'Steep disconnect' between Ethereum Foundation and crypto community

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ETH’s not having a good time.

And it didn’t just start with this weekend’s selloff. We’ve got “wartime” Vitalik Buterin, criticisms of the Ethereum Foundation, not to mention price action (it’s down 10% over the past week).

On the positive side, at least Eric Trump still seems bullish and — in a now-edited post on X — initially encouraged folks to buy ETH, adding “you can thank me later.” But I’m not sure that’s the type of support anybody wants right now.

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There’s a lot of discussion about what went wrong and how to right the ship. The recent sentiment is nothing new, Tribe Capital’s Evan Park told me.

“When I was at Devcon, I noticed a steep disconnect between the foundation focusing on infrastructure, while retail users and the broader crypto community were demanding exciting new applications. On the one hand, ETH L2s like Base, Ink, and MegaETH are positioned to onboard new applications and users. However, what Ethereum leaders need to realize is that they face accelerating competition from established L1s like Solana and new L1s like Berachain and Monad, which are poised to dominate mindshare over the next year,” he explained.

Even with Buterin signaling a “greater sense of urgency,” we’re in a ‘can’t stop, won’t stop’ moment in the market. Berachain, just yesterday, announced that its mainnet is launching tomorrow.

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In my conversation with Blockworks Research’s Ryan Connor, he explained that he and his team had initially been “excited” about Max Resnick’s potential cultural impact at ETH. But when that didn’t pan out, and Resnick jumped to Solana, the excitement dissipated.

The situation now is “pretty dire” post-Resnick but Connor told me that there are still ways to, well, make ETH great again.

“Bringing execution back to the base layer is the very simple way of putting it. How do you do that? You scale it technically. You compete with the L2s. You change the culture of the ETH organization, the people who are shipping the upgrades, and the app developers that live on that chain. [It’s] way easier said than done. You have to basically abandon these like very niche political, philosophical views that many people in that ecosystem hold [though] I think it’s clear over a multi-year period that they’re not willing to do,” he explained.

That includes leaving the “hardware requirements” focus at the door.

While there are technical things that can be done, it’s going to come down to changing the culture. And that, Connor acknowledged, is not going to be an easy battle to win.

Connor compared it to the Department of Motor Vehicles: It doesn’t matter who’s in charge of the department, they can’t just switch on “wartime” mode and change everything. It just, unfortunately, doesn’t work like that.

Whether or not Buterin and EF are politicked to the point of being similar to a government department remains to be seen.

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