This week, the Ethereum ecosystem has been rocked by a $654 million ETH transfer by the Ethereum Foundation. This triggered intense scrutiny over developer compensation, transparency, and leadership, culminating in the public resignation of core developer Péter Szilágyi and renewed criticism of governance practices.
Simultaneously, Polygon’s AggLayer upgrade has faced launch delays and network instability, intensifying debate about Layer-2 alignment, fragmentation, and the Foundation’s support for external L2s.
These developments, alongside POL token migration volatility, ongoing struggles to balance mainnet centralization with L2 sovereignty, and reaction to the Foundation’s earlier executive restructuring, have added fresh urgency to the disputes over Ethereum’s future direction and the sustainable growth of its scaling ecosystem.
Ethereum family feud
Ethereum’s scaling architecture underwent a transformation from a technical sidebar to a political economy when Vitalik Buterin praised Coinbase’s Base for “doing things the right way,” weeks after Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal assumed the CEO role at the Polygon Foundation, issuing warnings about Ethereum’s “existential” layer-2 (L2) direction.
The question emerging from competing visions is whether Ethereum will standardize how L2s earn and settle value, or watch liquidity fragment into parallel systems that route around rather than through the mainnet.
The tension crystallized across three developments in mid-2025. Nailwal took leadership of Polygon Foundation on June 11 amid a strategy reset, positioning the network as more independent from Ethereum’s rollup-centric orthodoxy.
Polygon shipped AggLayer v0.3 on June 23, advancing chain-agnostic interoperability with Polygon PoS, which was slated to connect by the end of the third quarter, but did not happen as of press time.
Buterin’s public endorsement of Base in September reignited debates over whether Ethereum’s leadership favors specific L2s, amplifying earlier friction when Nailwal questioned the low rec
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Author: Gino Matos
