The Ethereum Community Foundation (ECF), a newly formed organization led by Ethereum core developer Zak Cole, is now in operation. The primary goal is to elevate the price of Ether (ETH) to $10,000. The news about ECF’s formation was announced at the eighth Ethereum Community Conference in Cannes, France.
Cole expressed his disappointment with the Ethereum Foundation’s disregard for ETH as an asset class. He has formed the ECF with a mission to fund projects that will help in growing the Ethereum ecosystem and simultaneously boost the value of ETH.
“Our existence is to serve the Ethereum community. We voice what the Ethereum Foundation cannot, and we act where the Ethereum Foundation does not. We are here for ETH holders because you deserve better,” Cole said during the conference.
Cole has highlighted that ETH’s price is intrinsically linked to security and emphasised the need for ETH to reach the $10,000 mark. The ECF is independent of the Ethereum Foundation and aims to grant funds to projects that will contribute to the public good, advance core infrastructure, and scale Ethereum. The projects must use Ethereum as the settlement layer, leading to ETH burns due to transaction processing on the Ethereum mainnet.
Cole criticized projects such as Uniswap, Ethereum Name Service, and Optimism for receiving support from the Ethereum Foundation but later launching their own tokens backed by venture capital funding.
“Projects funded by the public should stay public and benefit those who funded them,” Cole stated. He also criticized the Ethereum Foundation for overlooking ETH as a valuable asset.
The Ethereum Validator Association (EVA) is the first organization to be awarded a grant by the ECF. Cole believes that EVA will influence Ethereum’s monetary policy by prioritizing EIP road maps and choosing Ethereum’s client priorities.
He also raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, noting that Offchain Labs, the team behind layer-2 network Arbitrum, owns a stake in Prysmatic Labs, which operates the Prysm client, the second-largest consensus layer client of the Ethereum network.
