Ethereum Foundation Mandate Controversy

EF Mandate Controversy

Header art from the EF Mandate announcement
Type	Controversy and lawsuit
Date	February 25, 2026 – present
Location	Ethereum Foundation; U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado

The Ethereum Foundation Mandate Controversy (EF Mandate Controversy) is a 2026 dispute inside the Ethereum Foundation (EF) over the EF Mandate, a foundational document that the EF board asked every employee to personally affirm. Staff objected to two features of the document: a copy of the Source Seppuku License, a free-software license by Onno Whitemoor whose second clause pledges a program's author, maintainer, editor or redistributor to "take his or her own life with a sword", and a visual style drawn from Milady Maker and the wider Remilia aesthetic, with illustrations credited to Shiro and Tomo Saito.

A draft circulated to staff in February carried the license in its body text. In the published PDF it appears inside an illustration on page 11, between a winking anime girl and three yellow Remicats, captioned with a wish that the Foundation "fall on its own sword" if it breaks its promise to Ethereum. EF leadership said the reference was part of the artwork and not meant literally. After an internal vote to remove it failed to change the final document, about half of the EF's Protocol cluster signed a letter declining to affirm the Mandate under pressure. The two organizers of that letter, Kayleen "Nixo" Fulton and Trent Van Epps, were dismissed on April 6, 2026.

On November 4, 2026, Fulton sued the EF and its Singapore affiliate, two payroll and HR firms, Co-Executive Director Bastian Aue and Vitalik Buterin in federal court in Colorado. The suit, Fulton v. Ethereum Asia Pacific Limited, alleges disability discrimination, retaliation and interference with medical leave, and drew wide press coverage that described the license as a "suicide pledge".

Background

The Source Seppuku License illustration on page 11 of the EF Mandate

The Mandate

The EF board released the Mandate on March 13, 2026, describing it as "part constitution, part manifesto, and part guide" for the Ethereum Foundation. The 38-page document commits the EF to the "CROPS" properties of censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security, and was also inscribed on Ethereum as transaction calldata. In the blog post and the announcement thread, the board thanked Tomo Saito and Shiro for their "artistic interpretation" of the text.

The Mandate's visual design uses anime-style girls, glitch effects and cartoon animals in a manner associated with Milady Maker and Remilia. Protos noted a Milady-style girl on page 34 and that Buterin had used a Milady profile picture on X.

The Source Seppuku License illustration

The Source Seppuku License is a two-clause license written by Onno Whitemoor as a companion to the Viral Public License and published on the Remilia Wiki on January 28, 2026. Its first clause requires the software's author, maintainer, editor or redistributor to keep the source code freely available; its second pledges them to die by the sword if they fail to uphold the license or modify it.

In the final Mandate, the license is reproduced as an open book within an illustration at the foot of page 11. The page is drawn in a Comic Sans-style typeface over a glitch-effect background, with a winking anime girl on the facing page and three yellow Remicats perched around the book. A speech bubble below reads "May the Foundation fall on its own sword if it fails to uphold its solemn promise to Ethereum". According to the complaint, the license text in the final PDF is part of the image and not the document's machine-readable text. The text edition on ethereum.org gives the license in full, in a collapsible block at the end of the same chapter.

Aue told staff the license was "part of the artwork of the mandate" and "a cultural reference", and the EF's commitment form later stated that it had "nothing to do with literal seppuku".

Internal dispute

Board member Aya Miyaguchi circulated a draft of the Mandate, version 1.4, to staff on February 25, 2026. Page 11 of the draft reproduced the license in the body text, introduced as "words of wisdom" adopted from "kindred spirits who share our long term vision" and followed by the line "May we ritualistically fall on our own swords if we fail to uphold our solemn promise to Ethereum and the Infinite Garden." On March 2, Trent Van Epps posted a proposal to remove the license, and 79 employees voted in favor. According to the complaint, one employee asked management in writing whether signing meant he had to commit suicide, and another mentioned a colleague the EF had lost to suicide the previous year.

On March 5, Buterin told staff the document was being reworked "with significant changes especially to the areas where people have expressed the most concern or confusion". The published version kept the license word for word, now inside the illustration and with a shorter closing line. Several engineers objected on the day of publication. Marius van der Wijden wrote that the new placement made it "a dog whistle for the people who are in the know", and Tim Beiko questioned why the EF cared about "signalling 'milady alignment'" instead of stating its beliefs in its own terms. Buterin replied that being "inoffensive like Mozilla" would have been compatible with CROPS, "but we feel that being inoffensive in that sense is not the energy we need right now."

The complaint describes the Mandate's styling as built around Milady Maker imagery, and says the collection's founder, whom it does not name, was "publicly exposed in 2022" for running accounts that promoted white-nationalist ideology and pro-anorexia content. It also says that board members' use of Milady profile pictures implied they embraced that messaging. These claims repeat the allegations made against Charlotte Fang in the May 2022 Milady Cancel. Remilia disputes them. A rebuttal published by a Remilia member in November 2022 describes the accounts in question as collaboratively written satirical performance art, states that the people named as victims spoke out against the allegations, and reports that several of the original accusers later retracted them. The complaint does not mention the rebuttal or the retractions. Fang answered on X on November 9: "The EF is not in the business of promoting NFT's, and Milady isn't an NFT." The post described Milady as "a forcing function for cypherpunk values on the entire wayward crypto industry".

On Friday, March 20, Aue told all staff to personally commit to the Mandate by the end of Monday, March 23. The announcement said that not submitting the form "will be interpreted as a decision to leave". On March 25, Fulton and Van Epps sent the board a letter from members of the Protocol cluster. It carried 49 names when sent, about 47 percent of the cluster, and 53 after four more were added. The letter endorsed the EF's direction but declined to affirm the Mandate under coercion, and its signers did not resign.

Protos reported in May that the Mandate had been followed by a wave of departures and step-backs among senior researchers and protocol staff.

Fulton v. Ethereum Asia Pacific Limited

Dismissal

Fulton led the EF's Protocol Support team and coordinated Ethereum's All Core Developers calls, which she continued to run after leaving the Foundation. According to her complaint, on March 24, 2026, she told Aue, two board members and the head of People Operations in writing that she had been diagnosed with cancer, and asked that her employment status not be changed. On April 6, Aue dismissed Fulton and Van Epps, thirty minutes apart, without giving a reason.

On the call, Aue offered to keep paying her salary for a year if she worked somewhere else. That afternoon, Fulton received a separation agreement that, in exchange for a release of her claims, offered either the Singapore affiliate's "reasonable endeavours" to have EthStaker engage her for twelve months or a payment of $25,680.28, with disputes to be arbitrated in Singapore. She says she signed it under duress on April 9, returned the severance deposited in her account, and rescinded the agreement on April 17. The EF's Singapore affiliate rejected the rescission on May 14.

On May 1, at a conference in Svalbard, Norway, Fulton spoke with Buterin about her dismissal and recorded part of the conversation. According to the complaint, Buterin did not dispute her account and said that rewarding "making a stink" would teach staff that public pressure works. He also said employees should have been given weeks, not three days, to decide.

Lawsuit

Fulton filed her complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado on November 4, 2026 (case no. 1:26-cv-05818), represented by James H. Bartolomei. The defendants are Stiftung Ethereum, Ethereum Asia Pacific Limited, Lightsource HR Global, Vensure Employer Services, Aue and Buterin.

The complaint brings eleven claims. They include disability discrimination and retaliation under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, interference and retaliation under the Family and Medical Leave Act, wrongful discharge in violation of public policy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and aiding-and-abetting claims against Aue and Buterin personally. It also seeks a declaration that the separation agreement is void and that no agreement requires arbitration in Singapore. Fulton seeks back pay on her $195,000 salary, front pay, liquidated and punitive damages, and a jury trial. Before the suit, the EF's Singapore affiliate had taken the position through counsel that the separation agreement is binding and its arbitration clause enforceable.

Coverage

Protos reported the suit on November 5 and The Denver Post on November 6; coverage followed in The Block, Crypto Briefing and others. Most headlines described the license as a "suicide pledge" that employees were made to sign; The Block noted that EF leadership had told staff it was not meant literally. Of the outlets that covered the dispute, Protos had identified the license's source in May, linking the illustration to its page on the Remilia Wiki.

See also

• Aya Miyaguchi
• EF Mandate
• Source Seppuku License
• Viral Public License
• Milady Zine
• Ethereum Foundation
• Vitalik Milady Arc
• Shiro
• Milady Maker