The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has created a new 15-member advisory group called the Silviculture Society to address leadership issues. This group includes different Ethereum developers and is focused on protecting the project’s main values.
Vitalik Buterin said this group is a test to improve community decision-making. The EF will set up other teams to handle different issues, but the main focus right now is the project’s future direction.
Can The Silviculture Society Uphold Ethereum Values?
Ethereum is finally making progress in fixing its leadership struggles. Just two days ago, Aya Miyaguchi announced that she would be stepping up as the Foundation’s new President after spending seven years as Executive Director.
Today, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) introduced a new advisory group called the Silviculture Society.
“The EF Silviculture Society is a group of individuals from outside the Foundation who offer informal advice to help keep Ethereum’s core values alive—things like open-source development, privacy, security, and resisting censorship. Ethereum’s success depends on developers who believe in and build with these values,” the EF explained.
The group has 15 members from a wide range of backgrounds. Some are well-known in the public eye, like Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Lefteris Karapetsas, founder of Rotki, a privacy-focused platform.
However, most of the members choose to stay anonymous, going by online names like “Aleph,” “dystopiabreaker,” and “mashbean.” This group is deeply rooted in the early crypto community’s values and the cypherpunk movement.
That said, the Silviculture Society isn’t a decision-making body. One member clarified that its role is simply to give the EF outside feedback from people active in the Ethereum ecosystem.
This same member also shared a comment from another community builder, suggesting that not all criticism toward the EF has been fair. Some of it, they said, might just be frustration driven by falling prices rather than real concerns.
Ethereum Price in Turmoil, Fueling Criticism
While the EF has been embroiled in its leadership crisis, the price of Ethereum has been in dire straits. For example, a major controversy was related to how the Foundation handled business expenses.
This was resolved thanks to DeFi loan protocols, but discontent remained. Today, Ethereum’s price is at multi-month lows, and the whole crypto market may be turning bearish.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter if some community members criticized the Ethereum Foundation (EF) out of frustration over price drops.
What’s clear is that the Silviculture Society is a genuine attempt to bring together experienced developers with different viewpoints to work toward the same goals. Overall, it seems like a positive step for Ethereum and its community.
Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin, has been actively defending the Silviculture Society against criticism on social media. He described it as “an experiment to give builders and other community members more ways to share their input with the EF.” The main focus of this effort is to protect Ethereum’s core values.
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