What is the Ethereum Foundation?

The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit entity that dedicates efforts to maximize the development of Ethereum as a technology and community around the world.

UOne of the most important organizations within the Ethereum ecosystem is the well-known Ethereum Foundation or Ethereum Foundation. The role of this foundation is to dedicate efforts to promote the adoption, development and research of solutions on Ethereum. But it also dedicates efforts to promoting technologies related to this ecosystem. In this way, it seeks to encourage the expansion of the Ethereum ecosystem beyond being a simple payment system or small applications for its users. But, at the same time, it also seeks to show itself as a powerful option for companies and large companies around the world.

To achieve these goals, Ethereum Foundation has created various mechanisms supported by a philosophy that always seeks the best destination for the Ethereum project. Which makes it very clear that it will continue to be an important piece in this project.

Birth of the Ethereum Foundation

The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization created on July 6, 2014, in Bern (Switzerland). It was devised by Ethereum developers Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood, together with the collaboration of a team determined to organize everything necessary to grow the nascent Ethereum ecosystem. The initial intention with the Ethereum Foundation at this point was to organize a common governance point that would lead the development efforts, as well as control the organization's treasury valued at more than 18 million dollars, coming from the collection of Bitcoin for the development of this new cryptocurrency.

He played a fundamental role within the regulation to receive crowdfunding, complying with the regulation and avoiding having to pay penalties in the form of taxes that will limit his financial capacity.

The initial effort paid off quickly. By November 2014, the Ethereum Foundation was able to organize one of the largest Ethereum development events, Devcon-0, which brought together various developers and people interested in the Ethereum project. The event was a success and since then, the Devcons have become an annual event of great relevance for the community and the development of this cryptocurrency.

Currently, the Ethereum Foundation is controlled by Aya Miyaguchi (Executive Director), Vitalik Buterin (Co-founder of Ethereum) and Patrick Storcheneger (Committee Member).

Today, Ethereum is a project that is being the main part of all this technological, financial and social revolution that we are experiencing throughout the planet earth, being the epicenter of much of the innovation in these aspects.

Ethereum Foundation Philosophy

The main philosophical ideal that drives the Ethereum Foundation is to maximize value and all that Ethereum represents to the world. An ideal that they have maintained since its inception and that they have been cultivating together with the community that contributes and supports the Ethereum project.

In fact, thanks to being the first foundation around Ethereum, the position of this organization is privileged. In fact, it has an important role in making decisions about the evolution of the cryptocurrency. But very especially, in those related to research, development and community cultivation that favors the ecosystem.

However, many in the community see in the Ethereum Foundation a high degree of centralization and power that can be dangerous for free innovation. Faced with these fears, the Ethereum Foundation has created and maintained a philosophy accepted by all its parts, in order to encourage decentralization, free expression of ideas, coordination and leadership within the project, organizing the project following the development model "Bazar ”(Like that of free software projects like LibreOffice or the Linux kernel), instead of“ Cathedral ”(like most proprietary software or free software projects like GCC).

With the "Bazaar" development model, what is sought is that people can see, review and improve the project in a completely autonomous way, present their improvements, discuss them and include them if they are really profitable or solve a problem for everyone within the company. community. Something that in the "Cathedral" model would be quite difficult to achieve, due to the existence of well-defined tasks and roles for each of the parts of the project that limit their access or work within it.

In fact, the Ethereum Foundation represents its philosophy in four parts which are:

1. Instead of capturing opportunities, we distribute opportunities to others.
2. Rather than being defensive when others create value, we are delighted.
3. We don't want to import more, we try to import less.
   4. Ultimately, any philosophy is only as good as the choices it inspires.

Other Ethereum Foundation initiatives

On the other hand, the Ethereum Foundation has also dedicated efforts to other initiatives designed to involve the community. Thus, in April 2015, the Foundation announced the creation of the DEVgrants program. This program was created in order to support and reward the work of developers who contribute to the Ethereum project.

Around the same time, the Foundation also started the Olympic testnet as well as the Ethereum Bug Bounty Program. The testnet was actually an event where members of the Ethereum community were invited to try and break the Ethereum system in any way they could; members who were successful were rewarded with ETH tokens.

On the other hand, the Ethereum Bug Bounty program provided rewards in BTC for any user who could find bugs or vulnerabilities in the underlying software of the Ethereum platform. The program is ongoing and hosted at bounty.ethereum.org. Currently, participants are rewarded in ETH, not BTC.

The Ethereum Bounty program uses a point system that is earned by users who find bugs and bugs; the more bugs you find, the higher your "score" will be. The show's website has a "high scores" leaderboard for its top-ranking programmers on its home page.

In January 2018, Vitalik Buterin posted on the official Ethereum blog that the Ethereum Foundation had started the process of creating two programs to help fund the efforts of developers working on scaling solutions for Ethereum. Vitalik said that these programs “subsidies that are not intended to be sources of substantial earnings”. Instead they seek “cover some of the costs involved, with the understanding that anyone participating in the scheme will have access to a unique opportunity to participate in Ethereum 2.0 development”. The first wave of grants was announced in March 2018; 13 projects received a combined total of $ 2,5 million.

In January 2021, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it would be partnering with the Reddit online forum. The idea is that both organizations can help each other to scale up and develop new projects for their respective communities.