Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake discloses advisor role at Eigen Foundation

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake disclosed an advisory role at Eigen Foundation and a corresponding Eigen token allocation.

Drake’s disclosure followed discussions about potential conflicts of interest between EigenLayer and his employer, the Ethereum Foundation, arising from core devs and researchers at the organization taking advisory roles.

On May 18, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on X that he was proud that Ethereum did not have a culture of preventing people from speaking their minds, including negative opinions regarding the protocol or its ecosystem.

In response, well-known crypto trader Jordan Fish, also known as Cobie, questioned Buterin’s thoughts on incentives received by Ethereum Foundation core developers or researchers.

“How do you feel about Ethereum Foundation core developers or researchers taking life-changing $ packages from projects built on Ethereum to become ‘advisors’, when those projects may have conflicted incentives with Ethereum, either now or in the future?,” Fish said. “For example — purely theoretically of course — let’s say, EigenLayer.”

Buterin did not respond. However, the following morning, Drake disclosed he had recently become an advisor to EigenFoundation, adding that the community deserves extended transparency.

“The advisorship comes with a significant EIGEN token incentive which could easily be worth more than the combined value of all my other assets (mostly ETH)” Drake said. “We're talking millions of dollars of tokens vesting over 3 years.”

The Ethereum Foundation researcher went on to pledge he would “reinject” all the proceeds to “worthy” projects in the Ethereum ecosystem — either as investments or donations.

Researching the risks of restaking

EigenLayer is a platform that lets users deposit and “re-stake” ether from various liquid staking tokens, aiming to allocate those funds to secure third-party networks or actively validated services.

In terms of potential conflict, Drake said he was ready to end the advisorship at any time if he deemed EigenLayer to be going in a direction that was against Ethereum’s interest.

Drake added that he has turned down over 100 similar roles and didn’t take the EigenFoundation advisorship lightly, having been in discussions for over a year.

The researcher also noted that he only took on the role on the condition that his mandate was limited to researching restaking risks and he would not be included in any marketing materials, adding that his default public stance would continue to lean critical of EigenLayer.

“By being an advisor I hope to have a front-row seat to restaking issues and steer EigenLayer from within,” Drake said. “As a researcher I feel I did too little too late with regard to liquid staking. This is an opportunity to not repeat the mistake with restaking.”

Addressing concerns that EigenLayer is trying to “bribe” or “corrupt” the Ethereum Foundation, Drake said it was a large organization of more than 300 people, of which three had a formal relationship with EigenLayer — one as an investor and two as advisors — and didn’t see this 1% compromising its morals. Drake did not disclose their identities.