A core Ethereum developer criticized the EF compensation system, revealing that their total salary over 6 years was only $625,000.

On October 20, Ethereum core developer and Geth client developer Péter Szilágyi publicly disclosed that he had written to the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) a year and a half ago, expressing his disappointment with the Ethereum Foundation. He pointed out serious issues within the foundation, including significant salary inequities, conflicts of interest, and centralization of power. He stated that since joining, “working at the Ethereum Foundation has been a bad economic decision.” According to him, his total salary during the first six years at the foundation was only $625,000 (before tax and without incentives), while the total market capitalization of ETH increased from $0 to $450 billion. He believes that this low salary structure forces those who genuinely care about the protocol to seek compensation elsewhere, which lays the groundwork for “the protocol being captured by interest groups.” He also criticized that the foundation has long underestimated employee contributions while “over-relying on those willing to stay for ideals,” and deliberately obscured salary information internally, “making opacity the norm.” In his view, this structural imbalance is one of the important reasons why Ethereum has gradually deviated from its original intention. When discussing the ecological power structure, Szilágyi noted that Ethereum has formed a “small circle” around Vitalik Buterin— a handful of 5 to 10 opinion leaders and 1 to 3 venture capital firms control the investment and directional decision-making of the most influential projects in the ecosystem. “Ethereum appears decentralized on the surface, but the indirect control of Vitalik and his core circle over the ecosystem is almost absolute.” He concluded that Ethereum has “moved from idealism to realism,” and the governance structure and compensation mechanism of the foundation “have made the protocol designed as a system that can be captured,” admitting that it is “difficult to see a bright future.”