Ex-Ethereum developer warns: power lies with ‘a handful of people’

A former Ethereum (ETH) developer is causing a stir after publishing an internal letter from a year ago to the top of the Ethereum Foundation. In the letter he expresses concerns about centralization within the ecosystem, caused by a small, influential group around co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Ethereum is failing according to lead developer

In his letter, Szilágyi expresses sharp concerns about the balance of power. According to him, a small, close-knit group behind the scenes determines which projects survive, and founder Vitalik Buterin plays a central role in this. In his words: “Ethereum may seem decentralized, but the real power lies with a handful of people close to Vitalik.”

Péter Szilágyi was one of the core developers of Ethereum who was involved in the project from 2015 to 2025. For years he was the technical lead of the Geth client, a software program that allows users to connect to the Ethereum network. Geth is still one of the most used clients within the ecosystem.

According to the developer, an informal elite has been formed within Ethereum. New projects would no longer focus on the public, but on a small group of investors and advisors around Buterin. “You just have to convince the right five to ten people and you’re in,” he writes. “And those people are usually friends of Vitalik.”

The internal letter, written on May 22, 2024, was only recently shared on social media platform “Every time I spoke out against conflicts of interest, there was a counterattack from other prominent members. And the Foundation is watching,” Szilágyi said.

This centralization goes against the principles that Ethereum was originally founded for: decentralization. In addition, the developer points out that employees at the Ethereum Foundation were severely underpaid for years.

Ethereum is coming with a major upgrade in November

While Szilágyi has decided to step back from his development work, the network is still being worked hard. The next major upgrade is scheduled for November 2025 and is codenamed Fusaka.

Buterin calls this update “more secure and scalable than ever”. With the technical innovation, Ethereum mainly wants to improve the performance of Layer-2 (L2) networks. These are scaling layers on top of Ethereum. such as Arbitrum (ARB) and Base, which process transactions faster and cheaper, while still benefiting from the security of the main network.