Szilágyi: Ethereum Foundation Secretly Funded Competing Geth Team

- Péter Szilágyi claims EF undermined Geth team - Allegations include funding a competing team and dismissal Péter Szilágyi, a lead developer of the Geth Ethereum client and former Ethereum Foundation (EF) employee, has accused the EF of undermining his team's efforts. On June 11, 2025, Cointelegraph reported that Szilágyi claims the EF achieved this by covertly creating and funding a second Geth development team at Nethermind, a team Szilágyi only discovered in November 2024 despite its earlier commencement. Regarding this, on June 11, EF representative Josh Stark told Cointelegraph, "100% independent fork from us, with no intended collaboration." Szilágyi alleges the Ethereum Foundation dismissed him after a confrontation with Josh Stark regarding the "secret" Geth team's existence, and he further claims the Ethereum Foundation took several actions to undermine the Geth development team. These actions reportedly included encouraging developers to find other jobs, proposing salary cuts, and offering $5 million for the team to become a private enterprise. This issue surfaced amid broader changes at the Ethereum Foundation, such as recent leadership shifts and staff layoffs. Indeed, on June 2, 2025, the Foundation announced staff reductions and an overhaul of its core development team, stating these changes aim to improve the Ethereum protocol's scalability, expand blobspace, and enhance user experience. In addition, the EF reported altering its funding strategy; instead of its traditional method of selling Ether, the Foundation now focuses on leveraging yield from decentralized finance (DeFi) lending and borrowing and has also committed to producing regular financial reports for transparency. On June 11, Cointelegraph noted it sought comments from the Ethereum Foundation but had not received a response by the time of publication, while other outlets also noted Szilágyi's statement. According to the same Cointelegraph report on June 11, Péter Szilágyi, former Geth lead developer, revealed the Ethereum Foundation stated the reason for his termination was: "threatening to quit is unacceptable and destroys team morale." Szilágyi also mentioned the EF invited him multiple times to return; however, he declined because the Foundation's leadership did not meet his condition for an apology. As of June 11, 19:18 UTC, Ethereum (ETH) was trading at $2,821.61, reflecting a 1.998% increase in the preceding 24 hours.