Ethereum insiders are calling out the Foundation for low pay, favoritism, and leadership failures, exposing growing rifts in the network’s core community.
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Posted October 21, 2025 at 9:42 am EST.
Internal disputes and allegations highlight deep divisions over the Ethereum Foundation’s (EF) leadership and evolving role in the network it helped create.
Earlier this week, Péter Szilágyi, the lead developer of Ethereum’s primary execution client, Geth, shared a letter he had sent to the EF leadership team more than a year ago.
In that letter, Szilágyi said the Foundation had a history of underpaying its employees, which forced its most trusted staff to seek compensation elsewhere. He disclosed that over his six-year tenure as Geth lead, he received a total of about $625,000 — a figure that sparked widespread commentary on X, where many users expressed disbelief at how low the compensation was given his critical role in maintaining Ethereum’s core infrastructure.
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Szilágyi also suggested that the success of Ethereum-based projects boiled down to their relationship with founder Vitalik Buterin.
“Do I find Ethereum fixable? No, not really. I don’t see how any of this can be reversed. I feel the Foundation blew allegiance to it beyond reversal,” he said.
Polygon co-founder and CEO Sandeep Nailwal said Szilágyi’s letter made him realize it was time to speak up.
“NGL, I’ve started questioning my loyalty toward Ethereum,” said Nailwal.
Among the issues he laid out was the Ethereum community’s failure to consider Polygon a layer 2 network, despite the fact that Polygon PoS is “effectively hinged” on Ethereum.
“When Polymarket wins big, it’s “Ethereum,” but Polygon itself is not Ethereum. Mind-boggling,” said Nailwal.
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