In the current bull market, the Ethereum community has been increasingly dissatisfied with the market performance of ETH and the Ethereum Foundation's (EF) financial management. While mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Solana, and BNB have all reached new all-time highs, Ethereum has yet to return to the $4,891 all-time high set in the previous bull market, leaving investors feeling disillusioned.

V Vitalik Buterin Restructures Ethereum Foundation Leadership

To address the current lackluster performance of Ethereum, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated on January 18 that he will be implementing major reforms to the Ethereum Foundation's leadership structure to achieve the following goals:

• Enhance the technical expertise of the Ethereum Foundation's leadership
• Improve two-way communication and engagement between the Ethereum Foundation's leadership and new and existing ecosystem participants, as the Ethereum Foundation's responsibility is to support users (individuals and institutions), application developers, wallets, and L2
• Bring in new talent to increase execution capability and speed
• Provide more active support for application developers to ensure that important values and inalienable rights (especially privacy, open-source, and censorship resistance) are implemented in the user-facing application environment
• Continue to increase the use of decentralization and privacy technologies, as well as Ethereum, including for payments and financial management

V Buterin also emphasized that the Ethereum Foundation will avoid the following in the future:

• Implementing any ideological/atmospheric shifts
• Actively lobbying regulators and powerful political figures (especially in the US, but in reality anywhere, particularly in major countries), risking damage to Ethereum's position as a globally neutral platform
• Becoming an arena for vested interests
• Becoming a highly centralized organization, even becoming the "protagonist" of Ethereum

V Vitalik Buterin: The Ethereum Foundation Can Stake to Solve Selling Demand

Regarding the Ethereum Foundation's ongoing criticism for its continuous selling, Ethereum community members Eric.eth and Josh Stark recently discussed on X that since the Foundation is criticized for selling ETH to maintain its operations, it would be better for the Foundation to cover its budget needs through staking and adopting DeFi strategies, so that it would not have to sell in the market and negatively impact the coin price.

Regarding this view, V Buterin responded yesterday (20th) that the reason the Ethereum Foundation has not chosen to stake previously is due to the following two considerations:

• First, the regulatory factor: The previous regulatory environment may have posed legal risks to the Foundation's staking activities, but this risk has now diminished;
• Secondly, the issue of hard fork positioning: If the Foundation chooses to stake, this could force the Foundation to take a stance in any controversial hard forks that may occur in the future, as staking would deeply bind the Foundation to the main chain, which is the current main concern. However, V Buterin added that the Foundation is now discussing potential solutions to reduce this impact, which means the Foundation may choose to stake its ETH in the future.

However, Spot On Chain expressed skepticism about this plan, believing that staking may not fundamentally solve this problem. Because ultimately, the rewards obtained through staking will still be sold by the Foundation in the market, so the Foundation could consider another option, which is to prioritize over-the-counter (OTC) sales of ETH, which may not have a significant impact on the ETH price.

Aave Founder Provides 12 Recommendations for the Ethereum Foundation

At the same time, Stani Kulechov, the founder of the largest DeFi lending protocol on Ethereum, Aave, also posted on X yesterday, stating that if the Ethereum Foundation wants to maintain healthy operations, the following 12 recommendations can be adopted:

1. Immediately reduce the burn rate from $130 million to $30 million
2. Reduce the number of employees to 80
3. Carefully review who to keep
4. Prohibit consultants or any conflicts of interest
5. Ensure that 80% of the workforce are technical personnel
6. Split all technical teams into small 5-person teams, each focused on a specific area
7. The leadership should be a 5-person committee, selected based on business capabilities, with one appointed as the chairman to liaise with VB
8. Non-technical team members should focus on financial management
9. Diversify assets by investing in various long-term sustainable assets, as well as DeFi and non-DeFi projects with strong fundamentals and profitability
10. Invest staking rewards into DeFi
11. Borrow from Aave to manage finances and sell ETH periodically when it outperforms other assets
12. Create a sustainable revenue model to cover the Foundation's reasonable budget needs