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The Ethereum Foundation says it is preparing an update on how it plans to address ethical questions after two members of its core development team took roles in the groundbreaking protocol and were rewarded with valuable tokens.
“We are aware of the current discussion regarding conflicts of interest and share the community's concerns,” Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, tweeted.
“It is clear that relying on culture and individual judgment is not enough, and we have been working on a formal policy to solve this problem,” he said.
The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for the funding and leadership of Ethereum's early development, and it still has a large influence on the direction of the protocol today. In addition to Miyaguchi, the foundation's board of directors includes Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
Buterin was asked by the famous crypto trader Jordan Asa last week about the financial relationship between the main developers of the foundation with other projects being developed in the Ethereum ecosystem. Fish specifically called out ties to EigenLayer, which now holds $18.1 billion in TVL to secure Ether's Layer 2 blockchains to refinance Ether, DeFillama reported.
Days later, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake confirmed a multi-million dollar consulting relationship with Eigenlayer, for which he received a “significant EIGEN token incentive” worth millions of dollars, nearly half of his fortune.
Its affiliate, Dankrad Fest, confirmed the same connection.
Online critics worry that accepting funds from EigenLayer could again jeopardize expert analysis (which is cautious) or affect the core Ethereum protocol.
“[The Ethereum Foundation] They are the most honest people I know and I haven't seen 1 percent. [members] He has been formally involved with EigenLayer in their conduct,” Drake argued last week. According to his knowledge, three of the 300 people at the Ethereum Foundation are regularly involved with EigenLayer.
Fest also said his token allocation “does not change or influence my position on how the core protocol should be developed.”
In an interview with Decrypt, Ethereum co-founder and Consensus CEO Joseph Lubin said, “No one in the Ethereum Foundation or in the ecosystem is going to be restricted from supporting more projects.”
Lubin has led his own company, the main provider of Ethereum wallet infrastructure, to move many of its members to other ecosystem projects for financial compensation. He said it is best to communicate with such relationships as long as there is no conflict of interest regarding the decisions related to the agreement. (Agreement is one of 22 investors in Decrypt.)
“There will be so many opportunities to build good or bad things or to spoil things,” he said. “We must be vigilant.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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