Author: shushu
In the crypto world built on the concept of decentralization, the Ethereum Foundation is regarded as the guardian of technology and value neutrality, but a recent split caused by core developer Péter Szilágyi has broken this trust.
Disbanding the Geth team, EF falls into internal strife
Geth (Go Ethereum) is the most commonly used execution client of the Ethereum network, with about 41% of nodes relying on it. The stability and decentralization of the network are highly dependent on its development quality. Recently, Ethereum core developer and Geth client developer Péter Szilágyi mentioned in a review that many years ago he had proposed to issue small grants to authors of Geth's key dependent components (such as go-leveldb) to encourage them to continue to maintain the relevant code. At that time, he hoped to give a grant of $10,000, but was told that he could only allocate $500. If the amount exceeded this, he had to sign a contract and deliver results.
However, according to Szilágyi, during the same period, the Ethereum Foundation was able to provide Parity with a $5 million grant without any additional conditions, on the grounds that "Ethereum needs a second client because Geth is unreliable." This became an imbalance that Szilágyi could not get rid of: the Geth team had to rely on frugality to maintain the same critical infrastructure of the protocol, while competitors could easily obtain large subsidies.
Over time, this imbalance gradually evolved into a crisis of trust. Szilágyi broke the news that the foundation had formed a new Geth team within Nethermind and made it clear that this was a "completely independent and unintentional" fork. More importantly, the original Geth team was not informed in advance, but only learned about it after Szilágyi discovered the matter himself.
In response to Szilágyi's accusations, Tomasz K. Stańczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, publicly responded: "There are currently no plans to remove Geth. It is an excellent client software and an excellent team is contributing to the security of the protocol. We will continue to maintain and support Geth and are committed to making it better and faster."
Tomasz is also the leader of Nethermind, which is now the most important infrastructure in the Ethereum ecosystem, and is listed as one of the top five execution clients along with Geth, Besu, and Erigon.
But this statement is obviously very different from Szilágyi's disclosure. Szilágyi even publicly challenged the EF leadership, "Dare to deny?" and named several foundation executives who had privately proposed to let the Geth team become an independent company and break away from EF, but were rejected three times by the team.
Szilágyi said that Tomasz had approached most of the developers who were still in Geth in recent weeks and told them that they could start interviewing other companies because he felt that their salaries were too high, and asked them how many people would leave if their salaries were cut in half. "Come on, deny it! Remember that time I took off? Yeah, that was after my one-on-one conversation with @0xstark about this secret second Geth team I discovered. I was fired from the foundation within 24 hours"
"I dare you, the entire Ethereum Foundation, to stand up and say: You didn't offer us $5 million to spin off? Or, the Foundation didn't ask us at least three times whether we wanted to form a company and become independent, and me, Felix and @mhswende said no? I dare @hwwonx to deny our conversation in February."
Fellow developer banteg responded to the $500 The severance pay of 10,000 US dollars was split and asked Szilágyi why he didn't accept the proposal and go it alone. Szilágyi's response was that as a developer, "we are not good at running a company at all, we don't have the corresponding infrastructure or team support, and the whole thing will eventually fail." According to Szilágyi, the intensity of the situation is far more than the disagreement on team management or resource allocation, but directly touches the foundation of the power operation and trust system within the Ethereum ecosystem. As a key module to maintain the normal operation of the Ethereum network, Geth should receive continuous and stable support, but the reality is just the opposite: it has neither received the resource tilt that matches its importance nor enjoyed the long-term trust from the foundation. For Szilágyi, this institutional cold reception gradually eroded his initial confidence in this cause-a decentralized experiment that once made him excited and fully committed has now gradually become discouraging.
From enthusiasm to disappointment and complaints, Péter Szilágyi's journey in Ethereum
Péter Szilágyi is a core member of the Ethereum Foundation and the head of development of Geth, the most important execution client of Ethereum. If he had not resigned from the Ethereum Foundation, this year would have been his tenth year working at Ethereum, and that was also his first job after graduation.
In 2015, Szilágyi accepted the "trial task" proposed by Ethereum core developer Jeff Wilcke: "This is a mess, you come and fix it, and you can ask me if you have any questions." In this way, he began to participate in the development of Geth.
Szilágyi's university major is computer science, and his research background is distributed systems, and he is particularly passionate about the network direction. During his master's degree, he focused on building a distributed hosting platform. Dissatisfied with the inefficiency and fragility of manual configuration, he was determined to develop a computing system that can run self-organized without human intervention. "After graduation, I didn't have to do blockchain, but I was looking for work that could make computers run themselves, and then I met Ethereum," Szilágyi described his encounter with Ethereum.
In 2021, the Geth team took a group photo, with Szilágyi on the right
In an interview with Bankless, Szilágyi said that in the last few years of working on the Geth team, most of it was tinkering. In his early years, his motivation was "to create, release, and toss", but now that driving force has almost faded. Slowly it turned into a sense of responsibility: he realized that he was maintaining an extremely valuable network, and he was one of the few people who really understood it and could maintain it. "This kind of work is indeed not that interesting, but it is fulfilling, and you will get a sense of satisfaction from being involved."
In a 2023 interview, when asked about the trajectory of his relationship with Geth, Szilágyi replied, "There have been ups and downs over the years, and there have been times when I was very frustrated and wanted to slam the table and leave. The worst period was probably the COVID-19 pandemic, which was really hard. But now I still enjoy this job."
However, only one year later, Szilágyi became an "outsider" in the Ethereum community.
In fact, this is not the first time that Szilágyi has blasted the Ethereum community for certain issues. In July last year, he criticized Ethereum for going astray and that the research team fully accepted all centralized ideas as long as they could be verified. On the surface, it was decentralized verification, but in essence it was centralized control. His strong words attracted widespread attention from the Ethereum community and sparked a heated debate about the core principles of the Ethereum network.
A month later, Szilágyi published a complaint about the crypto industry, wondering if he had chosen the wrong industry. "Like SpaceX, they send a rocket to Mars? Humanity progresses. They fail to launch a rocket and it blows up? Humanity learns and still progresses. All outcomes lead to progress.
In contrast, the crypto industry is a casino for fools (apologies to the few exceptions). Prices go up? Great, when will you buy a sports car? Prices go down? Lives destroyed. What's the contribution to humanity?
In my opinion, this industry should have started creating something actually useful that people want to use, or it should have closed down. At least Bitcoin tried (and failed) to be a safe haven asset. But the others are all selling shovels, and there is no sign of a gold rush at all."
In hindsight, Szilágyi may have encountered some unhappy things within the Ethereum Foundation at that time.
And Szilágyi and Tomasz, the current director of the Ethereum Foundation, don't seem to get along well. Nethermind once stopped storing Ethereum's historical data with Besu. This decision triggered Szilágyi's public criticism, believing that this was irresponsible behavior and could mislead users. This was also one of the fuses for Szilágyi to withdraw from Ethereum. "Since even the core developers are maximizing their interests relative to other developers, why bother to make it better? I am deeply disappointed with everyone involved."
On November 16, 2024, Szilágyi announced that he would temporarily leave the Geth team due to "vacation", but as mentioned above, Szilágyi's "vacation" was due to the discovery that the Ethereum Foundation secretly funded a second Geth development team within Nethermind and was fired. He was fired by the foundation within 24 hours for "threatening to resign and undermining team morale" after a one-on-one meeting with foundation member Josh Stark.
The process of cutting expenses is not decent
This public split essentially touches on the dilemma of Ethereum's current governance structure. On the one hand, the foundation emphasizes that "multi-client consensus" is crucial to the security of the protocol and emphasizes that Geth cannot be allowed to dominate; on the other hand, Geth has been the main force in protocol execution for many years, and its infrastructure quality and team experience cannot be easily replaced.
In February of this year, Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, announced that she would move to the newly established position of "chairman". This change put an end to the community's dissatisfaction with the leadership and direction of the foundation for months.
In June, the Ethereum Foundation announced the layoff of some R&D personnel and reorganized the original research team into a new department called "Protocol", concentrating resources on three major technical directions: L1 expansion, blob expansion, and UX improvement. The official positioned this move as an optimization of resource allocation. On the one hand, some R&D personnel were laid off, especially those teams that have been stuck in the theoretical stage for a long time; on the other hand, a stricter accountability mechanism was introduced to require the rapid transformation of research results into actual outputs.
It can be said that the Ethereum Foundation has been committed to transforming the entire team since it was ridiculed by the public in the second half of last year, but the reform is bound to encounter a period of pain. According to the new policy, EF will determine the allocation ratio of fiat currency to ETH based on the "operating expenditure ratio × buffer years" model, and maintain annual expenditures at a high level of 15%. The foundation pointed out that 2025-2026 will be a critical stage for the ecosystem, and resources need to be concentrated to promote the implementation of technology at the protocol layer, including L1 expansion, blob technology, and UX optimization.
EF said that 2025-2026 will be a critical window for promoting the implementation of the agreement, and it is expected to maintain an annual expenditure of 15% and set a 2.5-year fiat currency buffer period. This means that the foundation needs to convert about 37.5% of the treasury into fiat currency to support medium- and short-term investment.
Today, the policy level is constantly favorable, which is a good thing for the application layer on Ethereum. But when it comes to governance, we may need to give the Ethereum Foundation a little more time to adapt to the new stage.
Joy
