The Ethereum Foundation refuses to disclose the weight of V-God's voting! Governance transparency is questioned by the community and centralizes

But Laura Shin, the author and historian of the book The Cryptopians, a book that studies blockchain history, has long been unable to write the answer to this basic question in the book: How much voting rights does Vitalik Buterin have in the decision-making power of the Ethereum Foundation? In Protos' report, the answers tried to obtain may disappoint the community.

The Ethereum Foundation avoids answering?

Although Ms. Shin has made more than ten attempts in recent years, including recent inquiries, the Ethereum Foundation has never disclosed the specific allocation of voting rights for its core meeting "council". This continuous "radio silence" has made the community more confused and uneasy in the recent "fud" atmosphere. Interestingly, no matter how many times you ask this question, the response you get is silent.

As the core support organization of the Ethereum ecosystem, the Ethereum Foundation has its governance structure claimed to be decentralized and transparent, and is composed of communities. Therefore, it has attracted many open source engineers and crypto-natives to support it. Therefore, understanding that maintaining community trust and decentralized spirit is the crucial key to Ethereum. The size of the founder's influence within the organization, especially his weight in the formal decision-making mechanism, is one of the key indicators to evaluate the degree of project decentralization. The Ethereum Foundation is so secretive about this issue, which naturally triggered a lot of speculation.

Conflict message: Vitalik has absolute veto

In its public communication, the Ethereum Foundation has been working hard to shape a decentralized, community-driven, and co-supervised image. The foundation often emphasizes the collective role of its board of directors and downplays Buterin's role as an individual in the organization, although he is regarded by the community as the most critical founder Qiu Yuan and is widely regarded as an Ethereum leader. In the recent reorganization announcement about the Ether Real Estate Foundation, the new vision statement and the appointment of joint executive directors all appeared in the form of joint releases by board members, in order to convey an impression that the team is in control of the final power, rather than a single person, which is inconsistent with the past information conveyed by the foundation.

The report mentioned that as early as 2020, the foundation's board member Patrick Storchenegger (Swiss Legal Counsel) privately informed Ms. Shin that Buterin had three votes at the time. On a four-person board of directors, three votes were enough to unilaterally reject or reach any resolution, even if the other three members objected, this message would mean that Buterin had disproportionately huge power.

Buterin's statement about his right to vote in public is also volatile. Sometimes he talks about his only one vote. What's more striking is that in January this year, in response to community criticism of the foundation's leadership reform, Buterin's remarks seemed to be very different from the foundation's spirit of joint supervision and decentralization emphasized, suggesting that he has the final decision at a critical moment.

“I am the one who decides the new EF leadership team…before (the reform is completed), it’s up to me.”

Current situation and challenges of governance transparency

The Ethereum Foundation’s board of directors is currently composed of four people, including co-founder Vitalik Buterin, current chairman Aya Miyaguchi, co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang and Swiss legal counsel Patrick Storchenegger. However, the report pointed out that no board member would be willing to publicly state the number of voting rights each member has.

This lack of transparency has caused concern among community members and outside observers. Below this article, there are comments that respond to Ms. Shin's question importance "I hope you can get an honest response" and "I hope you can get an answer to this question, which is important for transparency."

Of course, in decentralized non-profit organizations, it is complex to achieve a stable and consistent governance structure in the chaotic and scattered "imagined countries". Especially in the rapidly developing and controversial cryptocurrency field, the foundation may refuse to disclose specific voting rights details for certain principles and orthodoxy considerations and legal reasons.

But for the blockchain industry that regards decentralization as the gold standard, whether the Ethereum Foundation dumps and reversals between the ecosystem, is the role of the core funder and coordinator of the ecosystem, or a centralized corrupt group that absorbs the ecosystem, it has also caused community controversy.

The foundation pretends to be "working to improve"?

The reform and direction of the Ethereum Foundation can be said to be adjusted closely with the public opinion of the community. At the end of last year, when the community questioned the foundation's actual actions in the ecosystem, the Ethereum Foundation was reorganized at the beginning of this year. After being criticized by many Ethereum OG last month, core members recently also made many remarks and proposals on "optimizing Layer1". Is this just a coincidence in the order of events? No one knows, but it seems that the Ethereum Foundation is making "lagging improvements" in community and ecosystem complaints, despite the lack of direct responses and explanations.

In the face of the reorganization of Ethereum, many communities still distrust, part of which is women who hold important positions (directors and chairman), which has attracted criticism from the traditional male-dominated open source engineer stereotype, who believes that it is still following the DEI rules at critical moments rather than focusing on solving problems. This is still necessary for the reorganization of Ethereum board of directors and new directors to prove its capabilities.

Ethereum's recent moves have attracted the attention of the entire community. Whether it can usher in favor of favors and trust in this year's Pectra and Fusaka upgrades will be the main focus of the community.

The above is the detailed content of The Ethereum Foundation refuses to disclose the weight of V-God's voting! Governance transparency is questioned by the community and centralizes. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!