Kydo@0xkydo
Knowing true north.
I want to be direct about this.
The EF Mandate is a 180 from the direction the Foundation was heading under the recent leadership changes. A few months ago, the signal was clear -- lean into real-world adoption, support stablecoins, engage with institutions, help Ethereum win the race for relevance. Tomasz was brought in to operationalize that pivot. This document effectively undoes most of it.
Some key quotes that make the shift explicit:
"We are NOT Opportunists: We do not actively assist in adoption of Ethereum in ways that compromise trustlessness."
"We are NOT a Casino: We do not encourage people to take life-changing, and possibly life-wrecking, amounts of risk by going into personal debt hyper-gambling."
"Our priority, and the default path for decisions, in line with our mandate and the Only-EF Rule, is the CROPS-native approach."
"We leave space within the Foundation for the incrementalist approach only in tightly bounded circumstances."
"Right association also means we prefer to focus on individuals, teams, and projects that share our principles but operate in different domains, over those individuals, teams, and projects who are in crypto, but operate according to a very different set of standards."
Translation: the EF will deprioritize supporting stablecoin infrastructure, institutional onboarding, RWA tokenization, and broadly anything where the path to adoption runs through centralized intermediaries -- which is essentially everything that has product-market fit on Ethereum today.
This is a combination of d/acc philosophy and a broader leftward ideological pull within the EF. If you've been paying attention to the defense acceleration discourse, none of this is surprising. The framing is pure sanctuary tech -- Ethereum as digital refuge, not financial rails.
I respect the intellectual coherence. But the thing that strikes me most is the ability to hold two contradictory views simultaneously. The entire platform -- the treasury that funds the EF, the ecosystem that gives these words weight, the network effects that make Ethereum worth writing a 38-page manifesto about -- was built on financialization, speculation, DeFi, stablecoins, and yes, things with centralized access points.
Every application with real PMF on Ethereum today exists because someone made pragmatic compromises on the CROPS spectrum.
It was built by people who are willing to make compromises and see the world as it is, bringing product and people to Ethereum. The very people that this mandate is trying to alienate.
I will end with this quote from Lincoln: "A compass will point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp -- what's the use of knowing true north?"
CROPS is true north. Nobody disputes that. The question was never the destination -- it was always whether you can get there without engaging the world as it actually is.
