Transparency and ethical behavior are critical in the sphere of cryptocurrency, and the Ethereum Foundation is taking all necessary measures to ensure it. After Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist revealed that they received substantial token rewards for their work in EigenLayer, an ether staking and validation platform, the Foundation has begun to work on creating a detailed policy on conflict of interest.
In her public statement, the Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, Aya Miyaguchi, admitted the concerns of the community about the conflict of interest situation. This she said has been seen as insufficient and therefore the need to have formal measures to address such incidences rather than using culture and personal discretion.
”We understand the community’s concerns about conflict of interest and that’s why we have developed such a policy,” Miyaguchi said. “Of course, it is apparent that relying on culture and individual judgment only is not enough. We have been developing the formal policy to solve this problem and will step up the pace in the near future, reporting on further actions soon.”
The revelations made by Drake and Feist led to a discourse regarding the Ethereum ecosystem on possible biases that can be obtained by the researchers or developers who can be funded by an external project or company. Despite this, the conflict of interest that arose from both researchers accepting token incentives from the company raised some questions as to the need for more stringent measures.
In response, some voices in the community, one of which is Lefteris Karapetsas, a former Ethereum software engineer, proposed the Foundation to grant its workers reasonable remuneration so that they would not seek other means of making added income, which could cause them to become bias.
While the Ethereum Foundation is working to advance the conflict in its policy on the issue, the cryptocurrency community is looking forward to the official regulation. These measures seek to check on and prevent unethical practices in the Ethereum project, to maintain the credibility of the project with the input of a clear policy on decentralization and trust.
