Original｜Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )
Author: Wenser ( @wenser 2010 )
On February 27, the latest investigation results of the Bybit 1.5 billion fund theft once again put Ethereum at the forefront. According to preliminary investigations, the problem mainly lies in the Safe multi-signature wallet that Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation (EF) have repeatedly supported. Countless people exclaimed that it turns out that the security infrastructure of the crypto industry is so fragile and poorly built.
On the other hand, on February 26, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik announced the promotion of Aya Miyaguchi, former EF executive director, to EF chairman, praising her for her achievements in the seven years in office, including important contributions to the stable execution of Ethereum hard forks, client interoperability workshops, Devcon, Ethereums culture, and her firm commitment to its mission and values.
The two events combined have different market reactions. For the former, the market is mostly incredibly disappointed and scared. After all, the assets related to the Safe multi-signature wallet exceed 100 billion US dollars, and the hacker behind Bybit just chose the Bybit cold wallet with the largest ETH holdings. For the latter, some people think that this move reflects that Ethereum is still firmly practicing the concept of decentralization, while others think that the Ethereum Foundation has not changed at all and is still overstaffed.
Odaily Planet Daily has previously published several articles discussing the EF organizational reform (see Vitalik fired the first shot of reform, where is the Ethereum Foundation heading? , Ethereum is sick, are these three medicines effective? and other articles). We will discuss this in conjunction with the latest news in this article, and it is not intended as a reference for investment advice.
The beginning of EF reform: still a centralized decision-making process
EFs first shot of change: The organization has decided to arrange for you to be the chairman
As we mentioned in the article “Ethereum is “sick”, are these three medicines the right ones?” :
Management chaos leads to organizational chaos, and organizational chaos is the reason why the Ethereum Foundation cannot play a real leadership role and provide a coherent development roadmap and a clearer development direction for the ecosystem, rather than relying on many personal centralized nodes including Vitalik to wrack their brains for Ethereum. This neither meets the long-term development needs of the Ethereum ecosystem nor supports the innovative growth of the Ethereum ecosystem.
The key problem of EF at present is that all decisions at the organizational management level are made by centralized nodes. In the article Vitalik fired the first shot of reform, where is the Ethereum Foundation heading? , Vitaliks reform ideas for EF eliminated some wrong answers. But from the results, Aya Miyaguchis position change was still driven by centralized decision-making, and the decision-maker was even herself - according to Vitaliks article : A year ago, Aya first shared the idea of transitioning from executive director of @ethereumfndn to chairman.
During this process, we did not find any job change process announcements released by Vitalik or EF. All the Ethereum community waited for was Aya’s “acceptance speech” tweet after she took office as EF chairman and a long blog post titled “A New Chapter in the Infinite Garden” . However, the rhizome pipelines that transport nutrients to this seemingly free-growing crypto garden are firmly controlled by some EF personnel.
Previously, in response to the public opinion attack on Aya by Ethereum community member and crypto KOL @coinmamba, Vitalik revealed : I am the one who decides the new EF (Ethereum Foundation) leadership team. One of the goals of the ongoing reforms is to provide EF with a suitable board of directors. But before that, the decision is mine.
On the one hand, this move did take the criticism away from Aya; but on the other hand, it also exposed the rigidity, stereotype and one-man rule of EF’s leadership changes, which are contrary to the “decentralized ideology” that Vitalik has always believed in.
This is also the point that the Ethereum community and crypto industry professionals have always criticized the most: Vitalik, who is better at academic research and technology development, has always actively or passively served as the spiritual leader and decision-maker of the ETH ecosystem, but in fact he is not good at community communication, marketing or even product application.
This is one of the important reasons why Vitalik’s number of posts on the X platform in the past few months far exceeded the number of external voices in the previous 1-2 years: because he could not communicate effectively with the ETH community or even the crypto circle based on market conditions, he could only unilaterally output his own opinions, emotions, and values, and even had to publish relevant meme pictures at the request of the community.
If Vitalik is the CEO of a listed company with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars, from a personal perspective, he has done enough and has been compromising enough. But the reality is that he is not the CEO of a listed company, but the co-founder of a crypto ecosystem and a token project, and the core figure of the EF organization.
Therefore, a better way to deal with it is - Render to Caesar the things that are Caesars and to God the things that are Gods. Applying this to Ethereum and EF means, Technology and research belong to Vitalik and EF researchers, education and charity belong to Aya and some EF organizational personnel, and marketing, marketing, and community belong to appropriate ETH community personnel.
Vitalik: Ethereum is great (don’t be Fud)
Vitalik even posted a post for fun : Lets learn to meow together, meow meow meow meow meow
A slightly outdated organizational philosophy: a Zen management style that combines idealism and romanticism
After talking about the “people” level, let’s talk about EF’s “management philosophy” at the organizational level.
Stewart Brands Layered Rhythm Theory
Also in the article A New Chapter in the Infinite Garden , Aya revealed her and EFs organizational philosophy:
Ethereum’s “ownership”: It belongs to no one individual, so Ethereum belongs to everyone, and because of this, our permissionless culture can not only tolerate disagreement, but will become stronger.
EF’s primary goal: to maintain Ethereum’s cultural values, hoping to integrate Ethereum into the world’s architecture rather than as a short-term corporate product, and to ensure its resilience as an ecosystem;
Philosophical guidance of Ethereum: Ethereum’s original intention is still to be a world computer. EF must help Ethereum maintain its potential infinity and must keep it independent and free from all kinds of capture;
EFs value is reflected in: opening a core developer dialogue section to ensure the diversification of node clients; supporting RD interoperability seminars; promoting community development account abstraction or cross-L2 coordination; adhering to the principle of leading without control, coordinating without centralization to complete the merger and transition from POW to POS mechanism; Devcon and DevConnet become independent and related community networks;
At the same time, she reiterated what Vitalik had previously emphasized - the goal of EF is not for EF to win (Odaily Planet Daily Note: that is, to win at the commercial value level) - but for Ethereum to win in the long run while adhering to its core values. Finally, she summarized the philosophical guiding principles of EF:
Subtraction, not minimalism
Long-term sustainability, not short-term gains
Thoughtful complexity, not oversimplification
Manage, not control
Adaptive growth, not rigid fr structure
Purposeful evolution, not corporate expansion
Communities lead, not dominate
In addition, she also mentioned: The uniqueness of Ethereum lies in its resilience rooted in values, which makes it possible for technological and social innovation, making it an infinite garden in an infinite game that thrives on its biodiversity, rather than a machine; EF is committed to maintaining the democratic system and values that allow Ethereums technological and social innovations to continue to serve the decentralized concept of humanity.
Finally, she gave her expectations for becoming EF Chair - My purpose is to continue to foster Ethereums unique culture and serve as a voice that bridges the gap between Ethereum and the broader global community. As in Pace Layering, culture develops the slowest, but it provides a solid foundation for everything that follows (If the slow parts arent occasionally frustrating, theyre not working - Stewart Brand). Culture transcends market cycles, sustaining us through the winter and pushing us through the spring.
All of the above remarks are full of the naivety of idealism and romantic spirit, and also carry the Zen management style that Aya has emphasized many times before. This is exactly another kind of cultural hegemony - one-sidedly defining the culture of Ethereum as the principles and ideas in ones mind.
In the early stages of Ethereums ecological development, the more flexible, free, and decentralized organizational concepts can undoubtedly maximize the enthusiasm and innovation genes of the ecological network. As a result, Ethereum has experienced waves of industry booms from 2018 to 2022, has the foundation to turn the world computer from a concept into reality, and has risen from an ICO price of $0.4 to a historical high of nearly $4,800.
But starting from 2022, after the successive collapse of UST, LUNA (Terra), 3AC, FTX and others brought the crypto industry into a cold winter, after the BTC ecosystem took over the focus of crypto, and after the Bitcoin spot ETF landed on the U.S. stock market, my lord, the times have changed.
A reality that is hard to accept but must be acknowledged is that the crypto industry has passed the early wild stage where scammers and idealists danced together and people from the Old World landed in the New World in droves, and has entered a stage where the crypto economy has become part of the world economy (or even just a small part), BTC has become a slightly different investment target in the US financial industry, and the industry narrative has entered a dead end of exhaustion.
The Mass Adoption and so-called positive externalities that countless people dream of are nothing but wishful thinking under the arrogance and prejudice of people in the crypto industry, just as Vitalik previously sneered and disdained DeFi, the only undisproven track in the crypto industry.
Decentralization cannot be achieved by just talking about it, nor can it be realized by simply relying on one’s own enthusiasm and courage. If a person or an organization only has a one-sided belief in technical decentralization, but cannot achieve decentralization at more levels, how can they convince the public? How can they talk about values? How can they achieve unity of knowledge and action?
At the same time, the recent theft of more than 500,000 ETH from Bybit has also exposed another hidden concern in the Ethereum ecosystem: the decentralization crisis.
ETHs decentralization concerns: Bybits shocking theft and Safes insecurity crisis
BTC Maxi and ETH Maxi have always been proud of and often boasted about the decentralization of the ecosystem. The former has created the worlds largest digital gold, which was originally intended to be a peer-to-peer payment system; the latter is running wildly on the vision of a world computer that can compete with Windows, MacOS, etc.
However, highly related to decentralization is the security risk brought about by its inseparable anonymity.
On the evening of February 27, Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou posted a message saying : The hacker forensics report provided by Sygnia and Verichains revealed that the theft of funds was caused by a vulnerability in the Safe infrastructure. In addition, the malicious code was deployed at 15:29:25 UTC time on February 19, specifically targeting Bybits Ethereum multi-signature cold wallet.
Previously, the official statement of the multi-signature wallet platform Safe was that the developers machine was attacked, but there were no vulnerabilities in the smart contract and front-end source code; however, the investigation results of security companies showed that it was obvious that the truth of the matter was not so: the truth was that the supply chain was poisoned, and malicious code was implanted in the front-end js of Safe . In other words, there was a problem with the security of Safes infrastructure, which led to Bybit being targeted by the Lazarus Group hackers due to the large amount of ETH in the multi-signature cold wallet ( Odaily Planet Daily Note : According to industry insiders, it is as high as more than 400,000 ETH, far exceeding Bitfinex cold wallet-310,000 ETH, Vitalik cold wallet-240,000 ETH, Bandit hacker-51,000 ETH ), and completing the theft of more than 510,000 ETH and derivative assets.
As a long-established crypto project, Safe, with assets as high as $100 billion, is caught in a trust crisis of security projects are not secure. You know, this is a multi-signature wallet platform that Vitalik himself uses and has endorsed many times before. The Safe incident has also triggered another level of trust crisis: Are the developers in the cryptocurrency industry carefully arranged by hacker organizations such as Lazarus Group?
If previous security incidents were more about technical vulnerabilities and gaps in risk security management, the Bybit theft case and the security risks of the Safe multi-signature wallet involve a non-attack dilemma like in the dark forest - in the anonymous decentralized world on the chain, we cannot be sure whether there is a long-lurking hacker member of the Lazarus Group in the development, maintenance, and development of a crypto project (even a crypto security-related project).
At around 9 am today, according to monitoring by on-chain analyst Yu Jin, the Bybit hacker had laundered 206,000 of the 499,000 stolen ETH, an average of 45,000 per day. At that time, there were still 292,000 ETH (worth US$685 million) left in the hackers address.
Bybit hacker ETH holdings (as of around 9:00 am on the 27th)
On one hand, hackers who stole over $1.5 billion in assets are using various mixers and decentralized protocols to launder the stolen money; on the other hand, there is EF, which supports decentralized concepts and privacy protocols.
At around 7 p.m. on February 26, EF officially announced that the foundation announced that it would donate $1.25 million for the legal defense of Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, and stated that privacy is normal and writing code is not a crime.
It is worth mentioning that previously, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes and DWF Labs partner Andrei Grachev had called out to Vitalik regarding the Bybit theft case, “whether Ethereum will be rolled back like the previous The DAO theft.” As of the time of writing, Vitalik himself and EF officials have never made any comments on this, and they seem to be standing by and watching. (Odaily Planet Daily Note: Previously, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko personally wrote an article in response to “ Why can’t Ethereum be rolled back after the Bybit incident? ” The author personally believes that this once again reveals the disconnection between the EF Foundation and the community )
Ethereum and EF may be able to find a balance between decentralization and industry security management.
Conclusion: Confidence is more important than gold. Where is the confidence of Ethereum?
After Ethereum’s 10th anniversary, in addition to the ancient whales and IC0 profit-taking in the past, we should also find new “confidence growth points.” After all, confidence is often more important than gold, or even “digital gold.”
But the reality today is that the crypto community cannot find the confidence to support the subsequent development of ETH. Only EF occasionally dumps coins, reacts slowly to external changes, pursues metaphysical concepts and values one-sidedly, and avoids and ignores the real voice of the community and issues of real concern.
What is the next event that will bring new life to Ethereum? Who will it be? Which project?
Like the readers, I don’t know either. All we can do, besides waiting, is to build silently in our own way.
