Over the past few days, Ethereum developers and researchers have been debating whether someone can autonomously sign a contract under coercion.

Earlier this month, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) published a 38-page mandate outlining the organization’s guiding principles. This included the non-profit’s commitment to prioritizing Censorship-resistance, Open source, Privacy, and Security, or "CROPS," on Ethereum. 

While few EF employees would object to championing Ethereum as a tool for user self-sovereignty, it soon surfaced that the organization was allegedly asking employees to sign a loyalty pledge and to affirm CROPS or, reportedly, face expulsion. 

Last week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted to X: "I affirm the direction set out in the mandate will help translate it into thoroughly reasoned strategies for my domain, and will maintain an exclusive and energetic focus on the mission-critical tasks necessary for its implementation, from today until my last day at the EF."

"The EF mandate text itself is a fine document with a lot of great concepts, including CROPS," former EF exec and longtime Ethereum communicator Hudson James told The Block. "Clearly there are people at the EF upset with being made to internally sign a mandate or have 'forced severance.' I support those people who don't want to be forced to sign a mandate."

"Loyalty pledges are really unhealthy, and that is what has got people worked up a lot more than The Mandate itself," EarlyDaysOfEth.org founder and STRATO Head of Ecosystem Bob Summerwill said. 

It is unclear whether the EF officially asked employees to pledge fealty or threatened termination. The Block reached out to EF representatives for confirmation.

However, like many sprawling debates on social media, the conversation quickly went meta, including concerns about whether the EF undercut the principles of CROPS, whether it needed to publish a mandate at all, and why the document featured graphic design elements seemingly inspired by the controversial Miladys NFT series. 

"I don't think that the issue is whether or not people support CROPS and going in that direction, I think that the issue is how the EF is going about it," Optimism co-founder Mark Tyneway told The Block. "The conflict is framed as 'being true to OG crypto ideals' vs 'selling out to corporate tradfi' which I believe is happening because there is no way to measure Ethereum's success."

Paul Dylan-Ennis, a lecturer at the University of Dublin and Ethereum historian, noted that "The EF Mandate has created an unnecessary cultural schism given that the people it involves - EF employees and core developers - are already aligned around CROPS values."

"The intent to reaffirm cypherpunk values is admirable, but the execution is puzzling," Dylan-Ennis said.

Cultural context

The EF has long faced criticism over its communications strategy. For years, Ethereum’s branding conjured up images of rainbows and unicorns, which made for an idyllic view of the internet as a shared commons, but stood in stark contrast to the cutthroat and increasingly competitive world of crypto capitalism. 

Calls to reform the EF reached a crescendo early last year after Buterin made a comment seemingly in support of communism. Amid community backlash, the EF reorganized to pursue a more competitive agenda, with Buterin, often accused of navelgazing, announcing he would take on a larger leadership role. 

Indeed, last year the EF pushed out two major protocol upgrades — Pectra and Fusaka — and took steps to actively engage with the Ethereum ecosystem, including backing app developers and investing resources in privacy tech.

A sister organization, Etherealize, was spun up to communicate Ethereum’s utility to Wall Street. 

To some extent, Ethereum’s more competitive positioning could be seen as part of a wider realignment within the U.S. tech sector, which began to embrace "accelerationism," a philosophy perhaps best summed up by a16z’s Marc Andreessen’s techno-optimist essay "It's Time to Build," which argued for fewer regulations and more innovation.

It’s in this same cultural current that the Milady NFT series — those "neochibi" anime girls on X — was launched. Distilling Milady culture is no easy task, but a few terms supporters might use are: internet native, cypherpunk, and anti-woke. The group often espouses belief in "network spirituality," the belief that they're part of a collective, digital organization that is chaotic and creative.

Detractors, however, have described Miladys as weird, racist, and unsettling. Charlotte Fang, the pseudonymous creator of Miladys, has been linked to previous internet "performance art" projects that have been described as bigoted. 

Buterin, for reasons he has yet to fully explain, began sporting a Milady profile pic earlier this year. Many took it as a shorthand to express the pro-growth and cypherpunk elements within the Milady community, given their full-throated support for privacy, pseudonymity, censorship-resistance, self-sovereignty, and other cypherpunk principles. 

"Milady is seriously committed to free speech and free association," Ethereum commentator Tim-Clancy.ETH told The Block. "They genuinely love Ethereum as the uncensorable forever computer."

Miladys mishmash?

But Buterin’s support for — and now the EF’s tacit endorsement of — Miladys has also rankled many. 

Commenting on both the EF Mandate’s pledge and Milady design elements, Lightclients, a core developer behind the widely used Ethereum client Go Ethereum (Geth), reposted this message: 

"Milady's core product is larp with the goal of growing the cult; it's entirely inward-facing. The entirety of the lore is self-referential and the gap between self-ascribed importance and actual influence is vast. The philosophy hasn't traveled any serious distance."

Many took a more pointed line against the group, noting that the Milady brand is toxic and not something that will increase mainstream adoption, while others searched for a middle ground.

"I don’t think most people have a real issue with Miladies existing or doing their thing," DCBuilder.eth told The Block, arguing against any top-down culture directive from the EF. "I just also don’t think they’re nearly as relevant or central to Ethereum culture as some people make them out to be. They’re there, but they’re not some defining force. A lot of the backlash seems more about some Ethereum or EF-adjacent people trying to push memes or aesthetics onto others who just don’t care."

It was a point echoed by Alchemix’s Scoopy Trooples, who said in a direct message, "The true spirit of crypto is anarcho-voluntarism and no one should be compelled to do anything they don’t wish to, especially milady purity tests."

Dylan-Ennis noted the ongoing debate is just another expression of Ethereum’s "cultural pluralism," and perhaps a result of Buterin trying to articulate a mission statement for Ethereum after so many years of simply implying a clear endgame. "It's being formed now, quite late into the game, as CROPS (rooted in a longer story of Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again) and so I think it's more frantically contested, since there is much at stake, power-wise," he said. 

For others, the situation is less philosophical, though equally as emblematic of how the EF has historically operated. "EF adopting Milady culture via committee 5 years after it was cool is the most EF thing to ever happen," Joseph Delong, founder of Colossus, said.