Coin Bureau|02. Juni
The Billion Dollar Plan To Save Ethereum
Background: Dankrad Feist
- Dankrad Feist is a leading Ethereum Foundation researcher, instrumental in Ethereum's scaling (e.g., Dank Sharding, EIP-4844).
- In May 2026, he proposed a radical structural overhaul, claiming the project is "structurally broken."
The "Feist Plan" consists of five parts:
- A $1 billion war chest (denominated in ETH, not USD) – directly tied to ETH price performance.
- Sustainable funding from staking yields (~4% = $40M/year) and a slice of network fees.
- Clear mandate: Support ETH's competitive position and price.
- Governance by a board that wants ETH to succeed, led by someone competent and willing to fight.
- Accountability to the network, not just a single non-profit charter.
- Narrative Defeat: ETH is down 43.8% over two years, while Bitcoin is up 11.8%.
- Fee Collapse: The EIP-4849 upgrade (Proto-Dank Sharding) drastically cut L2 costs, but also collapsed the ETH burn rate (from thousands to under 100 ETH/day). The "ultrasound money" thesis is dead.
- Brain Drain: Numerous senior leaders and developers have left the Ethereum Foundation (e.g., Thomas Stangass, Tim Beiko). Developer count dropped from 225 to 169.
- Economic Misalignment: Coinbase's L2 Base made $94M in profit in 2025 but paid only $4.9M back to Ethereum.
- Institutional Exodus: Harvard liquidated its ETH ETF holdings; Bank of America reduced ETH exposure.
- Feist Faction: Advocates for an economically aligned, aggressive advocacy organization. Supporters: Ryan Sean Adams, Simon Dedic, Danny Ryan (with his Etherealize project).
- Neutrality Faction: Defends the EF as an independent protocol body (like the IETF). Fears a "corporate chain" and points to the CROPS mandate (Censorship Resistance, Open-Source, Privacy, Security).
- Vitalik Buterin has not publicly taken a side – his existing philosophy ("Subtraction Path") leans towards neutrality.
- Bull Case: A properly governed, billion-dollar, economically motivated advocacy machine could fill the marketing and institutional persuasion gap. Etherealize ($40M) is a successful proof of concept.
- Bear Case: Money alone cannot fix the broken burn mechanism or L2 fragmentation. Political capture of the fund could undermine decentralization, Ethereum's last differentiator.
- ETH/BTC Ratio: Psychological resistance at 0.04-0.05. Until it stops bleeding, no narrative works.
- Funding: Will the entity actually be funded with real ETH within 6 months?
- Etherealize: Can it show measurable institutional inflows?
- Pectra Upgrade: Can tripling the gas limit (to 200M) be leveraged as a narrative event?
- EF Departures: Has the brain drain stopped or is it accelerating?
