Millions of dollars in EIGEN tokens? Ethereum Foundation researcher's third-party "advisory" position caused huge controversy
By Alex Liu, Foresight News
"The Ethereum Foundation has more than 300 people, and only a few of them serve as advisors to the Ethereum Foundation, which will not affect its neutrality." It sounds reasonable, if these "several of them" do not include Dankrad Feist and Justin Drake.
Recently, several researchers from the Ethereum Foundation have disclosed to the public that they have accepted "consultant" positions with the Eigen Foundation, the entity behind the restaking protocol EigenLayer, and will receive valuable EIGEN tokens. This has caused great controversy and heated discussions in the community. The author believes that a detailed study of the ins and outs of this storm can help everyone understand the dilemma faced by Ethereum developers and the community at the " social consensus " level.
Background: The Ethereum community started quarreling
As developers and opinion leaders with significant influence in the Ethereum ecosystem such as Vitalik have moved to Farcaster, the Ethereum community has been less "lively" for quite some time without representatives like Solana's Mert who can bring heat to the community by continuously outputting opinions and confronting people. But now the peace has finally been broken - Péter Szilágyi, the head of development of Ethereum's main execution client Geth, and Dankrad Feist, a core member of the Ethereum Foundation, have quarreled.
The quarrel was mainly about MEV and development progress, and Péter was dissatisfied with the current development status of Ethereum. Regarding MEV, Peter believed that it was an attack on Ethereum, but by sharing the benefits with stakeholders, the problem is no longer a problem.
This reflects a difficulty beyond development: as the protocol becomes larger and more decentralized, there will be more and more participants, or stakeholders. How to coordinate and balance the interests of all parties?
Finally Vitalik joined the discussion by posting on X.
Main topic: Potential conflict of interest sparks controversy
Vitalik then praised the Ethereum community's "open discussion." But in a thread on this topic, legendary crypto community influencer Cobie replied to him, "How do you feel about the core developers or researchers of the Ethereum Foundation receiving life-changing huge compensation and becoming consultants from projects built on Ethereum? These projects may have conflicts of interest with Ethereum now or in the future, such as - of course purely theoretically - assuming EigenLayer."
Cobie obviously knew something, and was not just casually mentioning EigenLayer. Because shortly after he posted his inquiry, Justin Drake, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, posted a long article on X, revealing that he would become an advisor to the Eigen Foundation and receive millions of dollars in token incentives, "worth more than the sum of all his other personal assets."
Why is this so controversial? Can't a person serve in multiple organizations at the same time? The answer is: Yes. But what if the entity you work for may have a conflict of interest? Things become complicated.
Restaking, or re-staking, is generally considered to introduce additional risks to Ethereum at the protocol level. Simply put, it is not necessarily beneficial to Ethereum and may even lead to potential conflicts of interest - such as additional Slash when providing security guarantees for third parties. In the worst case, it may even cause users who lose assets to try to fork Ethereum.
Regarding Restaking, a popular explanation is to let one asset do multiple jobs and get multiple benefits. In this way, these Ethereum researchers seem to be "restaking" themselves and trying to do multiple jobs. Restaking is very dangerous, and the boss may take back the work. (The company is unreliable and the principal was "slashed")
Although these researchers claim that the advisory role is personal and does not represent the Ethereum Foundation, they are fully capable of expressing dissenting opinions on EigenLayer and are ready to terminate their advisory positions at any time if EigenLayer takes a direction that goes against the interests of Ethereum.
“ Do you really think that receiving huge compensation from an organization that has different incentives than Ethereum will not affect your decision-making? ” Will having researchers serve as advisors to stakeholder projects affect the Ethereum Foundation’s neutral position?
As stated at the beginning of the article: " There are more than 300 people in the Ethereum Foundation, and only a few of them serve as advisors to the Eigen Foundation, which will not affect its neutrality." It sounds reasonable, if these "a few of them" do not include Dankrad Feist and Justin Drake . Because Dankrad Feist and Justin Drake are the people who can have a general impact on Ethereum - Justin Drake plays a vital role in the layout of Ethereum 2.0, and this year, apart from ETFs, the biggest narrative of Ethereum is the Cancun upgrade, which realizes proto-danksharding and lays the foundation for the realization of real danksharding in the future. That's right, the expansion plan finally selected by the Ethereum mainnet was proposed by Dankrad Feist and named after him.
Such people will receive millions of dollars in EIGEN tokens and be charged to criticize EigenLayer. Please judge for yourself whether Eigen Foundation is doing charity for public welfare.
Later, Péter Szilágyi and Dankrad Feist had another argument, and Péter asked, " Who decides what is necessary for the agreement and what is not? " Dankrad replied, " Obviously, me. "
Then Péter Szilágyi sarcastically said, " I thought it was EigenLayer , my mistake."
Dankrad did not reply.
Analysis: EigenLayer uses tokens to exchange for allies
We have no evidence to prove why EigenLayer is offering so many tokens to recruit "consultants", but we can observe an interesting fact.
10 months ago, Bankless did a podcast titled “Restaking Alignment”. There were 7 people on the podcast, and most of them had a relatively negative attitude towards restaking (including Justin Drake and Dankrad).
Now, the six people in the picture below all hold interests in EigenLayer (through angel investment, advisory positions or employment relationships), and the seventh person in the podcast is Vitalik.
In this regard, Sreeram is probably the best ever.
Reflection: Better and more transparent information disclosure
The Ethereum Foundation is essentially a non-profit organization. In the Crypto industry, such foundations are more opaque than traditional companies or foundations and lack basic information disclosure. This incident exposed this, and community members also raised related concerns. Some pointed out:
I have bigger issues with the Ethereum Foundation as a whole than with individual employees not disclosing their investments.
For years, the Ethereum Foundation should have disclosed financial reports, organizational charts, and other information.
A well-managed organization requires disclosure from its employees.
In the current crisis of trust, the Ethereum Foundation should make improvements and bring better and more transparent information disclosure. Otherwise, some people have already started discussing: " Should the Ethereum Foundation be dissolved?"
Extension: Social consensus and decentralization
Looking back at the incident, the individuals and organizations of the Ethereum Foundation essentially suffered a crisis of trust. Community members doubted their neutrality and feared that they would take Ethereum in the wrong direction for their own selfish interests.
In my opinion, this is actually a good thing. Different groups have different interests, which leads to disagreements. An Ethereum that advances in debate will obviously be more decentralized in terms of social consensus than an Ethereum that is "closely united" around the Ethereum Foundation. Questioning leads to reflection and progress.
It is not enough to decentralize only at the technical and code level. We should pay attention to decentralization at the level of social consensus. Imagine if there was only one decentralized computer in the world, would it be considered a kind of centralization?
Ethereum is a pioneer in smart contract platforms, but it is also burdened by historical baggage, such as the less advanced EVM. It now chooses a modular architecture and a roadmap centered on Rollup, which is to use the mainnet as a foundation to allow teams with differences to move forward in debate, each building their own "decentralized computer" solution and jointly realizing a better decentralized future.
