Testing Employee Loyalty with "Meme Culture"? The Ethereum Foundation Has Really Stirred Up a Storm This Time

The Ethereum Foundation is in trouble again.

On November 4, former employee Nixo filed a lawsuit against the Ethereum Foundation, Vitalik, and others in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. She alleges that she was fired by the Ethereum Foundation thirteen days after she informed management in writing that she had cancer, and twelve days after she helped organize a "joint petition" among foundation employees.

What also pushed this matter into the spotlight was a "seppuku license" that appeared in the foundation's mission manifesto.

The Mandate

The controversial document is called "The Ethereum Foundation Mandate." Here, "Mandate" can be understood as a mission statement, answering why the foundation exists, what it will do going forward, and which principles cannot be compromised.

The core of this document is not hard to understand. Ethereum must uphold censorship resistance, open source, privacy protection, and security, and the foundation is responsible for helping these principles endure over the long term. It also explicitly states that the foundation is not Ethereum's parent, owner, or ruler. Everyone can build whatever they want on this network without first obtaining permission from some center.

The problem lies on page 11.

The illustration includes a section titled "Source Seppuku License," which links failing to fulfill commitments, or modifying or deleting the license, with "ending one's life with a sword." Next to it is a sentence to the effect that if the foundation betrays its solemn commitment to Ethereum, it is willing to take its own life.

This is a joke from the Milady cultural circle. Milady is a set of anime-style avatar NFTs launched by Remilia in 2021. The community formed around these avatars is keen on shitposting, provocation, and opposing moral censorship, and many members also treat it as a cultural identity for expressing ideas about freedom. Vitalik had previously used a Milady avatar, so the appearance of this aesthetic in a foundation document has its cultural background.

Management also clearly explained that the seppuku text is an artistic and cultural reference and need not be taken literally. The employee confirmation form later specifically added that the commitment has nothing to do with actually committing seppuku.

But some employees did not accept making a joke of this. According to the complaint, after a draft was sent to Ethereum Foundation employees for feedback in late February, 79 people voted to demand the removal of this section, and some mentioned that they had lost a colleague to suicide the previous year. Vitalik had promised to revise the controversial content, yet the official version published on March 13 still retained it.

For employees, the discussion began to shift from "is this meme appropriate" to "do our opinions actually count."

On March 20, then co-executive director Bastian Aue required all employees to state their position within a deadline. There were only two options: commit to carrying out the Mandate, or apply for compensation and leave. Not submitting a statement was also treated as choosing to leave.

Nixo was then responsible for ecosystem protocol support, participating in coordinating Ethereum core developer discussions and upgrade processes. She and colleague Trent Van Epps drafted a joint letter, which ultimately received 53 signatures, about half of the protocol department.

The content of this letter is crucial. Employees supported the overall direction of the Mandate and committed to continuing to work according to the principles of censorship resistance and individual autonomy, but refused to confirm it under the pressure of losing their jobs, and explicitly wrote that everyone would continue to perform their duties and had not resigned.

On March 27, Aue initially accepted this form of expression, recognized the signatories' commitment to the mission, and acknowledged that the handling needed improvement. However, on April 6, the two organizers of the joint letter were notified of their dismissal one after the other. Nixo had disclosed in writing to management thirteen days earlier that she had cancer; she says that during the dismissal call, Aue also affirmed her work record but refused to explain the reason for the dismissal.

This is also the truly weighty part of the lawsuit. Nixo's allegations involve discrimination, retaliation, and medical leave rights, far beyond "someone didn't understand the seppuku joke." The complaint also records that lawyers for the foundation's Singapore entity had previously denied wrongdoing, coercion, and retaliation, and argued that the separation agreement and arbitration clause were valid.

The Milady Community's "Purification"

Why does the Milady side support this document so strongly?

In the understanding of Milady creator Charlotte Fang and others, crypto is first and foremost a movement to protect freedom. Code can make transactions harder to block, but an industry can also slowly come to accept censorship culturally, beginning to decide who is qualified to participate based on whether their speech is respectable and whether their associates are appropriate.

Remilia calls resistance to this change the "Cypherpunk Purity Spiral." Cypherpunks can be simply understood as people who want to use cryptographic technology to protect privacy and reduce dependence on centralized power. The so-called "purification" is the continual pulling of crypto back to the principles of freedom of speech, markets, association, information, and thought. In this self-narrative, Milady plays the role of cultural resistance.

So offensiveness is precisely useful. Whether a person can tolerate avatars and jokes they hate is treated by them as a way to test ideas about freedom. Charlotte's response to this controversy follows the same line: he calls Milady a cultural weapon for advancing cypherpunk values, and interprets Vitalik's use of it as a correction of the organization's internal direction.

Milady community core member Bonkle, in an article as early as May 23, already evaluated the requirement to sign the Mandate as an effective screening. By his standard, salary, friendships, and personal comfort cannot outweigh crypto's mission to protect freedom.

He also offered a further explanation. Developers and funding have long revolved around the foundation, which itself forms a center. People leaving the foundation to continue building at different organizations can instead disperse this dependence. Therefore, he sees personnel departures as an opportunity for decentralization. Leaving the foundation, one can still build Ethereum at other organizations.

By the time this lawsuit sparked discussion, Bonkle's response was even more intense. He elevated the incident to the level of freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of association being tested, and questioned why state courts should be resorted to for personal disputes. In his narrative, Ethereum is preparing to resist stronger future government and tech power, and the organization needs people who can withstand conflict.

These statements illustrate a distinct position within Milady: they see this controversy as a choice of direction and welcome the screening taking place.

Lawyer Gabriel Shapiro also believes that it is normal for an organization to require employees to identify with its mission, and that "seppuku" obviously cannot be understood literally. He also criticized the plaintiff's act of publicly releasing a phone recording without Vitalik's consent, suspecting that some employees were laying the groundwork for litigation from the start. This is his judgment of the parties' motives.

Freedom?

Milady's reminder about crypto culture has merit. A censorship-resistant network must accommodate expressions that make people uncomfortable; a system that can only accept mild speech and familiar viewpoints will find it hard to preserve openness under pressure. Ethereum's value cannot be measured only by coin price, revenue, and market share.

The foundation likewise has the right to choose its direction. It needs employees to carry out clear work objectives, and not every decision can be discussed endlessly. Willingness to devote oneself to censorship-resistance and privacy technology should be a basic requirement for joining such an organization.

But in this conflict, employees had already expressed support for these directions. What the joint letter rejected was the method of forced declarations, and Nixo also made clear that, compared with the association between seppuku and Milady, what bothered her more was that near-unanimous opinions were ignored. Categorizing all these people as lacking commitment to the mission is in fact a disregard of their real concerns.

According to the complaint, Vitalik acknowledged in a later call that employees should have been given several weeks to consider; but he also worried that once "making a big fuss" really worked, similar "troublemaking" behavior would intensify. This is management's concern. But after accepting the employees' joint petition and confirming the direction everyone agreed on, then firing the two organizers who initiated the joint letter—what signal does that send to those who remain?

The Mandate document itself requires leaders to treat disagreement kindly, patiently explain difficult decisions, and acknowledge and explain when they make major mistakes. Employees asking for their voices to be taken seriously is consistent with these commitments.

The foundation has the right to uphold the cypherpunk mission and the right to choose the Milady aesthetic, but it should not use obedience to a certain aesthetic and management style as proof of whether employees identify with freedom.

Judging from the handling process presented in the complaint, requiring employees to pledge loyalty within a deadline and then firing the organizers of dissent undermined the values this manifesto sought to uphold.

Ethereum needs people who dare to say no to external power. The foundation also needs to allow employees to dare to say no to their own leaders.