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- Ethereum Foundation forms Silviculture Society to uphold open source, privacy, security, and censorship resistance.
- Experts, including cryptographer Matthew Green, will provide guidance on Ethereum’s core principles and future policies.
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) recently formed the “Silviculture Society,” an external advisory group tasked with upholding Ethereum’s core values. The action coincides with several significant events that have lately happened in the Ethereum ecosystem.
🚨JUST IN: @ETHEREUMFNDN FOUNDATION ANNOUNCED THE FORMATION OF THE SILVICULTURE SOCIETY, A GROUP OF EXTERNAL INDIVIDUAL WHO PROVIDE INFORMAL COUNSEL TO THE FOUNDATION AND TO SUSTAIN THE CORE VALUES OF OPEN SOURCE, PRIVACY, SECURITY AND CENSORSHIP RESISTANCE
— BSCN Headlines (@BSCNheadlines) February 28, 2025
Silviculture Society: Keeping Ethereum’s Ideals Intact
The Ethereum Foundation aims to guarantee that open source, privacy, security, and censorship resistance are maintained in a world going more and more centralized. They have thus gathered a team of professionals from many backgrounds to offer advice and direction.
Along with developers, the group comprises project founders and researchers who have shown a dedication to these principles.
Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor, is among this group members. Furthermore, engaged in the project is Lefteris Karapetsas, the creator of Rotki—a program safeguarding user privacy in decentralized finance. With leaders like them, the Silviculture Society is expected to be able to offer an objective viewpoint on the several EF policies going ahead.
Donations for Legal Defense
On the other hand, EF has lately also shown support for developer freedom by sponsoring Alexey Pertsev, one of the Tornado Cash developers, with a $1.25 million donation. Pertsev is presently under legal hot pursuit on the usage of the platform for cryptocurrency transactions. This action supports the Ethereum Foundation’s stance in safeguarding crypto world developer rights and user privacy.
The Tornado Cash case is rather debatable. Mixing money from several sources makes the platform intended to boost transaction privacy difficult to follow. Authorities view it, meanwhile, as a possible weapon for money laundering. This reminds the crypto community that often existing rules conflict with technological innovation.
Leadership Shift at the Ethereum Foundation
Furthermore, the foundation is changing its leadership as well. Aya Miyaguchi declared her resignation from the Executive Director post on February 25, 2025, and will be moving to a new post as the President of the company. For years, Miyaguchi has been the face of the Ethereum Foundation, helping to guide several community projects.
This new leadership begs the issue of whether the Ethereum Foundation will undergo significant policy change. Although a clear solution is yet unknown, many hope his new post will keep benefiting the Ethereum community.
EF Fund Movement
Apart from internal dynamics and outside policies, the Ethereum Foundation keeps careful management and distribution of its resources. According to our prior report, the foundation had deployed $120 million worth of ETH to several decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, including Spark, Aave, and Compound.
Using a multi-sig wallet, the Ethereum Foundation transferred 30,800 ETH—worth $81.6 million—to Aave of that total. Two stages of the transfer were completed; the main market of Aave received the largest share, 20,800 ETH valued at $55 million. Aave Prime got 10,000 ETH, or $26 million, in the meantime.
This move reveals that the foundation is actively optimizing its assets in the decentralized finance ecosystem rather than only passively storing them. This could also suggest that they wish to support different initiatives or experiments they are running using DeFi lending services.
Meanwhile, as of press time, ETH is trading at about $2,181.43, up 2.78% over the last 24 hours, but still in a 7-day correction of 20.16%.
