Ethereum Foundation appoints security experts to board of directors

Key Points

His work on SEAL 911 brings direct experience to the board of directors in responding to real-time hacking and exploits.

The appointment follows a reorganization of the foundation, cutting 54 positions and reorganizing the Ethereum Foundation around five areas.

The board of directors is responsible for setting values and supervising management, but does not decide on agreement upgrades.

The Ethereum Foundation appoints security experts to its board of directors

The Ethereum Foundation has appointed security researcher pcaversaccio (known in the ecosystem as "pc") to its board of directors for an initial one-year, voluntary term. He will serve with President Cai Miyaguchi, co-founder Vitalik Butrin and Swiss legal counsel Patrick Stolsinger.

The appointment comes just over a month after the largest internal reorganization in the foundation's history, making the selection of candidates worthy of careful interpretation. The downsized Ethereum Foundation has placed a person from the Ethereum incident response field in an organization responsible for overseeing its direction.

He has previously advised the foundation

Pc is a member of the Silviculture Society, a pro bono advisory group that provides confidential guidance to the Ethereum Foundation leadership on censorship resistance, open source development, privacy and security. He also provided feedback on the Ethereum Foundation's Mission Statement, which was released in March and defines the foundation's mission and decision-making principles.

Moving him from that channel to the board formalizes a relationship that has shaped how the organization describes its purpose.

His experience from external governance

Pc co-founded and led SEAL 911, a free emergency response service designed to connect projects and users facing real-time security incidents with vetted researchers. The Security Alliance reports that it has handled more than 3300 cases, coordinated more than 125 emergency response rooms, and helped recover more than $180 million in assets.

This is a specific type of experience: key disclosure, contracts being exploited, funds stolen, and the difficulty of coordinating a response while the attack is still underway.

The most obvious value he brings is calibration. When weighing privacy or censorship resistance, boards often think at an abstract level, with many months before any consequences fall on users. And one person who coordinated real-time incident responses saw firsthand which theoretical safeguards would hold and which would collapse when a protocol was attacked. This is different from the type of input that foundation boards typically receive.

His article explores the same issue from a different perspective.

The Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto believes that privacy, security and censorship resistance should be the foundation of Ethereum, rather than additional features that will be added after it becomes commercially popular.

"Ethereum Privacy: The Path to Self-Sovereignty" points the way for greater transaction privacy, encrypted memory pools, and combating blockchain surveillance.

Both are personal frameworks rather than adopted roadmaps, but together they reveal what is about to enter the board's perspective: Ethereum should serve institutions and ordinary users, while retaining characteristics that prevent any company, government or intermediary from controlling it.

The foundation he joined was even smaller

On June 23, the foundation completed a months-long reorganization and laid off 54 employees, accounting for about 20% of its total employees. The remaining work is organized into five areas, covering protocols, access, users, communities and institutions, with each area having a narrower scope of responsibility than before.

The financial reset is deeper. As Coindoo pointed out in its analysis of "Ethereum's leaner foundation model," the 2026 budget dropped by about 40% as the Ethereum Foundation shifts to endowment-funded spending aimed at conserving resources for decades to come.

The foundation does not explicitly link the two things, but the description of the protocol cluster's responsibilities sounds like an explanation of the PC's own article: censorship resistance, open source development, privacy and security as uncompromising guarantees. The Ethereum Foundation made it clear that the cluster's purpose is not to make Ethereum more market-attractive or turn it into a financial track operated by intermediaries.

One of the five areas is specifically oriented towards institutions, so this is more of a sequential issue than an opposed issue. Business growth is included in the structure; this appointment shows where the boundaries lie.

What does board seats actually control

The foundation describes its board as a safety committee: It protects the organization's values, develops long-term visions, and checks whether management decisions are consistent with the two. It can appoint or remove executive directors.

Its power ends here. Ethereum upgrades are decided by the client team and the broader developer process, and the board has no command over this. Day-to-day strategy and operations are the responsibility of management.

Voluntary one-year terms also match this limited range. Pc joined a supervisory body rather than running an execution cluster, while the Ethereum Foundation received a clear evaluation node, although it has not made any statement about its renewal.

Therefore, the appointment itself does not change any budget lines or roadmap items. The impact will emerge later: how smaller foundations allocate their remaining resources-which security and privacy work is funded, whether institutional areas retain permission-free access, and whether boards can firmly hold management to adhere to the Mission Statement when these goals conflict.

Why appointment at this time?

After 20% layoffs and 40% budget cuts, the organizational chart has limited role after all. What a foundation needs in this position is a board that is willing to fight back when efficiency, adoption or institutional pressure begins to erode the core values it claims to protect.

Pcaversaccio comes from where its value is most severely tested: real-time attacks, real assets, and real-time loss of money by users. Whether this will bring change depends on decisions that the Ethereum Foundation has not yet made.