Ethereum
Ethereum Foundation Responds to EigenLayer Conflict of Interest Controversy
The Ethereum Foundation says it is preparing an update on how it plans to resolve ethics questions after two members of its core developer team took part in a staking protocol and were rewarded with tokens precious.
“We are aware of the current conversation about potential conflicts of interest and share the community’s concerns,” Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, tweeted on Friday.
“It is clear that relying on culture and individual judgment is not enough, and we have been working on a formal policy to address this issue for some time,” she added.
The Ethereum Foundation is the nonprofit organization responsible for funding and leading the early development of Ethereum and still has a major influence on the direction of the protocol today. In addition to Miyaguchi, the Foundation’s board includes Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Buterin was interrogates by popular crypto trader Jordan Fish last week on the financial relationship between the core developers of the Foundation and other projects built within the Ethereum ecosystem. Fish specifically called for connections to EigenLayer, a protocol for re-implementing Ether to secure layer 2 Ethereum blockchains, which now holds $18.1 billion in TVL, according to DeFiLlama.
A few days later, Justin Drake, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation confirmed that he had established a multimillion-dollar advisory relationship with EigenLayer, for which he received “a significant EIGEN token incentive” worth several million dollars, representing nearly half of his net worth.
Searcher Dankrad Feist also confirmed a similar relationship.
Online critics fear that accepting EigenLayer money could influence experts’ analyzes of the risks of re-staking (which cautious tendency) or possibly influence its work on the Ethereum core protocol.
“[The Ethereum Foundation] are among the most honest people I know and I don’t see the 1% of [members] formally involved in EigenLayer compromising their morals,” Drake argued last week. To his knowledge, he said that three of the 300 people at the Ethereum Foundation are officially involved in EigenLayer.
Feist also said that his token allocation will not “change or influence my positions on how the base protocol should be developed.”
In an interview with Decrypt, Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Consensys, said he would “stop anyone from the Ethereum Foundation or the ecosystem from supporting more projects.”
Lubin noted that his own company, a leading provider of Ethereum wallet infrastructure, has caused many of its members to pivot to other ecosystem projects in exchange for financial compensation. Consensys is OK with such relationships, he said, as long as they are disclosed and there is no conflict of interest regarding decisions related to Consensys. (Consensys is one of 22 investors in Decrypt.)
“There will be so many opportunities to build good or great things or to corrupt things,” he noted. “We must be vigilant.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.