The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has established a new advisory group: the Silviculture Society. This team of 15 experienced Ethereum builders will help to safeguard the project’s core values. The EF has established this group in response to criticism of the organization’s leadership. While the Ethereum price continues to fluctuate, this initiative is intended to strengthen the foundation’s leadership and vision, which could potentially have a positive impact on the long-term value of Ethereum.
Why is the Silviculture Society necessary?
Recently, the Ethereum Foundation has received a lot of criticism from the community. Many developers were concerned that the EF was increasingly moving away from its original values, such as open source, privacy, security and censorship-free development. The EF wants to protect these core values with the Silviculture Society.
Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, calls it an experiment to give the community more influence. According to him, the EF will continue to set up separate working groups for technical issues, but the Silviculture Society will focus solely on the direction of Ethereum itself: where is the project going, and which values will always remain central?
The announcement of the Silviculture Society follows shortly after a major change at the top of the EF. Aya Miyaguchi, who was director for seven years, becomes the new chair of the foundation.
The EF Silviculture Society: a loose collection of individuals from outside the Foundation who provide informal counsel to the EF in tending to the (dark or otherwise) forests in the infinite garden of Ethereum, to make sure we sustain the core values of open source, privacy,… pic.twitter.com/cleIrpArCi
— Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn) February 28, 2025
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Who are the members of the Silviculture Society?
The group consists of 15 people from different backgrounds. Some are well-known names in the crypto industry, such as Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Lefteris Karapetsas, the founder of Rotki.
The rest of the group is largely anonymous. They only use pseudonyms such as “Aleph”, “dystopiabreaker” or “mashbean”. Many of these anonymous members come from the old cypherpunk community, where privacy and decentralization are always paramount.
The Silviculture Society is not an official governing group. They do not make decisions for the EF. Instead, they provide feedback from the perspective of the community. They show how Ethereum developers think about the direction of the project. This advice is independent, without influence from the EF itself.
