Ethereum is the normal business-like crypto, right? Not like those bitcoin weirdos. Approximately 100% of holders are in it for the money. Fine.
The Ethereum Foundation is the non-profit that runs the Ethereum blockchain and its crypto, which is called ether. The Foundation is a little bit weirder. Like that time they demanded all staff sign a suicide pledge and threatened to fire anyone who didn’t sign. You might think it was a bit of a cult.
In March, the Foundation published “The Ethereum Foundation Mandate.” The document set the governance of Ethereum for the next one thousand years! [Ethereum Foundation, PDF, archive]
The 38-page mandate is full of cheerful anime characters wandering psychedelic landscapes. The text is about how much we need extreme anarcho-capitalist self-sovereign identity for all the people of the world! Or at least the ones who bought some ether.
Page 11 includes the “Source Seppuku License,” which demands signers take their own life with a sword if they fail to keep the code open:
To take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license, or upon modification or removal of any part of this license.
May the Foundation fall on its own sword if it fails to uphold our solemn promise to Ethereum.
The Seppuku License is written in Comic Sans and it’s decorated with a cartoon of an anime girl and some anime cats. Cute! The original version, which was sent to employees in February, had the Seppuku License in plain text, and it ended with the employee having to declare: [archive, PDF]
May we ritualistically fall on our own swords if we fail to uphold our solemn promise to Ethereum and the Infinite Garden.
This isn’t idle crypto weirdo edgelord talk. This is in a document that employees were required to agree to — or quit their job.
Several dozen employees refused to sign but also refused to resign. The two employees behind the rebellion were fired. One of them, Kayleen Fulton, is now suing the Ethereum Foundation, naming two of its board members, Vitalik Buterin and Bastian Aue, in her complaint. [Complaint, PDF; case docket]
Buterin is the main founder of Ethereum and Bastian is a co-executive director of the Foundation. From the complaint:
This is a case about an organization that fired a cancer patient thirteen days after she told its leadership, in writing, that she had cancer, and twelve days after she organized a respectful written objection, signed by half of her department, to a document that its board had ordered every employee to personally affirm under threat of termination. That document contained a suicide pledge, in the organization’s own words, “to take his or her own life with a sword.”
Ethereum Foundation employees widely objected to the mandate from the get-go. When an early version was sent around in February, nearly 80 of the foundation’s 250 or so employees wanted the seppuku bit removed:
One employee asked management in writing whether signing meant he was required to commit suicide. Another cited a colleague the Foundation had lost to suicide the year before.
Buterin assured staff the mandate was “continuing to be worked on with significant changes especially to the areas where people have expressed the most concern or confusion.”
On 13 March, the board published the final version. The “significant changes” were that the suicide pledge was in an illustration instead of in searchable text.
The Foundation then inscribed the full document permanently on the Ethereum blockchain, as transaction calldata, because they’re definitely not a cult.
Buterin defended keeping the Seppuku License intact: “we feel that being inoffensive in that sense is not the energy we need right now.”
So this is terrible. How can we make it worse? Let’s add Nazis! The visual styling for the manifesto, with the anime girls, was taken directly from the Milady Project, an NFT project:
The “milady alignment” Mr. Beiko referred to is the Mandate’s visual styling, which is built throughout around imagery from “Milady Maker,” an NFT project whose founder was publicly exposed in 2022 for operating accounts that promoted extreme, white-nationalist ideology and disturbing pro-anorexia content. Those controversies and messaging were widely known within the Ethereum developer community when the Mandate was published. Board members adopted Milady profile images, impliedly embracing such messaging.
The Milady Project really were just neo-Nazis. As well as putting Nazi phrases on the NFTs, they posted about exterminating Jews and compared black people to gorillas. These are the people the Ethereum Foundation board thought were just the ticket for their official corporate design. [Defiant, archive]
Buterin endorsed the Milady styling purely for the sake of controversy:
Employees objected to the imagery as well. Board member and Co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang wrote that she “did not support applying the Milady aesthetic to a 1000-year vision mandate.” Mr. Buterin’s answer was that “the controversialness of those aesthetics is itself part of the point.”
That Milady were straight-up Nazis is sure controversial. You could use that word.
The final version of the manifesto went around in March. On 20 March, Bastian Aue messaged all employees telling them to sign the manifesto or else. Suicide pledge and all. If they refused to sign, the Foundation would take this as resigning. [Exhibit 5, PDF]
You can’t just tell employees that not accepting arbitrary new conditions constitutes resigning. That’s not a thing. Fulton and her colleague Trent Van Epps organised an employee letter against this mandate to sign a pledge of suicide.
Fifty-three people signed the letter. They kept their jobs for the moment — but Fulton and Van Epps were fired on 6 April. Aue didn’t tell them why. By September 2026, most of the other 53 had resigned or been fired.
Fulton was diagnosed with cancer in March, around the time of the mandate signing demand. She notified the company of her cancer, and soon after of her chemotherapy schedule. She was told that Bastian Aue wanted to fire her over this specifically:
Mr. Aue concluded that an employee about to begin cancer treatment could not provide the “exclusive and energetic focus” the Foundation was demanding of every employee, and that retaining her, with the time away from work and adjustments her treatment would require, was inconsistent with the “right mix of people” he intended to assemble.
Fulton claims discrimination against a protected disability and illegal retaliation against workplace collective action.
So far the claim has just been filed, and it looks like one of substance. The likely outcome of a reasonably solid workplace discrimination claim from a lawyered-up plaintiff with resources is a negotiation and a settlement.
But also, how stupid do you have to be? Why would you create an insane manifesto and then insist on making your staff sign it? Why would you think retaliation for protected actions was a good idea? Why would you tell someone in your organization how you fired an employee for getting chemotherapy? All of this against an employee who has the crypto stash to fight back?
Ancap. It’s a hell of a drug.
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