various technical conferences on behalf of the Ethereum Foundation, especially in Taiwan. She has planned and promoted many high-quality Ethereum technology exchange activities, successfully building a bridge between local developers and the global Ethereum ecosystem.

For example, at the 2018 Ethereum Sharding Workshop Taipei, as an organizer, she also occupies a core position in the technical discussion session and discusses the future development direction of Ethereum with global developers. Her contribution not only enhanced the global influence of Taiwan’s Ethereum community, but also gave more developers the opportunity to gain insight into the cutting-edge technologies of Ethereum.

2018 Taipei Ethereum Fragment Seminar Hsiao-Wei Wang ranks C position

If you want to use a few words to describe yourself, Hsiao-Wei chose "unexpected courage, sincerity, and bear". This may sound special, but it aptly reflects her personality: to move forward bravely in technological exploration, treat people sincerely in community communication, while also having a little lovely stubbornness and tenacity. Whether it’s breaking technical bottlenecks in code or promoting collaboration in the community, she has shown this trait.

Today, as co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Hsiao-Wei will not only continue to deepen its technology, but also seem to be taking on more management and coordination responsibilities.

Tomasz Stańczak

Let’s look at Tomasz Stańczak, another co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. As the founder of Nethermind, he is not only one of the core developers of Ethereum, but also conducts in-depth research in key areas such as MEV (maximum extractable value) and PBS (proposer-builder separation). Now, he stands at a critical node in the development of Ethereum and shoulders the important task of promoting the continuous growth of the entire ecosystem.

Before entering the blockchain field, Tomasz was an engineer in the financial markets with extensive technical experience. In 2017, he officially joined the Ethereum development team as core development, was an early member of the FlashBots team and a member of the Starknet Foundation's board of directors.

He later founded Nethermind, one of Ethereum’s most important execution clients today. Nethermind was initially just an experimental project, but under Tomasz, it quickly grew into one of the most important infrastructures in the Ethereum ecosystem, ranking alongside Geth, Besu, and Erigon as one of the five major execution clients.

With its strong execution ability, Tomasz built Nethermind from a small team to a world-renowned blockchain development organization. He not only established a complete talent training and recruitment system, but also promoted Nethermind to carry out in-depth cooperation in many fields such as Ethereum infrastructure, re-staking (EigenLayer) and StarkNet, making it a key role in promoting the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Compared with Geth's historical accumulation, Nethermind has attracted more and more developers and institutional users with its efficient code architecture, flexible customization and strong enterprise-level support.

As a technological innovator, Tomasz's work has also sparked controversy. For example, Nethermind, together with Besu, stopped storing historical data from Ethereum, a decision that sparked public criticism from Geth core developer Péter Szilágyi, who believed it was irresponsible behavior and could mislead users.

This is also one of the fuses for Péter Szilágyi's exit from Ethereum. "Since even core developers are maximizing their interests relative to other developers, why do you have to work hard to make it better? I'm deeply disappointed with everyone involved."

Currently, Tomasz is gradually withdrawing from the role of CEO of Nethermind, but will remain engaged. His new mission at the foundation is to ensure that Ethereum continues to adhere to its core values: open source, global license-free collaboration, privacy and security.

This will be one of the most important moments in Ethereum's history

"The past few months have been turbulent. Although many changes are needed to win, if you can grasp it properly, it will be one of the most important moments in Ethereum's history."

He particularly gave Tomasz Stańczak a high opinion, saying he was the only one who could join the Ethereum Foundation from the outside and immediately promote change. Tomasz has built Nethermind from scratch, developed it into one of the most successful independent organizations in the Ethereum ecosystem, and has always been active around the world, and has in-depth communication with developers, researchers and users with practical actions. His joining will bring stronger execution and technological implementation capabilities to the Ethereum Foundation.

At the same time, Hsiao-Wei Wang is also an indispensable part of the development of Ethereum. Not only is she one of the few developers who have been deeply involved in the early stages of the transition from Ethereum to "Eth2", she also drew the first chart showing how sharding works. Not only did she understand how Ethereum research evolved into standardized specifications and eventually landed in production environments, she also had a unique perspective of long-term core members of the foundation. Her joining forms a perfect complement to Tomasz in terms of technology and strategy.

Tim Beiko also emphasized that Ethereum’s culture is unique, with both top-down strategic decisions and bottom-up technology-driven. Now, after Aya Miyaguchi served as the foundation’s chairman and established a formal and informal consulting network, the governance structure of the Ethereum Foundation is gradually improving. Although Aya is still a controversial figure, Ethereum must continue to be attractive to new forces while adhering to OG values.

The ultimate impact of this foundation's personnel adjustment may take time to fully manifest. But it’s a good reform start, and Vitalik is also trying to listen to the community.