Ben Bierens

I am stepping into the role of interim co-ED @ethereumfndn to continue the progress that Tomasz has made over the last year. Tomasz brought an energy and urgency that the EF needed at a critical time, and I join the community in thanking him for his work on behalf of the Foundation and the network. This task isn't something that I take on lightly, knowing the weight of responsibility of the role through seeing it up close for some time, but it is one that I am prepared to handle. I've served in a management position at the EF over many years, working closely with Hsiao-Wei, Tomasz, Josh Stark, Danny Ryan, Aya, and Vitalik at different points in time. My focus has been deliberately on illegible but essential work, helping management try to make well-informed decisions, working with EF's team leads, considering budgets, articulating strategy, setting priorities, and more. The decisions I make will be guided by a principled insistence on the properties of what we're building (censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security). These properties are what make Ethereum relevant and competitive, and they are the foundation of Ethereum's value proposition to the world and everything the world builds on it; just as Ether is the foundational store-of-value that underpins every transaction across it; and just as both are indispensable to the EF's own treasury. The mandate of the EF is to make sure that real permissionless infrastructure, cypherpunk at its core, is what gets built. Ethereum should outlast us, and it has been our job from the beginning to make sure it is robust enough to do so. I, and the rest of the EF, will work alongside other members of the community - core protocol contributors, researchers and client implementers, auditors and whitehats, incident responders, spec authors, solo stakers and validator operators, node runners, MEV gremlins, rollup and L2 teams, bridge and interoperability integrators, UX and product builders, infra providers and tooling maintainers, educators, community organizers, forum crews, lurkers, and free software advocates, grant-givers and culture-makers, artists, memers, cypherpunks, cyberanarchists, Landian accelerationists, financepunks, femboys, soundcloud rappers, transgenders, disinformationalists, cyborgs, anons, revolutionaries, shitposters, trolls, federal lists, hypebeasts, pirates, preppers, the bros, incels - to make it last 1000 years or more.

A fantastic workshop led by our Research Engineer Ben Bierens. Thanks to everyone who came along to see the power of Codex, and thanks to @masknetwork for putting on such a great event! 🙏