Prominent Ethereum Dev Proposes $1 Billion ETH Organization With Leader Who ‘Wants to Fight’

Amid a cascade of resignations and mounting criticism of its long-term vision, the Ethereum Foundation was hit with a stinging rebuke Thursday from one of its most prominent former members.

Dankrad Feist, who until last year was one of the Ethereum Foundation’s top researchers, today proposed creating a new organization to “save Ethereum” instead.

The organization would need at least $1 billion in funding, Feist said, coming from “a significant amount” of revenue from ETH staking fees.

“The EF now owns less than 0.1% of all ETH,” Feist said. “There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenue towards it.”

He added that the new organization needs a board of people “who want ETH to go up” and “a leader who is competent and wants to fight.”

In recent months, Ethereum co-founder Vitalk Buterin has struggled to satisfy community members who worry that the Ethereum Foundation is more concerned with idealism and arcane technological improvements than with economics and marketing.

Declutter reached out to Feist about the post, including asking for clarification on whether he was referring to a specific leader, and will update if we receive a response.

Despite its longstanding position as crypto’s second most valuable asset after Bitcoin, ETH has struggled to post significant price gains in recent years, and has yet to break above $5,000. It came close last summer, but has since fallen nearly 57% to over $2,100.

Last year, Buterin recognized the organization had to implement ‘major changes’. But then the Ethereum Foundation released a long-awaited new release mandate in March, the document not only contained vague sexual language and images, including allusions to the controversial Madam NFT collection, but also repeatedly highlighted the organization’s lack of desire to become too fixated on increasing the price of ETH.

“Our bottom line is not profit, nor organizational growth, nor blind adoption at all costs,” the document reads.

“We are NOT a marketing agency… We are NOT a casino… We are NOT opportunists,” another section read.

Since the mandate went live, several members from the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation to have resigned–including two this week, fueling further doubts about the current organization’s ability to lead the Ethereum ecosystem.

However, none of these developers directly referenced Buterin’s vision for Ethereum or the Ethereum Foundation’s new mandate. Feist’s statements today are the bluntest statements made to the organization by someone who until recently was a major driving force behind its work.

Last fall, Feist left the Ethereum Foundation to Building pacea private blockchain in development by payment giant Stripe. One crypto commentator compared the career change at the time was the idea of ​​environmental activist Greta Thunberg who accepted a job at oil giant British Petroleum.