Original title: "Working more and earning more money, Ethereum researchers are "restaking" themselves"

Original author: Alex Liu, Foresight News

"The Ethereum Foundation has more than 300 people, and only a few of them serve as consultants to the Eigen Foundation, which will not affect its neutrality." It sounds reasonable, if these "a few of them" do not include Dankrad Feist and Justin Drake.

Recently, several researchers from the Ethereum Foundation have successively disclosed to the public that they have accepted the "consultant" position of the Eigen Foundation, the entity behind the re-staking agreement EigenLayer, and will receive valuable EIGEN tokens. This has caused great controversy in the community and set off heated discussions. The author believes that a detailed study of the ins and outs of this storm can help everyone understand the dilemma faced by Ethereum developers and the community at the level of "social consensus".

Previous: The Ethereum community has started to quarrel

As developers/opinion leaders with significant influence in the Ethereum ecosystem, such as Vitalik, have turned to Farcaster to be active, the Ethereum community, which has no representative figures like Solana's Mert who can bring heat to the community by continuously outputting opinions/confronting people, has not been very "lively" for quite some time. But now the calm has finally been broken - Péter Szilágyi, the head of development of Ethereum's main execution client Geth, and Dankrad Feist, a core member of the Ethereum Foundation, have quarreled.

The quarrel was mainly about MEV and development progress. Péter was dissatisfied with the current status of Ethereum development. Regarding MEV, Peter believes that it was originally an attack on Ethereum, but by sharing the benefits with stakeholders, the problem is no longer a problem.

This reflects a difficulty beyond development: as the protocol becomes larger and more decentralized, there will be more and more participants, or stakeholders. How to coordinate and balance the interests of all parties?

Finally, Vitalik posted a post on X to join the discussion.

Main topic: Potential conflicts of interest cause controversy

Vitalik then praised the Ethereum community's "open discussion". But in a thread on this topic, the legendary influencer Cobie of the crypto community replied to him, "How do you feel about the core developers or researchers of the Ethereum Foundation receiving life-changing huge rewards from projects built on Ethereum and becoming consultants? These projects may have conflicts of interest with Ethereum now or in the future, such as - purely theoretical of course - assuming EigenLayer."

Cobie obviously knows something about it, rather than just casually mentioning EigenLayer. Because shortly after he posted the inquiry, Justin Drake, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, posted a long article on X to disclose that he would become an advisor to the Eigen Foundation and receive millions of dollars in token incentives, "worth more than the sum of all his other personal assets."

Why did this matter cause such a big controversy? Can't a person serve in multiple institutions at the same time? The answer is: Yes. But what if the entity you work for may have a conflict of interest? Things get complicated.

Restaking, or re-staking, is generally considered to introduce additional risks to Ethereum at the protocol level. Simply put, it is not necessarily beneficial to Ethereum, and there may even be potential conflicts of interest - such as additional slashes when providing security guarantees for third parties, and in the worst case, users who lose assets may even try to fork Ethereum.

Regarding Restaking, a popular explanation is to let one asset do multiple jobs and get multiple benefits. In this way, these Ethereum researchers seem to be "restaking" themselves and trying to do multiple jobs. Restaking is dangerous, and working for others may be reversed by the boss. (The company is unreliable, and the principal was confiscated by "Slash")

Although these researchers all claim that the role of consultants is personal and does not represent the Ethereum Foundation, they are fully capable of dissenting opinions on EigenLayer and are ready to end their advisory positions at any time if EigenLayer takes a direction that goes against the interests of Ethereum. But as community members ask themselves

"Do you really think that receiving huge compensation from an organization with different incentives than Ethereum will not affect your decision-making?" Will the fact that researchers serve as consultants for interested projects affect the neutral positioning of the Ethereum Foundation?

As the article begins: "There are more than 300 people in the Ethereum Foundation, and only a few of them serve as advisors to the Eigen Foundation, which will not affect its neutrality." It sounds reasonable, if these "several of them" do not include Dankrad Feist and Justin Drake. Because Dankrad Feist and Justin Drake are the people who can have a general impact on Ethereum - Justin Drake plays a vital role in the layout of Ethereum 2.0, and this year, apart from the ETF, the biggest narrative of Ethereum is the Cancun upgrade, which implements proto-danksharding and lays the foundation for the realization of real danksharding in the future. That's right, the expansion plan finally selected by the Ethereum mainnet was proposed by Dankrad Feist and named after him.

Such people will receive millions of dollars in EIGEN tokens and charge fees to criticize EigenLayer. Whether the Eigen Foundation is doing charity for public welfare, please judge for yourself.

Later, Péter Szilágyi and Dankrad Feist had another argument, and Péter asked, "Who decides which protocols are necessary and which are not?" Dankrad replied, "Obviously, me."

Then Péter Szilágyi sarcastically said, "I thought it was EigenLayer, my mistake."

Dankrad did not reply again.

Analysis: EigenLayer uses tokens to exchange for allies

We have no evidence to prove the purpose of EigenLayer giving so many tokens to recruit "consultants", but we can observe such an interesting fact.

10 months ago, Bankless did a podcast titled "Restaking Alignment". There were 7 people, most of whom had a relatively negative attitude towards restaking (including Justin Drake, Dankrad).

Now the 6 people in the picture below all hold interests in EigenLayer (through angel investment, advisory positions or employment relationships), and the seventh person in the podcast is Vitalik.

Sreeram may be the best ever in this regard.

Reflection: Better and more transparent information disclosure

The Ethereum Foundation is essentially a non-profit organization. In the Crypto industry, such foundations are more opaque and lack basic information disclosure than traditional companies or foundations. This incident exposed this point, and community members also raised related concerns. Some pointed out:

Compared with individual employees not disclosing their investments, I have a bigger problem with the Ethereum Foundation as a whole.

For many years, the Ethereum Foundation should have disclosed financial reports, organizational charts and other information.

A well-managed organization will require its employees to disclose.

In the current crisis of trust, the Ethereum Foundation should make improvements and bring better and more transparent information disclosure. Otherwise, some people have already started discussing: "Should the Ethereum Foundation be dissolved?"

Extension: Social consensus and decentralization

Looking back on the incident, the individuals and organizations of the Ethereum Foundation suffered a crisis of trust. Community members doubted their neutrality and feared that they would take Ethereum in the wrong direction for their own interests.

In my opinion, this is actually a good thing. Different groups have different interests, which leads to differences, and an Ethereum that advances in debate will obviously be more decentralized at the social consensus level than an Ethereum that is "closely united" around the Ethereum Foundation. Doubts bring reflection and progress.

Decentralization only at the technical and code levels is not enough. We should pay attention to decentralization at the social consensus level. Imagine if there is only one decentralized computer in the world, is it considered a kind of centralization?

Ethereum is a pioneer in smart contract platforms, but it is also burdened by historical baggage, such as the less advanced EVM. It now chooses a modular architecture and a Rollup-centric roadmap, which is to use the main network as a foundation to allow teams with differences to move forward in debate, each building their own "decentralized computer" solution, and jointly achieve a better decentralized future.

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