“Stewardship, Not Control”: Analyst Says Ethereum Foundation Has Walked Away From ETH’s Price

The centerpiece of the critique is the Ethereum Foundation’s “EF Mandate,” a 38‑page document published on March 13, 2026 and described as part constitution, part manifesto, part operating guide.

According to Love, the Mandate codifies four core properties the Foundation vows to protect: censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security — abbreviated internally as “CROPS.”

What’s missing, the economist notes, is any reference to the ETH price or to token holders, even as ETH sits roughly 63% below its all‑time high around $4,946.

“The word ‘price’ does not appear” he says, adding that the only economic phrase in the document is “extraction resistant,” and even that is framed around shielding users from exploitation, not defending market value.

The Mandate explicitly states that Ethereum should keep functioning “even if the Foundation vanished tomorrow,” and that the Foundation should measure its success by “how unnecessary it becomes.”

Love connects this language back to a February 25, 2025 blog post titled “A New Chapter in the Infinite Garden,” in which then–executive director Aya Miyaguchi emphasized “stewardship, not control.” He characterizes that line as the thesis: the Foundation will tend the protocol, not the asset.

Dana Love’s timeline traces how ETH’s price ran ahead of, and then far behind, that governance shift. After the 2025 “infinite garden” messaging and a series of Foundation posts invoking “stewardship of values” and “purposeful subtraction,” ETH rallied hard on external catalysts: the Spectra upgrade on May 8, 2025 and spot ETFs pulling in billions.

Trading volumes tripled into an August 24, 2025 peak near $4,946, with Wall Street flows driving the move.

The Foundation, he points out, did not claim credit. When macro conditions reversed — a broad risk‑asset sell‑off in late January 2026 that also hit bitcoin, tech stocks and silver — ETH fell from around $3,000 to just over $2,000 in under three months.

Love stresses that the Foundation did not cause the crash; large managers like VanEck framed it as “macro driven liquidation.” His argument is that, in both directions, the Foundation was neither engine nor brake.

By early February 2026, ETH was back near $1,820, roughly where it traded when the “purposeful subtraction” era began. Bitcoin, meanwhile, had recovered more of its losses. “An asset that nobody at the center is responsible for behaves exactly like this,” he says. “Nobody catches it.”

The video also highlights the Foundation’s own economic posture. Love says it funds operations by selling ETH — now largely via OTC deals to avoid jolting public markets — and currently holds “less than one‑tenth of one percent of all ETH,” around 92,538 coins (roughly $214 million at recent prices).

There is, he notes, no staking revenue or fee stream tying the Foundation’s finances directly to the token’s long‑term performance, which he frames as consistent with the Mandate’s design.

Against that backdrop, he points to a breakaway initiative by former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist. In May 2026, Feist proposed raising at least $1 billion for a new organization explicitly “economically aligned with ETH” and accountable for its price, with a board that “actually wants the price to go up.”

Feist has since joined a competing chain, and Love acknowledges those incentives, but treats the proposal as an insider’s admission that “the asset needed its own advocate because the Foundation will never be one.”

The Ethereum protocol is being actively and intentionally stewarded, but the ETH token is treated as fuel, not the mission.

Those buying ETH for appreciation, Love contends, are funding a machine whose core institution has clarified that “its role is to help Ethereum keep its original promise — and nothing else.”

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