On a Friday in March, employees at an international technology foundation received a 38-page document outlining leadership’s vision for the foundation for the next 1,000 years.
The document went out to all employees of The Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit organization registered in Switzerland that supports Ethereum, a popular cryptocurrency platform and the second-largest blockchain network in the world, valued at about $300 billion, according to a federal lawsuit filed by a Boulder resident Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.
Titled “The Ethereum Foundation Mandate,” the document featured ethereal illustrated scenes of glowing lights and anime-style characters voyaging through dark forests. The pages featured white text against a navy blue background and were adorned with cartoon flowers, rainbows and diamonds.
And on page 11 — nestled between a winking anime woman and three yellow cats — was a suicide pledge.
Authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of “this software” would pledge to ensure the software remained free and publicly accessible, and would also vow to “take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license,” the illustration read. It was labeled “Source Seppuku License,” an apparent reference to a traditional Japanese ritual suicide.
When the document went out on that Friday in March, employees were told to commit to the principles in the mandate by Monday or quit their jobs, according to the lawsuit brought by Kayleen Fulton, a Boulder woman who was fired from the Ethereum Foundation after she led employee resistance to the suicide pledge.
Employees were to return a form with one of two options checked, according to a copy of the document included in legal filings.
Choice one: “I personally commit to the direction set out in the mandate, I commit to help translate it into thoroughly reasoned strategies for my domain, and I commit to an exclusive and energetic focus on the mission-critical tasks necessary for its implementation. From today and until my last day at the EF.”
Or choice two: “I cannot confidently commit to the above and would like to request my extra months of compensation and leave the EF without undue delay.”
An email to the foundation seeking comment on this story was not immediately returned Thursday, but a foundation leader at the time told employees the suicide pledge was not meant to be taken literally, according to the lawsuit. After employee pushback, managers updated the commitment form to clarify that the form had “nothing to do with literal seppuku,” according to the lawsuit.
Resistance to the suicide pledge was swift and vocal, and began when the Ethereum Foundation’s board put out a draft of the mandate to staff in late February, Fulton alleged in the lawsuit. Employees soon asked whether they were pledging to die by suicide and wondered in workplace forums whether the pledge was a test of their loyalty to Ethereum’s core principles. One employee referenced a colleague’s recent death by suicide.
“I have a new hire joining tomorrow,” another employee wrote in a discussion about the suicide pledge, according to the lawsuit. “The first thing he’s going to see… is a motion to drop a clause that mandates employees commit the ultimate sacrifice by falling on a sword.”
Nearly 80 of the foundation’s 250 or so employees voted to nix the suicide pledge after the draft was released, according to the lawsuit, but leadership at the Ethereum Foundation ignored their objections and included the pledge word-for-word in the final version of the mandate. The final published version presented the suicide pledge in an illustration instead of including it in the main body of the mandate, as it had been in the draft version.
This screenshot from a federal lawsuit shows a so-called 'suicide pledge' distributed to employees at The Ethereum Foundation as part of a document outlining the organization's vision for the future. (Screenshot via U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado)
The mandate’s visual aesthetic — the anime and other illustrations — reflected imagery from a controversial online figure who was known to promote “white nationalist ideology and disturbing pro-anorexia content,” according to the lawsuit.
When an Ethereum Foundation board member objected to the aesthetic, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin responded that “the controversialness (sic) of those aesthetics is itself part of the point,” according to the lawsuit.
After demanding that employees agree to the mandate, Bastian Aue, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, defended the suicide pledge to employees as “part of the artwork of the mandate.”
It was, he said, “a cultural reference like other elements in there. Chosen deliberately, but not meant to be taken literally.”
In the days after the mandate was pushed out to employees, Fulton and a colleague organized and sent the foundation’s board a letter in which 53 employees endorsed the mandate’s general direction but declined to return the commitment form. The employees also declined to resign, according to the lawsuit.
Aue ultimately allowed the letter-signers to keep their jobs. But he fired Fulton and her colleague who helped organize the letter. Buterin later told Fulton — who had just been diagnosed with cancer — that the firing was about company dynamics, according to the lawsuit.
“If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,” he said, according to the lawsuit, which cited a recorded conversation between the pair.
The mandate started an exodus at the Ethereum Foundation, according to the lawsuit. The board member who’d objected to the mandate’s visual aesthetics started a sabbatical the day Fulton was fired and resigned in June. By September, eight senior employees had left, according to the lawsuit, and most of the 53 people who signed the letter had resigned or been terminated.
Fulton, who had earned a salary of $195,000 in her role at the Ethereum Foundation, sued for disability discrimination, retaliation, interference with her rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, unfair employment practices and related claims. Her lawsuit notes that the Ethereum Foundation “does not hire or pay its United States staff in its own name,” but instead uses employer-of-record service companies.
One of her attorneys, James Bartolomei, declined to comment Thursday, saying the lawsuit spoke for itself.
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