This decade is the most colorful chapter in the history of blockchain. From a white paper to a global ecological network worth hundreds of billions of dollars; from the founding team of the "Eight Kings" to the isolated island breakout in the siege of "Ethereum killers"; from PoW to PoS, from technical laboratories to public infrastructure, Ethereum has completed its first reincarnation.

But its real story may have just begun.

Ethereum's "prequel"

The focus of this stage is the split and ideological conflict of the Ethereum founding team, which took place between 2014 and 2015. Vitalik Buterin, a programmer genius who always talks about technology, always answers "the eight co-founders" when asked what his biggest regret is in the Ethereum journey. Obviously, these eight founders who have long left are a concern of his.

When Vitalik had nothing but an idea, he welcomed the first 10 developers who responded and wanted to join, and selected 5 of them as the leadership, namely the 5 founders of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie and Amir Chetrit.

"This was obviously a serious wrong decision. They looked like good people and they wanted to help, so I thought, why not let them be the leadership?" Vitalik said when he looked back on his decision at the time.

Regarding the co-founders of Ethereum, this is a controversial topic, and there are many versions on the Internet. Even the relevant entries on Wikipedia are constantly edited and modified. After Vitalik "personally certified the 8 co-founders", the version widely recognized by the community is: after the 5 founders, three other developers became co-founders in 2014: Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke.

So far, Ethereum has completed the formation of eight core leaders in its early days, which is very similar to the "Eight Kings' Political Consultative Conference" implemented in the early Yuan and Qing dynasties to prevent the emperor (Khan) from being arbitrary.

Berlin "Pilgrimage"

In the documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story" launched last year, Vitalik recalled that he started his digital nomad life in mid-2013.

That was the prehistoric period of Ethereum, when Bitcoin was only $204, and it had been more than a year since Vitalik and Mihai Alisie founded Bitcoin Magazine. When building Ethereum, he traveled around the world because he was invited by communities around the world. In 2013 and 2014, Ethereum had headquarters in Switzerland and Berlin, and the white paper came out. Vitalik visited China to crowdfund Ethereum and visit miners.

Berlin is a city where he stays for a long time.

"Pilgrimage", Vitalik described himself as being active in the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin at the time. In the Bitcoin Kiez area of Berlin, cryptocurrency payments are very common. Within a few hundred meters, more than a dozen stores accept BTC payments. The "Room 77" restaurant and bar in the center of the community is also a community center, frequented by various people such as technical developers and political activists.

Room 77 restaurant and bar, photographed by Vitalik Buterin in 2013, now closed

Near this area, Ethereum rented an office, only 1.5 kilometers away from the "Room 77" restaurant and bar, and Vitalik can walk there in less than 20 minutes. If you search for the Ethereum office address, "Waldemarstraße 37A, 10999 Berlin," on Google Maps, you'll still see the address marked with the Ethereum Network Launch (July 30, 2015), along with a group photo of early Ethereum core members. In early 2014, most of Ethereum's core members centered around Vitalik, and the Ethereum team was highly cohesive. At the Miami Bitcoin Conference in January of that year, Vitalik and his co-founders presented their project to the world together for the first time. The result was a resounding success, officially launching Ethereum into the public eye. However, this also marked the beginning of a period of separation.

The first Ethereum party held in Miami in January 2014, source network

Swiss split

The whole year of 2014 was not so ordinary for the currency circle. The theft and bankruptcy of Mentougou caused the price of Bitcoin to fall sharply, from a peak of US$951.39 to US$309.87, a drop of 67%. It was also this year that CZ sold his house in Shanghai and became OK CTO with a price of US$600. SBF, a recent MIT graduate, was applying for a job on Wall Street.

For Ethereum, 2014 was a crucial year, a crypto version of the "Silicon Valley Exodus." The split at this meeting determined the future of Ethereum.

June 7, 2014. All Ethereum leadership members gathered in Switzerland for an internal meeting focused on the future of Ethereum. The meeting was held at Spaceship House in Switzerland. This was the birthplace of Ethereum and its first headquarters.

Spaceship house, Image source: Mihai Alisie

In fact, this topic had long been debated internally before this meeting, even forming factions. Tensions within Ethereum had grown over the question of whether to take venture capital funding or crowdfund from ordinary people; whether to pursue a profit-making path and become the Google of crypto, or to remain a purely non-profit organization?

Vitalik recalled this memory and said: "I was once persuaded to take Ethereum towards a more corporate route. But this thing never made me feel more comfortable, and even made me feel a little dirty."

It is said that this meeting that determined the "life and death" of Ethereum lasted a whole day, and Vitalik's decision was to choose a decentralized and non-profit route. "I tried to shirk responsibility throughout the process because I really didn't want to take responsibility, and in the end I had to clear some people."

This decision became the first turning point in the history of Ethereum, directly leading to the first major split of the team.

Charles Hoskinson was the most obvious opponent in this conflict. He has always advocated that Ethereum should become a commercial company, obtain funds through venture capital, and then develop into a profitable technology giant. "A horizontal power structure, then the cleaners and the top will be in the same position, which is crazy."

After leaving Ethereum, Charles founded the development company IOHK (later reorganized as a venture capital studio) and launched a Pos public chain Cardano. This has been the leading altcoin for many years. Its early focus on the Japanese market earned it the nickname "Japanese Ethereum." It's also considered the first generation of "Ethereum killers," consistently ranking in the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Shortly after Charles Hoskinson, Joseph Lubin also decided to step back from core development and founded the incubator ConsenSys. In 2022, ConsenSys secured a $450 million Series D funding round at a $7 billion valuation from top VCs including ParaFi Capital, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund II, and Microsoft. Over the years, ConsenSys has incubated numerous blockchain startups and built a rich ecosystem for Ethereum. The most successful is MetaMask, the plug-in wallet, the most commonly used wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, generating $300,000 in weekly revenue and nearly $300 million in total revenue. Like Joseph Lubin, Anthony is a wealthy second-generation investor whose motivation for participating in Ethereum is to make more money. Therefore, after Ethereum established a non-profit operating model, Anthony began to gradually retreat to the second line, in a semi-retired state, created Decentral, developed the Jaxx digital wallet, (finally decided to leave Ethereum in December 2015). The 2018 Forbes ranking estimated his net worth to be between $750 million and $1 billion, making him one of the top 20 richest people in the cryptocurrency field. However, in 2021, he announced that he decided to "clear out" and quit the circle based on personal safety considerations, and no longer funded any blockchain projects. He plans to devote himself to charity and other causes in the future.

Amir Chetrit left the Swiss conference due to criticism from other developers and founders for his lack of investment in Ethereum, and later devoted himself to other industries. Because he has always been anonymous and focused on privacy protection, there is very little information about him.

By the end of 2014, when the dust settled, only four of the original eight co-founders, Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Mihai Alisie and Jeffrey Wilcke, remained in the team.

Vitalik also reflected that he was too hasty in selecting the team and failed to consider the deep-seated differences among the members. The conflict of ideas and the collision of interests were far more complicated than he had imagined. "I did realize at that time that people in the cryptocurrency field were not all fighting for their ideals like me. Many people really just wanted to make a lot of money. The relationship between people is a practical problem."

The work has to continue, and Vitalik and others who stayed will continue to work. Fortunately for Vitalik, the foundation was taking over more work at the time, and his most important technical partner Gavin Wood was still fighting side by side with him.

The stumbling foundation

July 30, 2015, was the historic moment when the Ethereum mainnet was launched.

Some early members gathered in the Berlin office to witness Ethereum automatically starting after 1028201 blocks. A historic photo records some core members at the time. The people in the same frame with Vitalik include several core developers worth mentioning, including:

Gustav Simonsson was an early security consultant for Ethereum and played a vital role in the security of the Ethereum mainnet. After leaving Ethereum, he joined Dfinity and continued to work in the field of decentralized computing networks.

Christian Reitwiessner is the developer of the Solidity programming language, which provides the foundation for running smart contracts on Ethereum.

Liana Husikyan is also a key member of the Solidity development team. She is one of the lead developers of the Remix IDE. Remix is an integrated development environment for writing and deploying smart contracts, which helps simplify the smart contract development process.

Meanwhile, Christoph Jentzsch is the founder of Slock.it and one of the initiators of The DAO. Although a security vulnerability led to a fork in 2016, The DAO remains one of the most important experiments in blockchain history, promoting the exploration of decentralized governance models.

In addition, there are Fabian Vogelsteller, the author of ERC 20 and ERC 725, Vlad Zamfir, who promoted the transition of Ethereum from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake, and Jutta Steiner, the head of security at the Ethereum Foundation (who later became the CEO of Parity Technologies founded by Gavin).

There's another often-talked-about detail in this photo: Vitalik is tucked away in the corner, his face partially obscured, while his most important technical partner, Gavin Wood, is right in the center, looking more like a serious CEO.

In past photos, we've also seen the close working relationship between Vitalik and Gavin. However, no one could have predicted that the leader of the Ethereum engineering team and author of the Ethereum Yellow Paper would be the next to leave.

On November 28, 2014, Ethereum's Berlin office hosted DEVCON 0, a developer conference. Most members gathered in Berlin. Previously, they had communicated via Skype; this was their first face-to-face meeting. Photos from the meeting show Vitalik and Gavin Wood, hugging each other as always.

Just three months after the mainnet launched, Gavin Wood left, believing that Ethereum needed a more centralized engineering management model to be more efficient. However, Vitalik once again said "no." The significant disagreement ultimately prompted Gavin to leave the team and found his own company, Parity (Ethcore). Parity quickly became a key node operator on the Ethereum network, at one point controlling over 40% of the network's nodes. Gavin subsequently devoted his full attention to the development of Polkadot, long a major competitor to Ethereum. Gavin's departure directly weakened Ethereum's engineering capabilities. His leadership and technical expertise were crucial in Ethereum's early development. With his departure, the team's efficiency issues gradually became apparent. Ethereum's Geth client developers were globally distributed, and management and coordination issues frequently arose within the team, hampering development progress.

Vitalik, Jeff, and Gavin. Image source: Vitalik

However, after Gavin's departure, the remaining two co-founders, Mihai Alisie and Jeffrey Wilcke, both left during this period.

Mihai Alisie was one of Vitalik's earliest partners. Together, they co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. He helped establish Ethereum's legal framework in Switzerland and served as Vice Chairman of the Foundation. Mihai's departure was relatively natural, and he did not cause any major conflicts with the team. However, the core force behind Ethereum's early development was further reduced.

Jeffrey Wilcke gradually withdrew from the project after a huge amount of ETH was stolen from The Dao by hackers, causing Ethereum to fork. He handed over the development and technical supervision of the Ethereum Go client Geth to his assistant Péter Szilágyi, and turned his attention to game development and spending time with his family. This was around March 2018.

Jeffrey Wilcke cares for his children. Image source: internet

With the departure of these founding members, Vitalik's sense of isolation within Ethereum grew. Developers revealed that 2015 was a lonely and difficult year for Vitalik, who often spent the night in his Berlin office.

The First Generation of the Foundation

When the Ethereum Foundation was first established, many members were temporary appointments. For example, Kelley Becker and Frithjof Weinert briefly served as the Ethereum Foundation's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, respectively, overseeing the foundation's day-to-day operations and financial management, ensuring sufficient funds to support Ethereum's development and operations. However, their tenures were short-lived, and they soon left the foundation.

In 2015, while Ethereum was undergoing a massive recruitment drive, the foundation also took on more responsibilities, with Ethereum core developers being reassigned to the Ethereum Foundation's research group.

On April 10, 2015, the Ethereum Foundation began establishing its own organizational structure, began selecting its board of directors, and gradually began operating on track. In mid-2015, Ming Chan, with years of experience in IT and management consulting, was appointed as the Ethereum Foundation's new Executive Director. He oversaw the foundation's day-to-day operations, ensuring standardized management and ensuring that technical development and community operations proceeded smoothly within legal and regulatory frameworks.

The Foundation's internal structure has also been further clarified. While Vitalik remains a core technical and community figure, Lars Klawitter, Vadim Levitin, and Wayne Hennessy-Barrett have joined the Foundation's board of directors.

Lars Klawitter is responsible for integrating technology and innovation within the Foundation. He was an entrepreneur during the internet revolution and previously served as Head of Innovation at Rolls-Royce. Vadim Levitin, a technical expert with extensive international experience, previously worked for the United Nations, helping the Ethereum Foundation expand its global influence. Wayne Hennessy-Barrett is another board member who brings a global perspective to the foundation and has extensive operating experience in emerging markets in Africa.

With the addition of these new members, the Ethereum Foundation has gradually improved its governance structure, and the foundation's core mission has gradually shifted from technology development to community coordination and resource allocation.

At the time, the foundation also held a large amount of ETH assets and supported the development of the Ethereum ecosystem by funding various research projects and developer teams.

Second Generation Foundation

In 2018, the cryptocurrency circle has experienced the ICO explosion and the 94 crash, and the "regulatory liquidation year" of cryptocurrencies has begun. The price of Bitcoin fell from a high of $19,870 to a low of around $3,000, and Binance became the world's largest trading platform. It will take two years for Solana, the "Ethereum killer" that focuses on high performance, high efficiency, and high throughput, to be launched.

When people talk about Ethereum, they basically mention two things: one is the upgrade of Ethereum 2.0, and the other is that the Ethereum Foundation is selling coins again.

The supply of ETH controlled by the foundation has been decreasing and selling continuously over the years, and community members have shown more negative emotions. However, some members of the Ethereum Foundation also said that this is one of the manifestations of the foundation's intentional decentralization. "EF consciously wants to reduce its influence and role, which is a good thing."

Indeed, since Aya Miyaguchi replaced Ming Chan as the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation in 2018, the foundation is no longer the central hub of all development work as it was at the beginning, but has turned more to supporting and coordinating communication and cooperation between different projects, and expanding the foundation's cooperation with external partners, such as ConsenSys.

After Aya Miyaguchi took over, the EF's responsibilities became more clearly defined, primarily limited to:

1. Hosting Devcon or Devconnect annually;

2. Maintaining an execution client, Geth, but not maintaining any consensus clients;

3. Providing tens of millions of dollars in no-strings-attached funding to the broader community annually;

4. Hosting conference calls: For example, All Core Devs (ACD) chaired by Tim Beiko, All Devs Consensus (ACDC) chaired by Alex Stokes, and so on;

5. Research: This may be one of the departments that remains centralized, but it's possible that some EF research teams will become independent;

6. Roadmap development: Vitalik updated the roadmap diagram, and dozens of tasks are being developed in parallel by different teams;

The Ethereum Foundation's official website currently lists only three members of its leadership team: Aya Miyaguchi and Vitalik, as well as one board member. Patrick Storchenegger.

During this period, several new generations of core developers within the Ethereum Foundation gradually emerged and became key figures in Ethereum 2.0 and the entire ecosystem. The following is a list of people I personally consider to be important in Ethereum: Danny Rya, Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, Dankrad Feist, and Solidity creators Christian Rwitqiessner and Péter Szilágyi. (In my opinion, there's no particular order, and I won't list them all.) Danny Ryan is a core member of the Ethereum 2.0 team, known by the community as the "Chief Engineer of Ethereum 2.0." He played a crucial role in coordinating the development of Ethereum 2.0, particularly the launch and merge of the Beacon Chain. He was also the first Ethereum Foundation researcher to be featured in the documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story." Since joining the Ethereum Foundation in 2017, Justin Drake has primarily focused on Ethereum's transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and played a key role in executing the ETH merge. He is also a leading voice in the community on Ethereum's future technical roadmap, frequently participating in podcasts and interviews to educate the public. For example, he was one of the key speakers in the Ethereum Foundation's Reddit AMA, earning him a strong community following.

Tim Beiko joined the Ethereum Foundation full-time in 2018 and became one of the core developer leaders in 2021. He is responsible for organizing the ACD calls and serves as a vital bridge between Ethereum core developers. As a protocol engineer, his work encompasses the advancement of multiple Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

Dankrad Feist is a key researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on statelessness and data availability. His concept of "Danksharding" is part of Ethereum's sharding technology roadmap, and the scaling solution ultimately chosen for the Ethereum mainnet is named after him. His research on the MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) issue has also provided new insights into Ethereum's security. However, this issue led to a public dispute between him and Péter Szilagyi, the current lead developer for Geth, which ultimately forced Vitalik to intervene.

After securing the team, from 2018 to 2022, the Ethereum ecosystem expanded and gained mainstream recognition. In 2019, DEXs like Uniswap, Compound, and SushiSwap offered generous returns to any DeFi user providing liquidity, and the DeFi Summer led to a rapid increase in Ethereum's TVL. 2021 marked the "first year of the Metaverse," with Facebook rebranding as Meta, paving the way for the NFT boom. In 2022, the cryptocurrency world experienced a "Lehman moment," with the collapse of Luna and FTX, and the Solana ecosystem taking a heavy blow. Meanwhile, Ethereum successfully transitioned from PoW to PoS, and the Layer 2 sector flourished, reaching unparalleled heights, completing its explosive growth period.

"Midlife Crisis"

However, as the moon waxes and wanes, and as water overflows, everything that reaches its peak must decline, and as things reach their extremes, yin and yang transform, and surplus and emptiness ebb and flow. In 2024, Ethereum finally hit its "midlife crisis," with its price stagnating.

2024 was also a significant year, marking the 10th anniversary of the ICO. Apple, at its 10th birthday, nearly went bankrupt, and its market capitalization peaked at just $20 billion. Microsoft, after a decade as a public company, saw its market capitalization grow from $670 million to $130 billion. Ethereum, on the other hand, boasts a market capitalization of $321 billion. While Ethereum's market capitalization has grown more rapidly than nearly every other tech giant in the past decade, and was even once considered poised to surpass Bitcoin,

But a common rule in the financial world is that when an asset reaches $300 billion or $500 billion, it encounters a growth bottleneck. As the world's 34th-largest asset, ETH's market capitalization is $321 billion, placing it squarely within this growth bottleneck. The "car" is too heavy, and the "investors" are too dispersed. At this scale, Ethereum's growth is extremely difficult, practically fighting gravity. While Ethereum experienced stagflation, Bitcoin continued to reach new highs, and Solana "resurrected from the brink of collapse." No one can fully describe the problems and story of the Ethereum Foundation at the time. What we all know is that the sluggish performance of ETH prices has put Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation at the center of controversy for the past two years. As a decentralized non-profit organization, managing Ethereum's internal organizational structure is no easy task. Looking back at Ethereum's journey, the eight founding teams split up due to ideological disagreements, staging a crypto-version of the "Silicon Valley exodus." Now, amid stagnant prices, community discontent has fallen into a cyclical cycle of anger, erupting periodically and generating wave after wave of memes mocking ETH prices. Even the complex relationships and ideological conflicts within the Ethereum Foundation continue, with researchers constantly sparring with each other and Vitalik being criticized. Besides Vitalik, there's another person who feels equally uneasy. That person is Aya Miyaguchi (Miyaguchi Reiko), the former Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation.

Over the past year, Aya has faced considerable criticism from the Ethereum community, becoming a controversial figure in both the Chinese and English Ethereum communities.

Over the past year, Solana, Ethereum's biggest killer, has emerged from the brink of collapse. In addition to founder Toly's dedicated advocacy for various "Solana Casino Culture" memes, Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu has also earned community recognition for her work. For example, she proposed the PayFi concept, which uses on-chain staking to generate interest to pay for off-chain transactions, hosted numerous high-quality hackathons, and invested in numerous high-quality projects within the Solana ecosystem.

However, in the eyes of many in the Ethereum community, Aya's seven years as Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation produced virtually no "results."

"Hire for a job she wasn't qualified for for seven years, getting paid for doing nothing." Traders and influencers in the English-language community, led by CoinMamba, expressed the deepest resentment towards Aya.

They even attempted to pressure her into leaving through public opinion, with statements like "The day Aya leaves will be Ethereum's liberation day," "ETH will reach a new high within two weeks of Aya's departure," and "If we continue to pressure her, she'll resign." Some even subjected her to irrational verbal abuse and death threats.

If you still remember Vitalik's disastrous tweets during the Lunar New Year holiday, including his abstract language copying Milady and even his seemingly "good spirits" statements about considering leaving Ethereum, it was during that period that Vitalik came under immense pressure from the community.

Third Generation Foundation

Until March 2025, the Ethereum Foundation finally announced a major change in leadership: Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi stepped down from daily management responsibilities and became the chairman of the foundation. Two new co-executive directors took over Aya's original position - Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak.

Hsiao-Wei Wang was originally a backend engineer and came into contact with blockchain by chance in 2016. At the time, Vitalik was seeking contributors interested in Ethereum research, and Hsiao-Wei proactively applied and successfully joined as a core developer.

This Taiwanese blockchain pioneer has been focusing on Ethereum's core research for seven years, making significant contributions to sharding and the Beacon Chain. Sharding technology is a key upgrade to address Ethereum's scalability issues, significantly increasing network throughput and making it more efficient and fluid when processing large numbers of transactions. She also oversaw the Ethereum protocol review and proof-of-concept (PoC) development, laying a solid technical foundation for the advancement of Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2).

Despite her years in technology, Hsiao-Wei hasn't limited herself to code, but has actively engaged in community building. She frequently attends and organizes technical conferences on behalf of the Ethereum Foundation, particularly in Taiwan. She has planned and facilitated numerous high-quality Ethereum technical exchange events, successfully building bridges between local developers and the global Ethereum ecosystem. For example, at the 2018 Ethereum Sharding Workshop Taipei, she served as an organizer and took a central role in the technical discussions.

Hsiao-Wei Wang takes the C position at the 2018 Taipei Ethereum Fragmentation Seminar

Another co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Tomasz Stańczak. As the founder of Nethermind, he is not only one of the core developers of Ethereum, but also has conducted in-depth research in key areas such as MEV (maximum extractable value) and PBS (proposer-builder separation).

Before entering the blockchain space, Tomasz was an engineer in the financial markets, possessing extensive technical experience. In 2017, he officially joined the Ethereum development team as a core developer, was an early member of FlashBots, and serves on the board of directors of the Starknet Foundation.

He later founded Nethermind, one of Ethereum's most important execution clients today. Nethermind began as an experimental project, but under Tomasz's leadership, it quickly grew into a crucial piece of infrastructure within the Ethereum ecosystem, becoming one of the top five execution clients alongside Geth, Besu, and Erigon. Compared to Geth's legacy, Nethermind's efficient code architecture, flexible customization, and strong enterprise-grade support have attracted a growing number of developers and institutional users.

Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak were appointed as new co-executive directors, while the return of former EF researcher Danny Ryan was welcomed by the community.

As mentioned above, Danny Ryan is a core member of the Ethereum 2.0 team and is known as the "chief engineer of Ethereum 2.0" by the community. He played a vital role in coordinating the development process of Ethereum 2.0, especially in the launch and merge upgrade of the beacon chain. He was the first Ethereum Foundation researcher to appear in the documentary "Vitalik: An Ethereum Story". In an informal community vote of Ether, Danny Ryan was selected as the best candidate to serve as the sole leader of EF. On September 13, 2024, he announced that he would withdraw from the development of Ethereum indefinitely for personal reasons, ending his seven-year Ethereum development career. In March of this year, Danny Ryan announced his return to the Ethereum ecosystem and served as the co-founder of Etherealize, the institutional marketing and product department of the Ethereum ecosystem.

The truth about the change of dealers

The story of the change of dealers has been widely circulated in 2024. After the Hong Kong conference, rumors of a "dealer change in the Ethereum underground garage" circulated.

On-chain data offers clues. From December 2024 to April 2025, Ethereum's price experienced a period of free fall, but this was also the time when the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) quietly turned upward.

Image source: Glassnode

The HHI is an indicator of asset concentration. On the Ethereum chain, it represents the trend of stake ownership. While the price plummeted, HHI was rising rapidly, indicating that ETH was not generally sold off by the market. On the contrary, it was being concentrated from scattered retail investors to a few large investors or even institutional addresses.

In addition to data and trends, it is more obvious that in the new round of gains led by the crypto strategic reserve narrative led by MicroStrategy, listed companies playing the role of ETH strategic reserve are also common.

In May 2025, SharpLink Gaming ($SBET) announced that it raised $425 million through PIPE to purchase 176,271 ETH, with a market value of over $460 million at the time.

In June, BitMine Immersion Technologies ($BMNR) announced that it would raise $250 million through PIPE to purchase ETH, clearly "transforming into an ETH infrastructure asset manager." After the news was released, BMNR soared for several consecutive days, becoming another "ETH concept stock" after SBET.

Unlike SBET, BMNR is no longer simply about "buying and hoarding" coins; instead, it explicitly targets ETH staking returns, on-chain cash flow, and participation in the DeFi ecosystem. This marks the first time a traditional mining company has transitioned to a long position in ETH using an ETF-like approach, demonstrating that market makers have shifted from directional betting to structural capture.

Almost simultaneously, BTCS ($BTCS) did not publicly announce the total amount of ETH it purchased, but instead emphasized the innovative nature of its financing structure: a hybrid financing model of "DeFi + TradFi." It wasn't just ETH it was buying; it was an asset anchored by stablecoin liquidity.

Bit Digital ($BTBT) also quietly disclosed its purchase of 20,000 ETH, planning to transition from a BTC mining company to an ETH staking node operator. In this market oscillation, some players in the BTC camp have begun to align themselves with the other side.

From SBET firing the first shot to BMNR, BTCS, BTBT and other US stocks and mining companies taking over, the whole process took less than 1 month, with a rapid, clear and orderly pace.

It is also worth noting that the largest public individual shareholder of SBET, the largest ETH strategic reserve company, is none other than Joseph Lubin, one of the eight co-founders of Ethereum. As mentioned above, he left Ethereum due to different ideas and founded ConsenSys. Joseph Lubin not only holds a large amount of Ethereum, but also became the chairman of the board of directors of SharpLink after investing in it, holding 9.9% of SBET's shares.

Interestingly, at the EthCC7 conference in Brussels in July 2024, after Vitalik’s speech, the three former core founders of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, and Gavin Wood, took a group photo of the century, which was considered to be a decent end and reconciliation to the previous "breakup".

Ethereum without Vitalik

According to Vitalik's father, when Ethereum was first established, Vitalik didn't intend to take the lead. Instead, he thought, "Hey, I've come up with a cool idea. Let me write it down, and maybe some smart and influential people will do something about it."

But then, things changed. Many people joined the project, and they told Vitalik "You're the one who should be driving this project." So, people pushed him into a leadership position, but it wasn't a natural progression. For him, it was outside his comfort zone, and it remains one of his biggest challenges.

"Vitalik almost perfectly fulfilled the image that society has for tech founders: the cult of youth, the obsession with a certain innocence yet immense power," said Nathan Schneider, an economics professor who has interviewed Vitalik many times.

But in 2025, Vitalik was 31 years old.

While working on Zuzalu in Montenegro, he saw people a full decade younger than him taking on leadership roles in various projects, as organizers or developers. At a hacker meetup of about 30 people in South Korea, he became the oldest person in the room for the first time.

Vitalik fulfilled many programmers' idealized images of themselves: youthful, legendary. Vitalik is a symbol. He is no longer young and is not suitable for such a role. He himself is aware of this.

10 years ago, he wanted to do something cool, and many people praised him as one of the young prodigies who changed the world like Zuckerberg. Now, after experiencing the changes in the crypto era, the Russo-Ukrainian war, life and death, Vitalik has a new understanding: "I am now playing a completely different role, and it is time for the next generation to take over the mantle that once belonged to me."

"I am curious if Ethereum can survive without Vitalik's leadership?" Previously, a related discussion post received a lot of discussion on the Ethereum reddit: "In the past few years, Vitalik has indeed not led Ethereum as people imagined", "I even heard that Vitalik is not even the best person to explain the Ethereum roadmap."

Marco Castignoli, who works at the Ethereum Foundation, also expressed his personal opinion: "Although I am not one of them, I clearly know that Vitalik is just a member of the EF research team. The research team is composed of a group of very smart brains, and Vitalik is just average among them."

The several new core members mentioned above have gradually emerged and become core developers in the Ethereum community.

Furthermore, according to Electric Capital, Ethereum currently has 99 active core developers, far exceeding other blockchain projects such as Bitcoin, Cardano, EOS, and Tron. Looking at the bigger picture, the Ethereum network currently boasts over 250,000 developers and researchers, making it one of the most decentralized blockchain development communities.

When young Vitalik was abandoned by Blizzard, he was able to create a new world with his technology, seemingly built entirely on it. After several rounds of major reshuffles within the Ethereum team, he finally found himself powerless, and it was from this point on that Vitalik's ego began to unravel.

As he wrote at the end of his 30-year-old life reflections: Communities, ideologies, "scenes," nations, or even very small companies, families, or relationships—they are all created by people.

Not by technology. Moreover, Vitalik is no longer the youngest, smartest, or even the technical researcher who best represents the roadmap within Ethereum. Vitalik's role will continue to diminish, and one day, Ethereum will become Ethereum without Vitalik.

Perhaps now is the time to imagine Ethereum without Vitalik.

Author's Note: This article attempts to summarize the changes in Ethereum's core organizational structure, but Ethereum's membership is far richer than I'm aware of. To fit it all into one article would require omitting many details, resulting in some omissions. Thank you to everyone who provided information and other feedback.