Ethereum Foundation Forms Silviculture Society to Defend Core Values

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has recently announced the formation of the Silviculture Society, a 15-member advisory council, in response to leadership controversies within the Ethereum community. This diverse group of Ethereum builders is focused on defending the project's core values, including open-source principles, privacy, security, and censorship resistance.

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has described the Silviculture Society as an experimental effort to promote community governance. The EF plans to create separate organs and advisory groups to tackle other issues, but the project's direction remains the top priority.

In an effort to resolve leadership issues, the EF has appointed Aya Miyaguchi as its next President, following her seven-year tenure as Executive Director. The EF has also announced the Silviculture Society as its new advisory organ, which aims to provide informal counsel to the EF and ensure the sustainability of Ethereum's core values.

The Silviculture Society consists of 15 members from diverse backgrounds, including both public-facing individuals and pseudonymous figures. Some members, like Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Lefteris Karapetsas, founder of Rotki, have conventional careers. However, the majority of the members are pseudonymous, using handles such as "Aleph," "dystopiabreaker," or "mashbean," and strongly espouse the old-school crypto community's values and cypherpunk culture.

While the Silviculture Society is not a governance council, it provides the EF with "arm's length feedback from the PoV of ecosystem participants." One member noted that some EF criticism may not have been in good faith, suggesting that "price down pointless rage" could be a factor in the criticism.

As the EF has been dealing with its leadership crisis, the price of Ethereum has been volatile. A major controversy involved the Foundation's handling of business expenses, which was eventually resolved with the help of DeFi loan protocols. Despite this, discontent remained, and Ethereum's price has reached multi-month lows, with the broader crypto market potentially turning bearish.

Regardless of the motivations behind some community criticism, the Silviculture Society appears to be a good-faith effort to gather a team of veteran builders to approach Ethereum's goals from various perspectives. Vitalik Buterin has already been actively defending the Silviculture Society