Where Dissent Imposes A Heavy Price

A court filing last week provided the missing pieces explaining the Ethereum Foundation’s string of high-profile departures this year. The Mandate that brought the conflict to a head also says, in its own words, what leadership should have done differently and what it needs to do now.

I’ve read the complaint over and over these past few days and wrote this to share what I've found. It describes self-inflicted damage to the Foundation’s legitimacy that adversely impacted the whole ecosystem.

The Mandate

On March 13 of this year the Ethereum Foundation published a document it calls The Mandate, which it describes as part constitution, part manifesto, and part internal guide. I have read a lot of mission statements and they rarely feel sincere and useful, but this one is genuinely good for the most part. I have spent more than a decade of my life focused on Ethereum and the values the document enumerates clearly state principles that are aligned with are my own reasons for working in this space. At its core it focuses on CROPS: ensuring that Ethereum remains censorship resistant, open source, privacy-preserving, and secure.

I am writing this piece because I have long maintained that Ethereum and the decentralized stack are vital technologies for preserving personal freedom that can only achieve their potential through careful stewardship. My personal and professional lives have revolved around this ecosystem because of my convictions and that is why this is hard to write because the evidence clearly demonstrates EF leadership's failure in that stewardship. The goal of writing all this out is to provide insight into what transpired, why it was deeply harmful to the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole, and what should be done to correct course.

When the Mandate was published, there was a schism within the foundation and a wave of high-profile departures that many speculated on. Details were scarce until a complaint was filed in federal court in Colorado by Kayleen Fulton, the Foundation's former Protocol Support Lead, known to most of the ecosystem as Nixo. It fills in the gaps we had all be speculating on earlier this year, in particular that the new executive co-director Bastian Aue overrode the objections of the Foundation, including board members, to ensure everyone demonstrated unquestioning obedience despite the fact that these tactics stood in direct violation of the Mandate which he supported.

The Mandate states the Foundation is "not the parent, owner, or ruler of Ethereum." It says the Foundation will "admit when we get things, particularly big things, wrong, with humility, grace, and an honest and clear explanation of why our views have changed." It says: "We pair high standards with kindness: resilient systems are built by people who can disagree clearly without cruelty and who can stay curious when under pressure." And it describes Ethereum itself as a liberatory technology, a way out from "power relations that are imposed without true consent or where dissent imposes a heavy price."

The complaint names as defendants the Foundation's Swiss and Singapore entities, two employer-of-record firms, co-executive director Bastian Aue, and Vitalik Buterin. It is a plaintiff's document, which means it is one side's perspective and selection of facts, and The Foundation has not yet answered it. But most of what it describes is quoted from the Foundation's own internal channels, and I know and have spoken with enough people who were there to tell you that it's an accurate depiction of what transpired.

The Mandate was tested, within days of publication, by exactly the thing it praises: clear disagreement without cruelty, from people under pressure, who stayed curious. The people who disagreed most carefully, and most in keeping with the Mandate’s own standard, were fired, and the open, collaborative culture inside the organization did not survive their departure.

The Suicide Clause

I started out by saying I largely agree with what the Mandate covers, so why were all these people who were collaborating on a collective goal that mattered to them fighting over it?

The Mandate's eleventh page carries an illustration, and inside the illustration is a block of text headed SOURCE SEPPUKU LICENSE. The license is a found object, a joke license from the Milady NFT scene, a community that makes the Bored Apes look like Rhodes Scholars. The only public home I could find for it is a page on the Remilia wiki (Remilia being the company behind the NFTs) created on February 5 of this year, twenty days before the draft Mandate went to staff. In any other context it would be embarrassing and inconsequential.

The clause's terms are that any "author, maintainer, editor or (re)distributor" shall "take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license, or upon modification or removal of any part of this license." Beneath it the Foundation added a line of its own: "May the Foundation fall on its own sword if it fails to uphold its solemn promise to Ethereum," followed by a heart.

Some defended this as just a tone-deaf Michael Scott-esque bit from leadership. The trouble with a bit is that it has to land with the audience your addressing, and the audience here was the Foundation's staff, who were sent a draft on February 25, by board member Aya Miyaguchi, and asked to make the document their own. They told the board, in writing, in the board's own channels, what they thought. Two days after the draft went out, Trent Van Epps wrote that the license "has got to go." By March 2 there was a formal proposal to remove it, and seventy-nine employees voted in favor of its removal. One employee asked management in writing whether signing meant he was required to commit suicide. Another shared that he had lost a colleague to suicide the year before. On March 5 Vitalik Buterin told staff the Mandate was being reworked "with significant changes especially to the areas where people have expressed the most concern." It looked like decency was going to prevail.

On March 13 the board published it with the license intact, every word, now rendered as a small image at the foot of the page, set in a Comic Sans style typeface, tilted, glitched, and flanked by cartoon cats. The word "seppuku" was removed from the machine-readable text, so it no longer turns up in a search of the page. Then the Foundation inscribed the document on the Ethereum blockchain.

That last detail is the one I keep returning to. Whatever you think of the license, the board had a vote, a week, and written objections in front of it, and it spent the week restyling the clause rather than deleting it. Buterin explained the choice the day it published: being "inoffensive like Mozilla" would have been fine on the principles, "but we feel that being inoffensive in that sense is not the energy we need right now." As the complaint states "An organization does not spend a week redrawing a clause it regards as meaningless,"

Vitalik Buterin is a principled deep thinker, so I am struggling to understand how any of this made sense to him. The objections, including the colleague lost to suicide, were made in the board's own channels. He promised significant changes three days later. But the joke went out unchanged, restyled, and on-chain. He's not a callous or unkind person so I can only speculate that his statement that “the controversialness of those aesthetics is itself part of the point” were a lapse in judgement or someone feeding him advice that is contrary to his own values.

The Ultimatum

On March 18 Fulton wrote on the all-staff channel, under her own name, that she took "less issue with the Seppuku or Milady associations than with the idea that a near-unanimous opinion was visibly ignored and then dismissed," and that "there's little trust between the board and the rest of the organization."

Hsiao-Wei Wang, co-executive director and a member of the board, replied publicly that her concern was "critical for the future of the EF." While Wang endorsed that concern, the other co-executive director, Bastian Aue, replied to Fulton the morning of Friday, March 20: "We are now past the time of where it made sense to share concerns about the mandate, though. Now is the time for implementation"

Two hours later came the ultimatum. Every staff member was to submit a form by the end of the day on Monday. The form offered two choices. The first: "I personally commit to the direction set out in the mandate, I commit to help translate it into thoroughly reasoned strategies for my domain, and I commit to an exclusive and energetic focus on the mission critical tasks necessary for its implementation. From today and until my last day at the EF." The second: "I cannot confidently commit to the above and would like to request my extra months of compensation and leave the EF without undue delay." Anyone for whom the document did not resonate was invited to "make the only honorable decision and leave the EF." And: "Non-submission will be interpreted as a decision to leave."

Asked why the default was termination, Aue wrote: "It has to be default to leaving to ensure that everyone staying make an active commitment." Asked who had agreed to include the suicide pledge: "If you are asking more broadly who agreed with including it, I did."

An engineer asked whether signing the form meant he had to commit suicide. He was told the pledge was "part of the artwork of the mandate. A cultural reference like other elements in there. Chosen deliberately, but not meant to be taken literally," and later that day the form was amended to specify that the commitment "has nothing to do with literal seppuku."

Apparently, he did not recognize the absurdity of an organization amending its loyalty form to clarify that no actual suicide was required and insisting that everyone sign it to keep their jobs.

The next morning Buterin wrote that the abruptness was the point: "Hard breaks of this type are exactly the thing that is not designed well by committee, hence the undemocratic nature of announcing this one." The deadline was later extended by two days. The requirement was not withdrawn.

The Letter

This is where the people who actually build Ethereum did the thing the Mandate says it wants. Over March 24 and 25, members of the Protocol cluster, the researchers and coordinators who run the process by which the protocol itself gets upgraded, drafted a collective response in a channel from which Tim Beiko, the cluster's coordinator and Fulton's supervisor, had removed management so that staff could speak freely. He also reminded them that "walking away is not a viable option for many people, for different reasons (financial, benefits, etc.)."

The letter went out on March 25 to the co-executive directors, the board, and all staff, sent by Fulton and posted under her own name; she and Van Epps had coordinated the drafting. It said:

We endorse the general direction of the Mandate, but cannot in good faith affirm under these conditions. We intend to continue contributing to Ethereum in accordance with the values of CROPS and self-sovereignty. We will continue to perform the duties with which we are tasked and do not resign. Many of us have signed the commitment to the mandate under duress in fear of losing their jobs and livelihoods. We consider their responses on the poll to be coerced and meaningless.

Every EF staffer I know who did sign the pledge said they vehemently objected, but they they wanted to keep their jobs. They had been given the false impression of a real choice: sign or walk away from the work their lives were built around. One person I spoke to at the time described themself and their team as "demoralized"; this led to a complete collapse in their faith in the organization's leadership. This isn't just a job for these people, Ethereum is personally meaningful to them, and their voices were disregarded in favor of a single leader who had just told them the time for their input was over.

Forty-nine people had signed when it was sent, fifty-three by the end, roughly half the cluster. The lletter endorsed the Mandate’s direction, declined to affirm it under coercion, said the signers would keep working, and threatened nothing. It is, almost to the letter, what "disagree clearly without cruelty" and "stay curious when under pressure" look like in practice. When the staff was feeling like they had been robbed of agency and a voice, one signatory wrote at the time, the letter "gave us a bit [of] our choice back. "

Two days later the ultimatum collapsed. On March 27 Aue announced that he would "acknowledge the signatures on the Protocol letter as expressions of frustrations with the process and form, while still acknowledging their separate commitments to the contents of the mandate." He added: "If I had the opportunity to redo it, I would certainly handle many aspects differently," and that he took his "personal responsibility for ensuring that the EF becomes an organization where nothing like this happens again very seriously." All fifty-three signatories initially kept their jobs and it seemed like the letter worked.

A Lot Changes in 20 Minutes

At 8:10 on the morning of Monday, April 6, Aue posted a long statement to all staff on how decisions get made at the Foundation. Concerns, it said, may be raised "as input for their decisions, not as an attempt to pressure." "Tone is important here, especially in public spaces. If you find yourself getting heated, you are probably moving away from input and more towards pressure." If reasoned input does not produce change and that "damages your confidence in the EF," then "it is likely better for both you, the EF, and Ethereum if you look for a way to contribute to Ethereum from outside the EF."

At 8:30 he fired Trent Van Epps, the first of the letter's two organizers, on a video call, without explanation. At 9:00 he fired Fulton. Seven months earlier Beiko had rated her "greatly exceeding expectations" on performance review and given her a 21.9 percent raise.

On the call she was told the decision was his alone, that her "track record is good," that she had "broad support among colleagues," and that she had "not been found lacking" in any of her responsibilities. He declined to say why she was being fired. He offered instead to keep paying her salary for a year, provided she worked somewhere else. Thirteen days earlier she had told Aue, Wang, Miyaguchi, and People Operations in writing that she had been diagnosed with cancer, that she was beginning treatment, and that she asked that her employment status not be altered. Aue, Wang, and Miyaguchi had not replied.

That afternoon she received a separation agreement releasing every claim she had, with a Singapore arbitration clause, and three days to sign it or be terminated with "no severance or other benefit." Her health insurance ran out at the end of the month. Of the fifty-three people who signed the letter, the two who were fired were those who helped organize the effort.

Within the week, two of the Protocol cluster's three coordinators, Beiko among them, were announced as leaving and the third went on sabbatical. Co-executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang, who had called the dissent "critical for the future of the EF" began a leave of absence the day of the firings and resigned in June. The departures continued through September: the Protocol Support team had been dismantled; and most of the letter's signatories had resigned or been let go.

Whatever Aue thought of the Mandate’s text, what he enforced was compliance not the Foundation's declared principles.

Principles as Fashion

As an external observer at the time, it seemed like a bizarre self-inflicted wound by the Foundation which resulted in many of the respected long-term contributors being forced out, whether by firing or by making it so that staying was untenable. The most dedicated people in the ecosystem who had spent the decade alongside me were all disappearing en masse without explanation, sometimes hinting that they were under NDA. I couldn't account for it, but the record laid out in the complaint accounts for the gaps in detail, in leadership's own words.

Three and a half weeks after the firings, Buterin explained them to Fulton, in a recorded conversation. He conceded that staff should have had weeks to decide and not be pressured to answer within three days. Asked how he would regard an organization that fired an employee for organizing immediately after she disclosed a cancer diagnosis, he did not dispute the premise. The question, he said, was "what kind of dynamics you want to reward inside of the EF," because "if you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of a show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF."

The Mandate states that Ethereum exists to free people from the exact thing Buterin cited as the reasoning behind the decision: "power relations that are imposed without true consent or where dissent imposes a heavy price." The same document says the Foundation works "without caprice or coercion."

Set the two documents side by side, the Mandate and the complaint, and the irony is overwhelming.

Who's Really Responsible?

I have tremendous respect for Vitalik Buterin. He is thoughtful, analytical, and kind, but he has been, from the beginning, a better judge of ideas than of people.

My own read is that he trusted the wrong person at the wrong moment, and that Aue was more persuasive to him than the researchers, the core developers, and his even board member and co-executive director, Hsiao-Wei Wang, who made it clear that this pointless conflict put the future of the whole organization at risk.

But to be clear, Buterin was not a bystander: he defended keeping the license, defended the aesthetic when Wang objected to it, called the abrupt rollout deliberate, and afterward explained the firings in terms of what behavior the EF should reward.

Naturally, others will draw their own conclusions from the complaint, but either way the institutional facts remain the same. Seventy-nine employees asked for one sentence to be removed. Half the Protocol cluster declined to be coerced and said so politely. The board overrode the first, accepted the second, and then removed the two people who had written it. Whether that was one man’s temperament or a shared conviction, it is what the institution did, and the institution carries Ethereum’s name and Vitalik's blessing.

Course Correction

I am writing this because the Foundation told us how it would behave when it got something big wrong, and that paragraph is the way out: "We also admit when we get things, particularly big things, wrong, with humility, grace, and an honest and clear explanation of why our views have changed and what our new views are."

If the Ethereum Foundation wants to regain legitimacy with the people who are actually building this protocol every day, it should act in accordance with the Mandate's principles and take responsibility for what it did wrong and demonstrate it with action.

It should start with a statement from the board that the ultimatum was wrong, that treating a respectful collective objection as a threat was wrong, and that the firings of April 6 were wrong, in those words. Aue wrote half of this on March 27 in his own words.

Then fix the internal culture that suppresses open discussion and any form of dissent. The Foundation is not a soulless company. It is a steward defending its legitimacy, and its legitimacy is worth more than whatever it costs to make things right with a cancer patient it fired without giving a reason.

Take the license out of the Mandate in order to show your own staff and community the respect it deserved from the start. That draft is permanently on-chain, but a new version can also go on-chain which shows the organization's leaders care more about principle than achieving blind obedience from the people building this protocol.

The people who signed that letter are true believers who were willing to stand up for Ethereum’s values. The EF employed people who will tell power no, politely, and keep working. Many of them are gone now, and the Foundation is poorer for it. The ones who remain are watching what happens next, and so is everyone who builds on Ethereum.

The board owes the people who stayed what the Mandate promised them: an admission that the ultimatum and the April 6 firings were wrong, made “with humility, grace, and an honest and clear explanation,” and whatever consequences follow from it. That is the only way the Foundation becomes a place where people can “disagree clearly without cruelty” again and keep their jobs.

The clause Aue agreed to include in the published Mandate pledges, “May the Foundation fall on its own sword if it fails to uphold its solemn promise to Ethereum.” He told the EF staff that anyone who could not uphold the Mandate should “make the only honorable decision and leave the EF.” By the standard he set for everyone else, the honorable decision is now his to make.