The EF Can't Be Credibly Neutral While Playing Favorites

Camila Russo & yyc trader
March 27, 2026

gm, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

• There are two threads spurring debate in the Ethereum community this week: the rumor that the Ethereum Foundation is asking (forcing?) employees to pledge allegiance to the EF Mandate, or else get fired; and the close ties the EF has with a questionable NFT group.

In other news:

• Bitcoin plunges under $66K
• ICE invests another $600M in Polymarket
• ECB study casts doubts on DeFi DAOs’ decentralization
• Enterprises Are Finally Moving Their Businesses Onchain: RJ Catalan of Aligned [MEDIA PARTNER]

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📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours

	TICKER	VALUE	24H
	Bitcoin	$65,952	-4.38 %
	Ethereum	$1,985.21	-3.89 %
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	XRP	$1.33	-2.08 %
	Solana	$82.97	-4.78 %

Today’s Big Story

The EF Can't Be Credibly Neutral While Playing Favorites

There are two threads spurring debate in the Ethereum community this week: the rumor that the Ethereum Foundation is asking (forcing?) employees to pledge allegiance to the EF Mandate, or else get fired; and the close ties the EF has with a questionable NFT group.

The dissonance stems from the fact that both actions directly contradict the EF’s recently published Mandate.

Exhibits A and B below:

1. EF in its Mandate: “Our role” is to be a “credibly neutral steward,” and “We are NOT a Kingmaker: We support mechanisms and designs that are in line with our mandate and core principles, not specific private brands or companies.” (bold is my own).

Also EF: Hires artist with ties to a specific NFT collection to design EF Mandate art in the same style as those PFPs, while Vitalik himself has that PFP as his avatar and signs off many of his tweets with the meme associated with that group. This project, called Milady, also happens to have a very questionable past (more on this later).

1. EF in its Mandate: “... the unwavering belief that it is possible to build and maintain a better world without caprice or coercion - could have led to many destinations other than Ethereum (...) By asking ourselves ‘if we had these principles, and we operated in a different domain, what would we create?’, then seeing what things in our existing world come closest, we can start to find our natural allies.” (Bold my own)

Allegedly EF: Asks employees to publicly sign the Mandate or get fired.

I’ll unpack both:

I thought it was already strange that Vitalik, who always went to great lengths to not publicly endorse projects, was using the PFP of a specific NFT collection and signing his tweets with “Milady.” But at least you can say it was his own personal choice.

What makes it different now is that by branding its Mandate with Milady-like aesthetics, the EF itself is now aligned with this NFT collection.

What makes it worse is that this NFT collection also has a questionable past: Charlotte Fang (Krishna Okhandiar), the creator of the Milady Maker NFT collection in May 2022, confessed to being the person (or one of the persons) behind the online character of "Miya," notorious for racist, misogynistic, and homophobic statements online. Fang also participated in group chats that routinely degraded women and trivialized suicide.

While Fang hasn’t denied his participation in these groups, he has minimized the level of his involvement and has called most of it “performance art.”

The statements made are so vile, I don’t want to repeat them here. But DeFiLlama founder 0xngmi submitted documentation here and here. Meanwhile, here is the most comprehensive defense of Milady I found, so you can make up your mind.

The EF, in its grandiosely worded Mandate, said it wants to welcome everyone who aligns with its principles: “Our goal is to ensure the garden we’ve grown doesn’t just stay alive but flourishes, the commons it creates remain open and infinitely spacious, and the tools of sovereignty that are built remain available to all who would grasp them, to all who would log on and win, forever.”

Aligning too closely with any one cultural faction, especially one that carries baggage or signals a specific in-group, risks undermining that promise. An open system can’t feel selective. If the goal is for anyone to show up and participate, the posture has to match it.

On point B): It’s still unclear whether EF members are actually being asked to pledge allegiance to the Mandate or risk getting fired, as the EF itself hasn’t confirmed it (I reached out for comment but didn’t get an answer). But we do have many, many, many, many, many people saying that’s the case.

We also have different EF members tweeting the following: “[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.”

To me, in the words of Charlotte Fang, this is purely “performative art.” If you’re an employee of the EF, it should be understood that you align with the Mandate. Why make members put on this show?

More importantly, this pledge introduces a form of ideological conformity that feels at odds with Ethereum’s ethos. The whole premise of Ethereum is that coordination happens through code, incentives, and voluntary participation, not through top-down enforcement of beliefs.

And the optics here are particularly jarring when placed next to the Mandate’s own language: “the unwavering belief that it is possible to build and maintain a better world without caprice or coercion.” If employees feel pressured to publicly signal agreement or risk losing their jobs, that seems very capricious and coercive.

In the end, why does this matter? The world’s largest institutions are finally using blockchain rails, and there’s more competition than ever. The stakes are high.

Now is the time for Ethereum to inspire those seeking to place their trust in infrastructure that will last for centuries. Oath signing and in-group behavior do the opposite.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

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🎬WATCH

How the DTCC is Tokenizing $100 Trillions in Assets | Tom Sullivan

In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, Cami sits down with Tom Sullivan, Managing Director at DTCC Digital Assets.

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Watch the full interview:

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