The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced that security researcher pcaversaccio has joined its board. The announcement comes the same day a separate group, Ethereum Institutional, said it had closed its first ecosystem funding round.
The year has been relatively stormy for EF, which has previously mentioned that it will be cutting spending and has also witnessed an exodus of members recently.
pcaversaccio, who goes by “pc,” is a privacy maximalist and takes a seat on what is now a four-member board, the Foundation said in a blog post. He joins President Aya Miyaguchi, founder Vitalik Buterin, and Swiss counsel Patrick Storchenegger.
The appointment runs for an initial one-year term and is unpaid, according to the Foundation. pc co-founded and leads SEAL 911, a crypto security response effort, and has sat on the EF’s Silviculture Society, an informal advisory group focused on censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
He is also the author of The Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto, a 2024 reworking of Eric Hughes’ 1993 cypherpunk text, and a 2025 piece titled Ethereum Privacy: The Road to Self-Sovereignty.
pc responded to the Foundation announcement on X, writing, “_unconditional_ privacy.”
Commenting on pc joining the board, Miyaguchi wrote on X, “Very excited to welcome @pcaversaccio to join us at the EF board! What he brings isn’t just security and privacy expertise.
She added, “He’s a living example of what 100% CROPS alignment looks like in practice. Looking forward to the perspective he’ll bring, and to being pushed to think much harder about security and privacy,” which is seen as a reference to the censorship-resistance, open-source, privacy, and security principles the Foundation has put at the center of its recent mandate.
The Foundation describes its board as a body that sets the vision and checks that management’s strategy stays aligned with those principles. It also functions as a security council and keeps the organization compliant as a registered Swiss foundation.
The board’s role has been in flux this year. In May, Buterin wrote that the board was expanding and that his own influence would “continue to decrease,” a shift he said he wanted.
Hours later, Ethereum Institutional said it had wrapped its initial ecosystem funding round and supporter coalition. The independent non-profit, which launched July 1 as a point of contact between financial institutions and Ethereum, did not disclose a dollar figure.
According to its blog post, the round is anchored by treasury companies BitMine and SharpLink and by Ethereum co-founders Joe Lubin and Mihai Alisie, with more than 100 ecosystem participants signing on.
The published supporter list names Aave, Chainlink, Circle, Consensys, Uniswap Labs, and Robinhood. The group, founded by former EF enterprise staff David Walsh, Marius Smith, and Matthew Dawson, said the backing gives it runway to chase tokenization, stablecoins, and on-chain market infrastructure.
Cryptopolitan has reported that the EF cut 54 jobs, roughly a fifth of its staff, on June 22, and that co-executive directors Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang both left this year.
Former coordinator Trent Van Epps has warned that core-development funding could hit a crisis within three to nine months, with client-team upkeep running about $30 million a year.
Ethereum Institutional is one of several outside groups filling that space, alongside Ethlabs, a research non-profit staffed by ex-Foundation researchers and drawing on the same anchor backers.
The market has stayed cool through the churn, as Cryptopolitan reported ETH trading near $1,655 in late June, far below its August 2025 peak around $4,950. It currently trades around $1,894, having declined by 1.1% in the past 24 hours.
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