Ethereum is facing significant community distrust this year. Late last year, ecosystem members angrily criticized the Ethereum Foundation (EF) as useless and suggested disbanding, which led to a reorganization in the first two months. Recently, they have been frequently posting on their long-unupdated website and community, showing their desire to rebuild community trust. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik also posted today (29th), supplementing the Ethereum Foundation's mission, believing that EF should make efforts to promote Ethereum's usage and decentralization, but this has caused community dissatisfaction.
Vitalik's Post
Ethereum Foundation's new president Aya Miyagotchi recently uploaded a new Ethereum era article on the Ethereum website and community, defending the foundation's existence and purpose, and humbly stating that they will adapt to community needs. Vitalik responded to the post and annotated it, citing two main goals of the Ethereum Foundation:
- Ethereum's usage – the type of benefits users actually receive from Ethereum's underlying attributes
- Ethereum's flexibility and decentralization – focusing on solving weaknesses anywhere in the stack
It's worth noting that Vitalik also posted Aya Miyagotchi's article content, so the main explanation is concentrated on the website article.
Community Criticism
However, Vitalik's explanation has drawn widespread criticism at different levels. A Chinese-background individual called it "Empress Dowager interfering with politics", believing that Vitalik is creating an atmosphere of giving to the community while frequently providing guidance, which is puzzling:
Since the position has been handed over to a new executive director, he should consciously retreat backstage and stop publishing so many guiding opinions, restricting their performance, otherwise we can only consider you and Aya as hypocritical power-hungry people, like the Empress Dowager listening to government affairs in ancient China...
Another netizen directly pointed out that the Ethereum Foundation explained a lot of nonsense without properly explaining whether they will continue to dump Ethereum in the future. RIOT research vice president Pierre Rochard, who supports Bitcoin, also challenged Vitalik, believing that Vitalik still hasn't explained the Ethereum Foundation's value to the Ethereum ecosystem. He thinks increasing Ethereum usage can be achieved through wbtc, USDT methods, and decentralized financial optimization can be done by listing on Nasdaq, seemingly implying that Ethereum's current financing choice of dumping instead of fundraising is sacrificing Ethereum's value.
