Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author | Dingdang ( @XiaMiPP )

"My total income in the first six years of Ethereum (during which time ETH went from $0 to a market capitalization of $450 billion) was $625,000 (before taxes and without any incentives)."

—Ethereum core developer and main maintainer of the Geth client @peter_szilagyi

This sentence comes from a letter written a year and a half ago to the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation (EF). Reading it now, it feels like a delayed-explosion bomb, revealing a long-hidden crack within Ethereum.

In the letter, he openly criticized the Ethereum Foundation's (EF) internal compensation system and governance structure, calling himself "a useful fool in an unbalanced system." He accused the EF of being bribed, exploiting developers, and forming a closed elite circle where idealists became workers and those in power became the ones who divided the pie.

He mentioned that he had rejected a $5 million acquisition offer from the other party who wanted to "blacken the Geth team" and take control for themselves; at the same time, EF secretly funded new teams and marginalized old members.

Even Sonic co-founder and DeFi pioneer Andre Cronje (AC) and Polygon founder and CEO Sandeep Nailwal have expressed skepticism about the Ethereum Foundation. AC bluntly stated, "I simply don't understand. Who exactly is the Ethereum Foundation (EF) funding/supporting? When I was developing on Ethereum, I burned over 700 ETH just on deployment and infrastructure. I tried to contact EF but never received a response. No business connections, no funding, zero support, not even a forwarding. Since the Ethereum Foundation isn't supporting core developers (like Péter Szilágyi and the Geth team) or the most vocal Layer 2 supporters (like Sandeep and Polygon), where are all these resources going?"

At every market cycle peak, people often see EF selling tokens—official reports describe this as a "financial management measure," but each sale is accompanied by a sharp market correction. This is also one of the criticisms leveled against the Ethereum Foundation by the crypto community. The Ethereum Foundation's 2024 report lists L1 R&D expenditures of approximately $32.1 million in 2023, representing 30% of annual spending. This seems reasonable. But if you ask more closely, which teams and projects did this money actually go to? And how much remained for the developers building the underlying infrastructure? No one can answer. The core team that truly supports Ethereum's security and performance is overdrawing on their ideals and patience.

In Ethereum's tenth year, the "heroes" who once defined its technical direction are leaving one after another. Below, we'll examine how these "undervalued heroes" quietly departed, and whether they took with them their personal careers or the future technological defense of Ethereum.

Dankrad Feist: The Godfather of Ethereum Scaling

On October 17th, Dankrad Feist, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, announced his departure from the organization to join Tempo, a blockchain project co-incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. However, Feist emphasized that this wasn't a complete departure; he would continue to serve as a research advisor to the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on areas such as Layer 1 scaling, blobs, and user experience improvements. However, this "partial departure" itself symbolizes another shift in technological dynamics: Ethereum is no longer the sole "ideal country."

In 2018, Feist began working for the Ethereum Foundation on a part-time basis. In 2019, he officially became a full-time core researcher. At the Ethereum Foundation, Feist focuses on scaling Ethereum, with a particular focus on applied cryptography, secure multi-party computation (MPC), and zero-knowledge proofs.

Feist's most famous contribution is undoubtedly "Danksharding," a sharding design that bears his name. This design aims to improve Ethereum's data availability through an MPC-friendly proof-of-custody protocol and a new sharding structure.

Related reading: Ethereum's "Godfather of Scaling" has jumped ship! A look back at Dankrad Feist's legendary journey

Before joining Tempo, Dankrad Feist actually announced in May 2024 together with another core researcher Justin Drake that he would join EigenLayer as an advisor. He joined the company in his personal capacity and did not represent the Ethereum Foundation.

Justin Drake previously revealed that consulting services offered him significant EIGEN token incentives, potentially exceeding the combined value of all his other assets (primarily ETH). Feist also stated that he received a significant amount of tokens from EigenLayer. Therefore, compensation structure and incentives may have been a key factor in his departure.

Danny Ryan: A key figure in the proof-of-stake transition

On September 13, 2024, Ryan published a lengthy post on GitHub, announcing his "step away" from the Ethereum ecosystem after seven years of contributions. He described his work at EF as an "all-consuming experience," saying it was the greatest part of his life, but that he was ready to "relinquish" to make room for his personal health and well-being.

Posts on X.com called for Danny Ryan to return to lead EF. An informal voting website, votedannyryan.com, even emerged, with 97% of 335 voters (holding over 51,198 ETH, worth $164 million) supporting him as the new EF leader. Ryan briefly considered returning to EF but ultimately declined. In early March 2025, Ryan announced he would join the RWA protocol Etherealize as co-founder and president, collaborating with CEO Vivek Raman (a former Morgan Stanley bond trader).

Ryan was a key figure in Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) . He was instrumental in the launch of the Beacon Chain and the completion of The Merge—all of these historic milestones.

• Beacon Chain Launch (2021) : As Lead Coordinator, Ryan oversaw the launch of Beacon Chain, the first step in Ethereum’s PoS, introducing a validator mechanism that replaced energy-intensive mining.
• The Merge Upgrade (September 2022) : Ryan is the lead coordinator of this upgrade, which merges the mainnet with the Beacon Chain and switches to a PoS consensus. This not only reduces Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99.95%, but also paves the way for subsequent upgrades such as sharding.

Barnabé Monnot: Key Promoter of EIP-1559

In December 2024, Barnabé Monnot officially left the Ethereum Foundation. Following his departure, Monnot founded Defipunk Labs, which focuses on DeFi protocol design and is partially funded by Paradigm. However, he continues to support Ethereum Foundation projects, such as the Open Intents Framework (OIF) interoperability activation, and is recruiting builders at the Edge City Patagonia event.

Monnot is a senior researcher in the Ethereum ecosystem specializing in protocol economics and mechanism design. Around the beginning of 2021, as a PhD candidate in game theory and systems research, Monnot joined EF's Robust Incentives Group (RIG). Previously, he co-founded hackingresear.ch and actively participated in community events such as EthCC and Devcon, promoting open source research and being a key driver of upgrades such as EIP-1559 . His contribution to EIP-1559 directly optimized the transaction fee mechanism, driving a 20% reduction in Ethereum fees by 2025.

Reconstructing order: from ideal rift to institutional reflection

The Ethereum Foundation was once the spiritual center of the entire ecosystem. It represented a continuation of idealism and was once the most trusted sanctuary for the technical community. However, over the past few years, the EF's image has gradually faded. It has been criticized for being overly obsessed with long-term research and ignoring practical needs; it has been accused of being centralized, closed, and having opaque decision-making. More and more developers are beginning to question whether this supposedly decentralized organization has become a new kind of "center."

However, driven by the dual forces of continued public pressure and "brain drain", EF seems to have finally begun to "seek change". At the beginning of 2025, its internal governance and personnel structure began to loosen. On March 10, Hsiao-Wei Wang officially joined the board of directors of the Ethereum Foundation. This female technical leader, who grew from a core researcher to an ambassador for the Asia-Pacific community and then to a co-executive director, complements Nethermind founder Tomasz Stańczak, symbolizing EF's governance transformation from "Vitalik's unipolar authority" to a "technology + infrastructure dual-track system". Wang Xiaowei is deeply involved in sharding expansion and the Asia-Pacific ecosystem, while Tomasz focuses on client development and MEV mechanism optimization. This combination of "Eastern technology geeks + Western infrastructure architects" is considered to be EF's proactive choice to deal with ecological fragmentation. Related reading: " Who will save Ethereum from its "mid-life crisis"? Can Wang Xiaowei help? "

On June 3rd, the Ethereum Foundation announced a major restructuring of its research and development team, laying off some staff and renaming the department "Protocol" to focus on the core challenges of protocol design. This restructuring was intended to address ongoing community criticism of the Foundation's management and strategic direction.

However, whether this reform can truly address fundamental issues remains unknown. After all, the EF's biggest challenge has never been personnel structure or budget allocation, but rather a deeper question: once an idealistic system is institutionalized, how can it continue to demonstrate its decentralization?

When Feist, Ryan, Monnot and others left, they did not betray their ideals but were driven out by the institutionalized version of their ideals.

Therefore, this separation itself became the most silent and powerful protest against the "ideal country".