[An Ethereum Core Developer Criticizes EF Compensation System, Reveals Total Compensation of Only $625,000 Over 6 Years] BlockBeats News, October 20: Ethereum core developer and Geth client developer Péter Szilágyi publicly disclosed today that he had sent a letter to the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) a year and a half ago. In the letter, he candidly expressed his "disappointment with the Ethereum Foundation" and pointed out serious issues within the foundation, including unfair compensation, conflicts of interest, and centralized power. He stated that "working at the Ethereum Foundation has always been a financially poor decision." According to him, his total compensation over six years at the foundation was only $625,000 (pre-tax, without incentives), during which time the total market value of ETH grew from $0 to $450 billion. He believes that this low-pay structure forces those who genuinely care about the protocol to seek compensation elsewhere, which in turn plants the seeds for "the protocol being captured by interest groups." He also criticized the foundation for consistently undervaluing employee contributions while "over-relying on those who are willing to stay out of idealism" and deliberately hiding salary information internally, "making opacity the norm." In his view, this structural imbalance is one of the key reasons Ethereum has gradually deviated from its original vision. When discussing the ecosystem's power structure, Szilágyi stated that Ethereum has formed a "small circle" around Vitalik Buterin—comprising a handful of 5 to 10 opinion leaders and 1 to 3 venture capital firms that control the most influential project investments and directional decisions within the ecosystem. "Ethereum appears decentralized on the surface, but Vitalik and his core circle's indirect control over the ecosystem is almost absolute." He concluded by stating that Ethereum has "shifted from idealism to realism," and that the foundation's governance structure and compensation mechanism "have designed the protocol to be a system susceptible to capture," admitting that it is "difficult to see a bright future.