I spent the better part of the last two and a half weeks chasing one deceptively simple question:
Why did well-known core developer Zak Cole decide that Ethereum needs yet another foundation, and is his stated mandate—"$10K ETH or bust"—anything more than a meme?
Let me rewind to where this all started
On April 16, Cole dropped a tweet-thread that lit up my X feed:
“The EF has served its purpose, but ossified culture is killing permissionless innovation. Today I’m launching the Ethereum Community Foundation to do what they won’t. Roadmap? Simple: coordinate devs → ship upgrades → 10K ETH.” — @colarz
I’ll admit, my first reaction was classic crypto-skeptic snark: Great, another foundation, because the last dozen worked out so well. But the longer I stared at on-chain metrics—validators flatlining around ~30% solo, core-dev meetings increasingly bogged down in GitHub politics—the more I had to check my cynicism. Something structural may really be broken.
Here's what actually happened
From what I could verify (combining GitHub commits, Discord screenshots, and one surprisingly candid Telegram chat Cole dropped into), the Ethereum Community Foundation—ECF for short—was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands on April 10th. Cole allegedly hammered out by-laws with legal help from the same boutique firm that did Worldcoin’s Foundation paperwork.
Money-wise, the war-chest sits at 12,700 ETH—roughly $41 million at press time—which appears to have come from:
- 4,200 ETH transferred from a multisig labeled “Ethcore-Treasury” (I traced that back to Cole’s old R&D outlet, Whiteblock)
- 6,000 ETH crowd-funded via Juicebox over a 72-hour window—yes, the same contract used by ConstitutionDAO
- 2,500 ETH from an address tagged “ARB early contributor” by Nansen
These numbers aren’t gospel—I’m not entirely sure about the last chunk; the wallet could be a spoof—but Etherscan flows line up.
But why do we even need a new foundation?
Here’s the TL;DR I’ve pieced together talking to seven current and former core contributors (only two would go on record):
- Grants gridlock. EF’s four-month grant cycles can’t keep up with rapidly iterating L2s. One dev told me, “If you miss the February window, you might as well raise a seed round.”
- Testing infrastructure rot. Cole’s a testing guy (he maintains Eth-Tester and Lighthouse fuzz scripts). He argues that EF won’t fund a dedicated cross-client testnet past Holesky. The result: shadow forks are taking 30–40% longer to spin up compared to last year. I eyeballed their Grafana dashboards; he’s not exaggerating.
- Governance malaise. The same faces dominate ACD (All Core Devs). New voices get drowned out. One pseudonymous MEV researcher joked, “ACD is turning into Ethereum’s version of the U.S. Senate—old, repetitive, and allergic to velocity.” Harsh, but I’ve noticed the call minutes ballooning from 45 minutes to 1 hour 25 minutes on average.
Okay, so how is the ECF different in practice?
Cole published a draft mandate on a Mirror post. Key bits:
- Quarterly “Dev Sprints.” Think hackathons meets Agile: four-week bountied sprints focused on shipping EIPs stuck in purgatory (EIP-3074 “AUTHCALL,” EIP-4844 post-Dencun tuning, etc.).
- Simplified grants. USDC or native ETH streamed via Superfluid with milestone oracles. No 80-page proposals—recipients post weekly progress on Farcaster frames.
- On-chain voting for budgets. Gnosis Safe with Snapshot binding vote. Token? No new ERC-20; voting power derived from staked ETH weight. (I think Vitalik will like that part.)
- Public north-star: $10,000 ETH. Cole insists this isn’t “number-go-up” fluff. His thesis is that ETH price captures network security budgets. At $10K, validators’ annualized yield dips below nominal inflation, making unethical MEV less attractive. I’m still chewing on that logic.
This whole $10K meme—does it even make sense?
I pulled data from IntoTheBlock and Glassnode. Historically, major ETH rallies track three things:
- Aggregate L2 TVL crossing 25% of mainnet TVL
- Staked ETH hitting 30% of supply
- Average block fee per transaction above 70 gwei
Right now, we’re at 19%, 24.8%, and 43 gwei respectively. So $10K isn’t crazy if EIP-4844 fee reductions don’t crater fee revenue. Cole’s argument is that ECF-driven developer velocity will spawn higher-value L2 and account abstraction use-cases that offset base-fee compression. Personally, I’m 60-40 skeptical, but I appreciate the quantitative framing.
Can’t the existing Ethereum Foundation just fix these bottlenecks?
That’s what I asked EF researcher Danny Ryan over Telegram. His take (shared with permission):
“EF’s job isn’t price targets; it’s credible neutrality. If Zak wants to chase $10K, go for it. Ethereum welcomes pluralism.” — Danny Ryan
Danny’s point is philosophical: Ethereum is a coordination layer. If a new nonprofit wants to coordinate in a different flavor, the protocol allows it. But this also hints at the tension—EF won’t publicly center price appreciation, while ECF practically tattoos $10K ETH on its homepage.
A quick detour into optics and culture wars
I can’t ignore the vibe shift. Crypto Twitter loves big, punchy milestones. Remember when Laser-eyes Bitcoin hit mainstream? Cole’s tagline is tapping that same dopamine vein. Yet, a subset of devs worry that “$10K or bust” pushes Ethereum closer to Solana’s VC-heavy discourse.
I’m torn. On one hand, culture matters; I’d hate to see Ethereum lose its cypher-punk ethos. On the other, we do need some missionary zeal to compete against flashy alt-L1 marketing budgets.
Where the money is going first
The inaugural Dev Sprint kicks off May 5th with a budget cap of 1,800 ETH. Project ideas I’ve seen floating around:
- Stateless validator prototype (a re-hash of Turbo-GETH concepts)
- Account abstraction wallet SDK for gaming, coded in Rust for WASM chains
- Zero-knowledge prover benchmarks on consumer GPUs (shout-out to zk-opa devs)
All proposals live on Aragon and get up-voted via staked-ETH Snapshot every 48 hours. Winners receive streaming payments; losers can iterate and resubmit. Honestly, this rapid feedback loop feels refreshing after observing EF’s six-month RFP cycles.
Potential land mines nobody’s talking about
Look, I’d be remiss not to flag the risks:
- Regulatory fog. A BVI foundation raises fewer eyebrows than a Delaware one, but that’s thin ice if the SEC decides ECF tokens (should they arise) are securities.
- Grant transparency. Cole promises monthly public treasuries, yet the foundation docs only require annual disclosures. That mismatch could erode credibility fast.
- Personality cult risk. Cole is charismatic, but we’ve seen what happens when one charismatic dev (cough—Do Kwon) becomes the project’s single point of failure.
- Duplicative overhead. Running two overlapping foundations may fragment funding streams. The Merge showed how crucial unified messaging is during critical upgrades.
Why this matters for your bag—or your research agenda
Let’s assume ECF hits its first three targets: kick-starts testing infra, accelerates EIP-3074, and funds killer account abstraction wallets. The network effect arguably drives user adoption, elevates L2 throughput, and—if Cole’s security-budget thesis holds—creates upward pressure on ETH price.
Flip side: If politics gum things up, we could see competing client implementations or, worst-case, another contentious hard-fork scenario. I’m not saying ETH2.5 Classic is around the corner, but crypto history rhymes.
How I'm positioning personally
Not financial advice, yada-yada. But disclosure: I hold 18 staked ETH via Lido and another 2 in a self-custody wallet. After watching Cole’s move, I shifted 10 % of my L2 bag from Polygon to Arbitrum—my thinking is that ECF-backed devs will favor optimistic rollups for EIP-3074 sandboxing. Could be wrong; time will tell.
Where the community seems to land
I ran an unscientific poll in the EthStaker subreddit: “Is the new ECF net positive?” Out of 412 votes, 61% said yes, 23% no, and 16% “wait and see.” That lines up with the vibe IRL at ETHGlobal Lisbon last weekend—cautious optimism, with plenty of memes about “$10K but only if gas stays cheap.”
Final thought before I grab another coffee
I think pluralism is Ethereum’s secret weapon. If ECF lights a fire under EF to streamline grants, everyone wins. If it fizzles, the chain survives. Either way, watching two foundations’ differing philosophies clash in public could be the governance experiment we didn’t know we needed.
And hey, if we get $10K ETH along the way, I won’t complain.
