Mandatory Fun? Suit Claims Ethereum Foundation Took Irony Too Far
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WHAT HAPPENED
A former Ethereum Foundation employee alleges she and a colleague were fired for organizing a written objection to a clause in its institutional mandate that, read plainly, asks violators to take their own lives with a sword.
Kayleen Fulton, who led the Foundation’s protocol support team and facilitated All Core Developers, the open process through which the protocol is upgraded, filed a lawsuit last week against the Foundation and Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s creator. Her complaint, in the U.S. District Court for Colorado, describes a workplace where an inside joke from the Milady corner of crypto became a condition of employment, and where leadership passed up multiple opportunities to make the apparent suicide pledge optional, let alone remove it.
According to the complaint, the foundation circulated the mandate on Feb. 25 with a “Source Seppuku License” attached, a bit of Remilia-flavored internet theater that names ritual suicide as the penalty for violating its terms. Within a week 79 employees had backed removing the language, some pointing to a colleague’s suicide the year before as the reason it was more than a matter of taste. Leadership responded by keeping it in an illustrated edition with anime art and cartoon cats, which is roughly what you would do if you had decided the problem was that the clause wasn’t whimsical enough.
On March 20, employees were told to affirm the mandate or leave, and were reassured that the seppuku language was a cultural reference and not meant literally. Five days later, 53 of them signed a letter affirming Ethereum’s principles while rejecting the conditions under which they were being made to affirm them, which is about as polite and pro-institution as dissent gets. On April 6, the letter’s two organizers, Fulton and Trent Van Epps, were fired, according to the suit. Fulton’s suit alleges retaliation, disability discrimination, and medical-leave violations, and notes she had disclosed a cancer diagnosis shortly before her dismissal. These are still allegations, but it is hard to miss that the mandate itself describes Ethereum as liberating people from power relationships “where dissent imposes a heavy price.”
According to the complaint, the EF’s lawyers denied in May that Ms. Fulton “was subjected to unlawful conduct, economic duress, retaliation, or termination in violation of public policy,” but did not state a reason for her termination. The EF has not made any public comments about her claims since they became public.
OUR TAKE
I put very little stock in the criticism the Ethereum Foundation usually gets, most of which comes from people wishing their bags were heavier. Crypto Twitter has blamed the EF for not doing enough, not promoting projects, and not pumping the token. Meanwhile Ethereum has the deepest DeFi ecosystem and the most TVL of any chain by a wide margin, and foundations that did pick winners, like Avalanche’s, got hammered when those memes went nowhere. The EF exists to steward a vision, not a price. It is a nonprofit foundation, not a corporation, a home for developers thinking decades ahead rather than for suits, and that is part of why the weirdness is a feature. When Vitalik gives a conference talk in a cape and a mask, I mostly think it’s fine.
All of that said, the suit’s allegations are concerning. Imagine the HR department at a normal company hearing from 79 employees, some of them grieving a colleague, that a mandatory document was hurtful. It could have deleted the clause that afternoon without even consulting a lawyer, and it would certainly not have fired the people who asked nicely. Being esoteric is all well and good (especially when the work is mysterious, and important). But enforcing your esoterica by firing people, as the foundation allegedly did, is how you become Lumon, the fictional company in television’s “Severance,” an institution whose mission talks about care while its actions treat employees as disposable.
Crypto Twitter may want the EF to start acting like a corporation, but it doesn’t need to. If the suit’s claims prove correct, the foundation needs to act like the organization its own mandate describes, one where disagreeing doesn’t cost you your job. Until then, please report to the Break Room.
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