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On July 29, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) announced that pcaversaccio (Pascal Caversaccio) had joined its board. The board now has four members: President Aya Miyaguchi, founder Vitalik Buterin, Swiss counsel Patrick Storchenegger, and pcaversaccio. The term is one year, unpaid.
The foundation has drifted out of the public's attention, and a new board member is not exciting news on its face. I'm writing this comment anyway, because the appointment shows clearly what role the EF has decided to keep for itself.
A foundation that keeps shrinking
The Ethereum Foundation recently cut about 20% of its staff, and new organizations are filling the space it left behind. In June, Ethlabs launched: a nonprofit R&D organization backed by Ethereum DAT companies and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin. A week later came Ethereum Institutional, founded by alumni of the foundation's enterprise team.
Protocol R&D goes to organizations like Ethlabs; institutional and enterprise relations go to Ethereum Institutional. Then in July, the team that ran the foundation's Institutional Privacy Task Force left to found EthSystems, a for-profit company selling onchain privacy infrastructure to banks and financial institutions. Three organizations spun out in less than a month.
Work that once revolved around the EF is moving, piece by piece, to the community and outside organizations. The foundation is pushing this along. Which leaves one question: once all the practical work is gone, what job remains?
Who is pcaversaccio?
pcaversaccio is an independent security researcher who belongs to no company. He co-founded and leads SEAL 911, a 24/7 hotline that connects hack victims with vetted whitehats, and he is a member of the Silviculture Society, a group that has quietly advised the foundation on holding to censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
In the community, though, he is best known for his writing. In 2024 he published the "Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto," a rewrite of Eric Hughes' 1993 original for Ethereum. In "Ethereum Privacy: The Road to Self-Sovereignty," he argued that privacy is not a feature of Ethereum but a survival condition. And through all of it, he has criticized the foundation publicly, frequently, and harshly for putting privacy and security on the back burner.
Nothing in this résumé says management or operations. The EF invited him onto the board anyway, and for a reason.
Ethereum's irreplaceable spirit
The reason is in the EF Mandate, published earlier this year. The document splits the foundation's roles in two. Co-executive directors run the organization, while the board sets the vision and checks that management's decisions stay true to the foundation's values. In the foundation's own words, the board "acts as a security council to protect the heart and soul of EF."
Work that other actors can do instead, like R&D or institutional relations, gets carved off to the community. The cypherpunk spirit at Ethereum's root, censorship resistance and privacy, is what no one else will guard in the foundation's place. That is the one thing the foundation keeps as its last line of defense. Seating the manifesto's author on the board that does the guarding puts a stamp on this division of labor.
The principle that Ethereum must remain a censorship-resistant, trustless network cannot be measured as performance. So it cannot be left to market competition either. The EF has shed every replaceable job and kept the single irreplaceable one.
Closing thoughts
Appointments are the loudest announcements an organization makes. With this one, the EF confirmed its move from an organization that does the work to one that guards the core and its spirit. Whatever else it gives up, the cypherpunk spirit stays with the foundation. And for that job, it picked the cypherpunk who has criticized it most harshly.
I think the direction is right. Ethereum has taken constant fire in areas that demand flexibility, like the ETH price and institutional relations, and handing those to community-based organizations buys the agility to respond. Good strategy. But flexibility has a price. The money behind Ethlabs, Ethereum Institutional, and EthSystems comes from for-profit companies like BitMine.
What makes Ethereum unique is, in the end, the trustlessness and censorship resistance at its core. Once the practical work starts running on capital's logic, that spirit has to be guarded from outside capital. It is what keeps Ethereum from becoming just another network, and by now the EF is the only organization that can hold that line.
The foundation is smaller now, and it will get smaller still. Its role has never been heavier.
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