The transparency of the Ethereum Foundation raises questions and the official weak response

The Ethereum Foundation is facing a crisis of transparency.

Recently, the Ethereum community questioned the transparency of the Ethereum Foundation.

Community questioning

Eric Hub, founder of the Ethereum community and EthHub founder, questioned the transparency of the Ethereum Foundation. He believes that the Ethereum Foundation can disclose information on the overall number of employees, organizational structure, average employee income, annual expenditures of the organization, and outlook for the future by making quarterly reports.

Conner also said:

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All of this information can be provided anonymously, which will increase the transparency of the Foundation. But without these basic facts, (community) is even hard to form recommendations. If someone just wants to provide data at a specific time, I would be happy to help you create a web page on ethhub.

Conner's questioning is echoed by other community members. A community member named “DCinvestor” said that he agreed with Conner that Conner was asking for some basic data, and the Ethereum Foundation could not even provide such basic data; the Ethereum Foundation wanted to do it. Larger and more professional, it should be more transparent and decentralize power.

Financial reporter Camila Russo also questioned the matter. She said that this is one of the biggest problems facing the Foundation. The total assets of the Foundation and how the funds are currently used should be reflected in the report. These reports should be properly audited by financial companies.

Russo also pointed out that because the Ethereum Foundation is too fragmented, much information is not available to community members:

People are not even sure they should ask what these costs are because the foundation is very 'decentralized' (irony), but the problem is that the community simply doesn't know what's going on.

Official response

In response to community skepticism, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake issued a Twitter response saying that the foundation has about 100 employees and has developed a foundation member structure chart; including employee compensation, operating expenses and project funding. The annual expenditure is about 20 million US dollars.

(Organization Chart)

It is worth mentioning that the organizational chart updated by Justin Drake was six months ago (September 2018), which he himself called "outdated"; in addition, for $20 million in expenses. , did not give specific details.

In this regard, community members do not buy it. Community member Aftab 'DCinvestor' Hossain pointed out that the member structure chart of the Ethereum Foundation is more like a relationship diagram. There is no direct supervision and supervision relationship between all people. The management structure is rather confusing.

This is not the first time people have accused the Ethereum Foundation of transparency. Carver, a member of the Ethereum community, told the Odaily Planet Daily that when the Ethereum and the Ether Classics were hard-forked, members of the community had accused the Ethereum Foundation and its members of promoting a hard fork because they could get more after the fork. More forked coins.

“After many members of the Ethereum Foundation announced their holdings, they proved that they have no direct interest in the fork.” Carver said that the reason for the community’s suspicion is that the Ethereum Foundation did not have a Announce the relevant interests.

In addition, the use of funds by the Ethereum Foundation is not transparent. The Ethereum Foundation has provided financial support for multiple ETH projects, but community members are not aware of specific funding limits and details of fund usage. Community members are also unclear about the selection criteria for funding projects, such as the Aragon project, which is questioned by community members.

Recently, Ethereum community activist and SpankChain CEO Ameen Soleimani proposed to limit the resources of the Ethereum Aragon project to invest in Polkadot. Soleimani pointed out that Aragon received various funds from the Ethereum community and other aspects of support, but now it is necessary to build an AragonChain on the Ethereum competitor Polkadot. Many of the Aragon token holders are interested in the Ethereum ecology. Fang, Aragon should be asked to focus on Ethereum related development.

For the Ethereum Foundation not to disclose the use of funds, Chen Yiwu, who worked at the Ethereum Foundation, explained to the Odaily Planet Daily that the Ethereum Foundation will disclose the funding status when it first funded the project, and later to avoid different The projects are compared with each other, so they are not published.

Chen Yiwu added:

Last year, a large proportion of the funds were used to give the community a bonus to fund some projects, not to say that because of the increase in personnel costs or the increase in office expenses, excessive consumption was caused. After all, in the third year, many organizations of the Foundation are still sound, and there are suggestions (such as the publication of financial reports) to improve and become better.

Ethereum Foundation

In June 2014, the Ethereum Foundation was incorporated in Switzerland, a non-profit organization that manages funds raised in Ethereum sales to better serve Ethereum and the decentralized technology ecosystem.

Its primary but not the only focus is to facilitate the development of the Ethereum agreement and related technologies, as well as to support the use of Ethereum technologies and protocols. The Foundation also hosts a number of developer conferences on the Youtube channel, such as the previous core developer conference call for delaying the fork of Constantinople.

For the cryptocurrency community, transparency is one of its most important values, because only communities that understand transparency can gain the trust of their followers. It now appears that the Ethereum Foundation is facing a crisis of transparency.

Author: Qin Xiaofeng

Editor: Lu Xiaoming

Source: Planet Daily

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