Eli Ben-Sasson, cofounder of StarkWare and a founding scientist of Zcash, has weighed into the growing debate around the Ethereum Foundation with a call to prioritize technical merit over political alignment.
Ben-Sasson framed his intervention as neither an attack on the Foundation nor an uncritical defense. “Ethereum has many strengths, and it also has its politics,” he wrote, adding that he spoke “as a friend.” His central argument: the ecosystem should evaluate teams and ideas primarily on engineering quality and long-term technical value, not on whether they appear socially or politically aligned with the Foundation.
Why his voice matters
Ben-Sasson helped steer StarkWare’s early technical direction. He noted the company’s first paid work in 2019–2020 focused on building a post-quantum secure, scalable ZK‑STARK system for Ethereum—work intended to both scale the network and insulate it against future quantum risks. Subsequent choices—embracing STARKs, developing the Cairo language, building a zkVM, pursuing native account abstraction and even Bitcoin-scaling work—were sometimes labeled “misaligned” with mainstream Ethereum preferences. Ben-Sasson defended those choices as sound technical decisions that benefited the broader stack, even if they originated outside consensus.
Context: leadership and funding pressures
His comments arrive amid a tense period for the Foundation. Hsiao‑Wei Wang recently resigned as co‑executive director and board member after a sabbatical, following other senior departures including Tomasz Stańczak. The debate over Ethereum’s direction also includes funding worries: former contributor Trent Van Epps warned core development could face a funding gap within three to nine months tied to spending cuts and the end of the Client Incentive Program; others, like Tom Lee, pushed back, calling such a crisis unlikely.
A push for meritocracy, not new governance
Ben‑Sasson didn’t lay out a formal governance blueprint. Rather, he urged the emerging system to weight merit and technology more heavily than “alignment” or political signaling. He said he’d be more inclined to work with ecosystem institutions that adopt that stance. His view also reframes past critiques of StarkWare: useful engineering can begin outside prevailing consensus and later be integrated into the mainstream stack.
Why this matters for Ethereum
The exchange spotlights a structural tension in Ethereum’s ecosystem: layer‑2 and protocol teams rely on Ethereum but often make independent technical bets. When those choices move at a different pace than Foundation priorities, friction follows. Ben‑Sasson’s intervention pushes the conversation toward a meritocratic evaluation of contributions—an argument likely to resonate with engineers and entrepreneurs navigating the tradeoffs between independence and alignment in Ethereum’s evolving governance landscape.
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