On Tuesday (February 19th), Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, revealed some details about his financial standing, including which cryptocurrencies he holds and his major corporate shareholdings, and these showed that the vast majority of his crypto holdings are in Ether (ETH).

Ethereum Foundation’s Hudson Jameson made a post called “AMA about Ethereum Leadership and Accountability” on the “ethereum” subreddit. The purpose of this post was to encourage all those in a leadership position in the Ethereum community, especially the people who are “actively involved in protocol decision-making” to disclose which cryptoassets they hold and where their income comes in order for others to be able to see if there were any potential conflicts of interests.

 Vitalik revealed the following information about his current financial standing:

  • “Non-ethereum-ecosystem tokens: BCH, BTC, DOGE, ZEC; total value < 10% the value of my ETH"
  • “Non-ETH ethereum ecosystem tokens: KNC, MKR, OMG, REP, total value <10% the value of my ETH"
  • “Significant corporate shareholdings: Clearmatics, Starkware”
  • “Revenue in the last 12 months other than ethereum foundation salary: a few advisor tokens (included in above)”

Vitalik also disclosed his non-financial interests: “friends in the ecosystems represented by the above projects, as well as some non-token ethereum ecosystem orgs (eg. L4, Plasma Group, EthGlobal, EDCON) and non-token non-ethereum orgs (mainly professional cryptography and economics circles).”

This encouraged some other members of the Ethereum Foundation to also make similair disclosures.

For example, here is what Etheruem Foundation researcher Justin Drake disclosed about himself:

  • “99% of token value in ETH (was given minor airdrops for free)
  • “Paid by the EF in ETH”
  • “Leverage long ETH using ETH as collateral (MakerDAO)”
  • “Close to zero fiat”
  • “Not associated with any blockchain project other than Ethereum”
  • “Zero speaking fees, zero grants”

And this is what Martin Holst Swende, who is the security lead at the Ethereum Foundation, said:

  • “95-99% of crypto holdings in ETH, rest is ZEC, BTC, SIA + some eth-tokens”
  • “Salary/income last 12 months: all via EF (in euro)”
  • “I previously also sometimes did consultancy audits, haven’t done any in a long time”
  • “Advisor in zero projects, zero speaking fees, zero grants received, etc.”

In case you are wondering why EVitalik and other members of the Ethereum Foundation chose yesterday to make these self disclosure, it is because of what happened with Ethereum Core developer Afri Schoedon. Last Thursday, Schoedon, who is the release manager for Parity Technologies (the developer of popular Ethereum client “Parity Ethereum”), wrote on Twitter: “‘Polkadot delivers what Serenity ought to be.’ Change my mind.” Now, since Parity is also working on the Polkadot platform, Schoedon was accused by some members of the Ethereum community of “conflict of interest” because of his perceived “attack” on Ethereum.

At first (on Sunday), Schoedon said that he was going to leave social media:

Then, yesterday, he explained that he was no longer going to do any more work on Ethereum:

 

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