Author: Jaleel Jia Liu, BlockBeats

Vitalik feels very bad.

When he hears people on crypto Twitter and venture capital firms tell him that a PVP KOL gambling casino that causes over 99% of users to lose money is the best market fit the crypto industry can achieve, and that wanting something better is seen as "condescending and elitist," Vitalik feels very bad.

When those who know nothing about the internal workings of the Ethereum Foundation tell him who should be kicked out of the organization and who should be let in, and expect him to make all these adjustments within two weeks, Vitalik feels very bad.

For all Ethereum teams and the community, 2024 is going to be a tough year. The community's dissatisfaction has fallen into a cyclical rage loop, erupting from time to time, and the meme mocking ETH prices has been updated wave after wave.

Besides Vitalik, there is another person who feels very bad.

That is Aya Miyaguchi, the former executive director of the Ethereum Foundation. A year ago, Aya proposed to Vitalik the idea of transitioning from executive director to chair of the foundation, and today that idea has come to fruition, with Vitalik officially announcing Aya's promotion to chair of the Ethereum Foundation. This has left the Ethereum community very dissatisfied.

The Controversial New Chair of the Ethereum Foundation

In fact, over the past year, Aya has faced significant criticism from the Ethereum community, becoming a controversial figure in both the Chinese and English Ethereum communities.

In the past year, Solana, Ethereum's biggest competitor, has risen from the dead. Besides founder Toly's efforts to promote various "Solana casino culture memes," the work of Solana Foundation chair Lily Liu has also been recognized by the community, such as proposing the PayFi concept of "using on-chain staking interest to pay for off-chain real transactions," hosting many high-quality hackathons, and investing in several quality projects within the Solana ecosystem.

In the eyes of many in the Ethereum community, Aya's seven years as executive director of the Ethereum Foundation have yielded almost no "results."

"Being hired for a job you are unqualified for for seven years, doing nothing yet still getting paid," is the deepest resentment expressed by traders and KOLs in the English community, led by CoinMamba.

They even tried to pressure Aya to leave through public opinion: making statements like "The day Aya leaves is Ethereum's liberation day," "ETH will hit a new high within two weeks of Aya leaving," and "If we keep the pressure on, she will resign." Some even directed irrational insults and death threats at her.

If everyone remembers the time around the New Year when Vitalik was particularly defensive on Twitter, such as his abstract references to Milady and even contemplating leaving Ethereum, it was during that time that Vitalik faced immense public pressure from the community.

Faced with the momentum of CoinMamba and others calling for "Aya's dismissal," Vitalik seemed somewhat defensive, tweeting seven or eight times, stating, "The only person who can decide the leadership team of the Ethereum Foundation is me, Milady!" "I hope everyone can be a bit kinder in their words, Milady!" "Those who speak abusive words are demons, Milady!" "Milady!"

Aya's Seven Years: Did She Do Nothing?

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Ethereum's ICO, and Aya has served in the Ethereum Foundation for seven years.

Before Aya, the executive director of the Ethereum Foundation was also an Asian, named Ming Chan, who had years of experience in IT and management consulting. From 2015 to 2018, she handled the foundation's daily operations, ensuring its management was standardized and that technical development and community operations proceeded smoothly within legal and regulatory frameworks.

Since Aya took over from Ming Chan as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation in 2018, she has redefined the foundation's responsibilities.

"To say that Aya has done nothing during her tenure is somewhat subjective," said Lida, a protocol researcher in the Ethereum ecosystem, in an interview with BlockBeats. "The most concrete work she can point to is the annual ETH Devcon or Devconnect conferences, which are all thanks to Aya's efforts. Moreover, it is evident that ETH events have spread around the world over the years, providing unconditional funding for community activities globally."

In addition, the foundation's responsibilities include maintaining an execution client Geth, hosting various conference calls (such as All Core Devs (ACD) hosted by Tim Beiko, All Devs Consensus (ACDC) hosted by Alex Stokes, etc.), conducting various Ethereum technical research, and roadmap development.

"However, under the adjustments in recent years, the Ethereum research team has basically become an independent department within the foundation, formulating roadmaps, with dozens of projects being developed in parallel by different teams, and conducting Reddit AMAs twice a year," Lida said.

In the latest reshuffle of Ethereum Foundation members, it can also be seen that the research team underwent significant restructuring, dividing that part into five categories of research groups, with stokes and barnabe jointly serving as co-leads of the Ethereum Foundation research team.

"That said, aside from Aya's lack of visible work results, another major criticism of her is her lack of management experience," Lida noted. Unlike Ming Chan's background in IT and management, Aya was a high school teacher in Japan, working in the education sector for over a decade.

Realizing the significant impact her work in education had on children's futures, Aya developed a sense of "impostor syndrome."

"To convey what we need to communicate as humans, rather than simply teaching a subject according to a manual, doesn't it require learning first? So, I was stuck for a long time. Therefore, I decided to resign." This is how Aya explained her departure from the education sector in an interview.

After leaving the education sector, Aya enrolled in a graduate program at a business school in the U.S., studying microfinance, but she was not interested in making money itself. "I needed a job to stay in the U.S. long-term, and it was hard to find a job without going to graduate school."

It was during this time that Aya entered the crypto industry.

"About that time, I had the opportunity to talk with Jesse Powell, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, and I felt that blockchain could connect with the financial inclusion and microfinance I was studying. At that time, the founder asked me if I would like to help, so I joined Kraken," Aya recalled in an interview. Initially, she was responsible for Kraken's business in Japan and later became the managing director of Kraken Japan.

That was in 2013, when Vitalik was still a writer for Bitcoin Magazine, and while interviewing various people, he would take the opportunity to share his thoughts, such as areas where Bitcoin needed improvement, which laid the groundwork for Ethereum.

"It is said that the founding members of Kraken wanted to support such new technologies and talents and greatly admired Vitalik, so when Vitalik was writing the Ethereum white paper, he spent some time in Kraken's office, and even the founder of Kraken let Vitalik stay in one of his spare rooms."

It was here that Vitalik met Aya, who was working at Kraken.

Ethereum is Primarily a Cultural Group

Recently, while chatting with a friend, he proposed a viewpoint: "All team members are, in fact, extensions of the founder's values; even if the power distribution in web3 is decentralized, this will not change."

He makes a valid point. Stokes, who was just appointed as one of the co-leads of the Ethereum Foundation research team, pinned a statement he wrote in 2022 on his Twitter: "Ethereum is primarily a cultural project; we just happen to leverage software to amplify it."

And even under immense public pressure from the community, Aya was not only not dismissed by Vitalik but was instead granted a larger title, making her a steadfast guardian of Ethereum's culture, positioning Ethereum as an "infinite garden": "Ethereum's mission is not to quickly gain short-term profits but to promote and develop the concept of decentralization in the long run."

This is all an extension of Vitalik's values.

So when the community directed harsh words at Aya, Vitalik became so defensive because it was not just Aya being criticized, but himself as well.

In the earliest prequel stories of Ethereum, when Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first ten developers who responded to his invitation to join and selected five of them to form the leadership, which became the five founders of Ethereum. After these five founders, three more developers became co-founders in 2014.

At that time, there was no Ethereum Foundation, only eight core leaders, until the internal relationships within Ethereum became tense in 2014, with debates arising over whether to use venture capital funds or to crowdfund from ordinary people; whether to pursue a profit model and become the Google of crypto or to remain a purely non-profit organization. The future direction of the Ethereum Foundation became a recurring topic of debate, leading to the emergence of factions.

Reflecting on this memory, Vitalik said, "I was once persuaded to lean towards making Ethereum more corporate. But this never made me feel comfortable; it even felt a bit dirty."

After the final co-founder meeting, Vitalik decided to choose the path of decentralization and non-profit. "Throughout the process, I was trying to shirk responsibility because I really didn't want to take on that responsibility, and in the end, I had to clear out some people."

Ultimately, aside from Vitalik, the other co-founders left Ethereum, leading to the emergence of the Ethereum Foundation.

The Lament of the "Leftist" Ethereum

Some say that the original sin ultimately lies in the unsatisfactory price trend of ETH.

"But I believe the original sin is that in an increasingly right-leaning crypto industry, Ethereum insists on going left." In Lida's view, Ethereum's values have not changed since then; what has changed is the industry. From the political landscape in the U.S. to the entire crypto industry, people no longer talk about ideals but instead support PVP casinos, making Ethereum appear very out of place.

From the very beginning, the founders and team of Ethereum have adhered to an ideal: decentralization, de-financialization, and the pursuit of social value realization. In a market filled with bubbles and hype, this ideal stands out starkly.

"Aya's recent criticism is actually a long-standing emotional outlet for the community; to some extent, she serves as a scapegoat. After all, over the past year, the Ethereum Foundation's continuous selling of tokens has left the community feeling very unhappy," Lida said.

During a time when community sentiment was not good, Vitalik's constant emphasis on the "leftist vibe" of peace and love further angered the community, even causing dissatisfaction among early Ethereum developer Eric: "Hearing someone use phrases like 'don't be too harsh' to ignore the community's commands is truly exhausting. We are here to change the world, not to create a safe space."

In Eric's view, the power of ideals is the source of social change, not a concession to the ever-changing market. Many times, leaders should take a long-term perspective and listen to the voices from the community.

"Ultimately, I lost my passion for something I was once so enthusiastic about because those in charge did not recognize the importance of the community and the need for change, but were more willing to focus on the 'goodwill' we proposed and whose feelings were hurt, rather than understanding a large community."

The values among early Ethereum members are also constantly colliding and reflecting. It all seems to return to the split in the Ethereum community in 2014. In the face of the industry's increasingly rightward trend, more and more voices are calling for Ethereum to also take the "capitalization route."

This has also been a hot topic of discussion recently, with many saying that Ethereum's revenue at the protocol level is too low. "If I could take over the Ethereum Foundation, ETH would rise to $10,000. The first thing I would do after taking over is optimize revenue," said Sun Yuchen, whose viewpoint gained the approval of most in the Chinese community.

Arbitrum is charging a 10% fee for its own L3, while as an L2, it only gives Ethereum a 2% "tax," which has raised doubts among many investors and ecosystem developers, as this ratio is simply too low.

So how much tax is reasonable? In response to this question, Rhythm BlockBeats once again inquired about Sun Yuchen's views.

"I personally suggest that the annual dollar tax for Base and Polygon should not be less than $200 million." In Sun Yuchen's view, while the prosperity of the L2 ecosystem will directly enhance Ethereum's value, Ethereum is currently indeed over-subsidizing L2. A 2% tax may be too low, but if raised to 8%, it could provide Ethereum with more stable income, enhancing revenue by at least over $1 billion a year, without stifling the development of Layer 2.

"If Layer 2 is in its early development stage, some subsidies can be provided. However, for already established large L2s like Base and Polygon, it is advisable to impose heavy taxes. This is also common at the national level, where ordinary people are tax-exempt or taxed at 10%, but super-rich individuals need to pay higher tax rates of 20-30%," Sun Yuchen further analyzed.

In addition to increasing efficiency, costs must also be reduced.

For example, AAVE founder Stani has also proposed his suggestions in this regard: "As an organization, the Ethereum Foundation should be a streamlined and efficient organization. Anyone who does not put in 100% effort should leave the foundation."

However, there is a huge gap between the left and right, and change will not come quickly. Everything takes time, and the Ethereum Foundation's restructuring is ongoing, including a series of financial and administrative reforms, introducing more standardized measures.

"As for the topic everyone is most concerned about, changes in price levels will definitely have a lagging effect, so just wait," Lida said.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。