A leaked pitch to reshape Ethereum’s leadership exposed deep divisions over politics, power and ether’s static price
U
S crypto developer Danny Ryan submitted a proposal in November 2024 to Vitalik Buterin, the founder and symbolic leader of Ethereum, a prominent blockchain powering the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. Ryan, who had worked for seven years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), Ethereum’s de facto governing body, suggested that Ethereum could be on the cusp of an era-defining shift.
Since its founding in 2014, the foundation had prioritized technical upgrades and had avoided centralizing power while its user base was growing, but Ethereum had now grown up, and the cryptocurrency world around it had grown up, too. The EF could now “exercise a stronger voice” without compromising its ethos of decentralization, Ryan said – and he was open to leading that charge if appointed as the foundation’s new executive director.
Ryan told the Guardian that he could see how political tides were changing “overnight”, which informed his proposal. In part, his thesis drew from personal experience: He’d been served by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in March 2024, only to have the case summarily dropped, which he suspects was a pragmatic move to avoid alienating the tech sector during Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. By November, with Donald Trump poised to return to the White House as the self-appointed “crypto president”, Ryan could identify “a massive American-shaped opportunity”.
