‘Steep disconnect’ between Ethereum Foundation and crypto community

Tribe Capital’s Evan Park and Blockworks Research’s Ryan Connor explain the issues with Ethereum and outline potential fixes

share


This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


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. 

Loading Tweet..

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.

Loading Tweet..

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. 


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Research

article-image

The trading card game will use Immutable’s zkEVM chain

article-image

From Ethereum primitive to multichain coordination layer, Symbiotic, EigenLayer, Puffer and MoreMarkets are evolving restaking

article-image

Satoshi’s “moved on to other things” is Bitcoin’s “return some video tapes”

article-image

Base’s Jesse Pollak spoke to Blockworks about his bullish case for content coins and how he’s approaching a real-time learning curve

article-image

Blockworks managing editor Michael McSweeney and news editor Katherine Ross give their thoughts on content coins and their viability.

article-image

Markets seem to sense the Fed has another tough decade ahead of it — one spent fighting for a certain cause