Horse racing, infighting, layoffs peek at the power struggle in the core circle of Ethereum

Author: shu

In the crypto world built by the decentralized concept, the Ethereum Foundation is regarded as the guardian of technology and value neutrality, but a recent split storm triggered by core developer Péter Szilágyi broke this appearance of trust.

Disbanding the Geth team, EF is trapped in internal strife

Geth (Go Ethereum) is the most commonly used execution client for the Ethereum network. About 41% of nodes rely on it, and the stability and decentralization of the network depend heavily on its development quality. Recently, Ethereum core developer and Geth client developer Péter Szilágyi mentioned in a review that many years ago he proposed to issue small subsidies to authors of Geth's key dependency components (such as go-leveldb) to motivate them to continue maintaining relevant code. At that time, he hoped to provide $10,000 in funding, but was told that he could only allocate $500. If he exceeded this amount, he had to sign a contract and deliver the results.

However, according to Szilágyi, at the same time, the Ethereum Foundation was able to provide Parity with $5 million in funding without additional conditions, citing "Ethereum needs a second client because Geth is unreliable." This became an unavoidable imbalance in Szilágyi's mind: the Geth team has to rely on saving money and easy access to large subsidies for the same key infrastructure of the agreement.

Over time, this imbalance gradually evolved into a crisis of trust. Szilágyi revealed that the foundation has formed a new Geth team within Nethermind and made it clear that this is a "completely independent, unintentional cooperation" fork. More importantly, Geth's original team was not informed in advance, but Szilágyi only learned about it after discovering it himself.

Faced with Szilágyi's successive accusations, Tomasz K. Stańczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, publicly responded: "There is no plan to remove Geth at the moment. It is an excellent client software and is also contributed by a great team to the security of the protocol. We will continue to maintain and support Geth and strive to make it better and faster."


Tomasz is also the leader of Nethermind. Nethermind is now the most important infrastructure in the Ethereum ecosystem, ranking among the five major execution clients along with Geth, Besu and Erigon.


But this statement is obviously very different from Szilágyi's disclosure. Szilágyi even publicly challenged the EF leadership to "Dare you deny it?" and named several foundation executives who had privately proposed the idea of ​​letting the Geth team become independent and break away from EF, but were rejected by the team three times.

Szilágyi said Tomasz has looked for most developers who are still in Geth in recent weeks and told them that they can start interviewing other companies because he felt their salary was too high and asked them how many people would leave if they cut their salary half. "Come on, deny it! Do you remember that vacation I took? Yes, that happened after my one-on-one conversation with @0xstark, and the secret I discovered was the second Geth team I was fired from the foundation within 24 hours."


"I dare let you all Ethereum Foundation come forward and say: You didn't offer $5 million to split us out? Or, the foundation didn't ask at least three times if we wanted to set up a company and go out on its own, and I, Felix and @mhswende refused? I dared to let @hwwonx deny that conversation in February."

Banteg, who is also a developer, asked Szilágyi why he didn't accept the proposal and did it alone for the $5 million split. Szilágyi responded that, as developers, “we are not good at running a company at all, we don’t have the corresponding infrastructure or team support, and the whole thing will only fail in the end.”

According to Szilágyi, the intensity of the situation is far more than the differences in team management or resource allocation, but is directly exposed to the foundation of the power operation and trust system within the Ethereum ecosystem.

As a key module to maintain the normal operation of the Ethereum network, Geth deserves continuous and stable support, but the reality is exactly the opposite: it neither gains the resource tilt that matches its importance nor enjoys the long-term trust from the foundation. For Szilágyi, this institutional cold acceptance gradually eroded his initial confidence in the cause - a decentralized experiment that once excited and devoted himself to, is now gradually becoming disheartening.

From passion to disappointment and complaining, Péter Szilágyi's Ethereum

Journey

Péter Szilágyi is a core member of the Ethereum Foundation and the development leader of Ethereum’s most important execution client, Geth. If he had not resigned from the Ethereum Foundation, this year should be his tenth year of working in Ethereum, and that was his first job after graduation.

In 2015, Szilágyi accepted a "trial task" proposed by Ethereum core developer Jeff Wilcke: "This is a mess, come and repair it. If you have any questions, please ask me." In this way, he began to participate in Geth's development work.

Szilágyi's university major is computers, his research background is distributed systems, and he is particularly enthusiastic about network direction. During his master's degree, he focused on building a distributed hosting platform. Due to dissatisfaction with the inefficiency and fragility of manual configuration, he was determined to develop a computing system that could operate self-organized without manual intervention. "After graduation, I didn't have to be a blockchain, but I looked everywhere for work that would allow me to run the computer itself, and then I met Ethereum." Szilágyi described his encounter with Ethereum in this way.


In 2021, Geth team took a photo, with Szilágyi on the right

In an interview with Bankless, Szilágyi said that most of his last years of working on the Geth team were tinkering. His motivation in his early years was "creation, release, and tossing", but the driving force has almost faded. Slowly it turned into a sense of responsibility: he realized that he was maintaining an extremely valuable network, and he was one of the few who really understood it and could maintain it. "This kind of work is really not that fun, but it is fulfilling and you get a sense of satisfaction from it."


In an interview in 2023, when asked what the relationship with Geth was like, Szilágyi replied, "There have been ups and downs over the years, and there have been times when they are very frustrated and want to fall down the table and leave. The worst possible thing is that during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was really difficult. But now I still enjoy this job."

However, just one year later, Szilágyi became an "outsider" in the Ethereum community.

In fact, this is not the first time that Szilágyi has bombarded certain issues in the Ethereum community. In July last year, he criticized Ethereum for going on a wrong path. The research team completely accepted all the idea of ​​centralization, as long as it can be verified. On the surface, it is decentralized verification, but in essence it is centralized control. His strong wording has attracted widespread attention from the Ethereum community and has also triggered fierce debates about the core principles of the Ethereum network.


A month later, Szilágyi posted a complaint about the crypto industry, doubting whether he chose the wrong industry. He said, "For example, SpaceX, they sent rockets to Mars? Humans have made progress. They failed to launch rockets and blow them up? Humans have learned lessons and are still improving. All results have brought progress.

In contrast, the crypto industry is simply a casino for fools (apologize to a few exceptions). The price has risen? Great, when to buy a sports car. The price has fallen? Life is destroyed. What contributions have been made to mankind?

In my opinion, the industry should have started to create something that is really useful and that people are willing to use, otherwise it should be closed. At least Bitcoin is trying (although failed) to become a safe haven asset. But the others are selling shovels, and there is no sign of a gold rush at all. "

Now it seems that at that time, Szilágyi might have encountered some unhappy things within the Ethereum Foundation.

Szilágyi seems to be not very good at dealing with Tomasz, the director of the Ethereum Foundation. Nethermind, together with Besu, stopped storing historical data on Ethereum. This decision sparked public criticism from Szilágyi, who believed that it was irresponsible behavior and could mislead users. This is also one of the fuses for 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."

On November 16, 2024, Szilágyi announced that he would temporarily leave the Geth team due to "leave", however, as mentioned earlier, Szilágyi's "leave" was fired due to the discovery that the Ethereum Foundation secretly funded a second Geth development team within Nethermind. He was fired by the foundation for "threatening resignation and undermining team morale" within 24 hours after a one-on-one meeting with foundation member Josh Stark.

The process of reducing expenses is not decent

This open split essentially touches on the dilemma of Ethereum's current governance structure. On the one hand, the foundation emphasizes that "multi- client consensus" is crucial to protocol security and emphasizes that Geth cannot be the dominant one; on the other hand, Geth has been responsible for the main responsibility of agreement execution for many years, and its infrastructure quality and team experience are difficult to be easily replaced.

In February this year, Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, announced that he would transfer to the newly established "chairman", a change that brought the end of the community's months of dissatisfaction with the foundation's leadership and direction.

In June, the Ethereum Foundation announced the abolition of some R&D personnel and reorganized the original research team into a new department called "Protocol", concentrating resources to tackle three major technical directions: L1 expansion, blob expansion, and UX improvement. The official positioned this move as an optimization of resource allocation. On the one hand, it abolished some R&D personnel, especially those teams that have been staying in the theoretical stage for a long time; on the other hand, it introduced a stricter accountability mechanism, requiring the rapid transformation of research results into actual output.

It can be said that the Ethereum Foundation has been committed to transforming its entire team since it was ridiculed by the public in the second half of last year, but reform is inevitably subject to pain. According to the new policy, EF will use the "Operational Expenditure Ratio × Buffer Year" model to determine the allocation ratio of fiat currency to ETH and maintain annual expenditure at a high of 15%. The foundation pointed out that 2025-2026 will be a key stage of the ecosystem, and resources need to be concentrated to promote the implementation of the protocol layer technology, including L1 expansion, blob technology and UX optimization.

EF said that 2025–2026 will be a key window to promote the implementation of the agreement, with an expected 15% annual expenditure and a 2.5-year fiat currency buffer period. This means that the foundation needs to convert about 37.5% of the vault into fiat currency to support medium- and short-term investment.

Nowadays, the policy level is constantly favorable, which is a good thing for the application level on Ethereum. But when it comes to governance, we may need to give the Ethereum Foundation some time to adapt to the new stage.