Foreign Media: Ethereum Foundation Undergoing Covert Investigation by a Country! Is it Really that Serious?

Foreign Media: Ethereum Foundation Undergoing Covert Investigation by a Country! Is it Really that Serious?

Foreign Media: Ethereum Foundation Undergoing Covert Investigation by a Country! Is it Really that Serious?

According to reports from foreign media, information disclosed by the Ethereum Foundation’s Github repository shows that the foundation has received a voluntary and confidential inquiry from an unspecified national agency. The scope and focus of the inquiry are not yet clear.

In a commit submitted by Pablo Pettinari, a front-end developer at the Ethereum Foundation, on February 26th, the commit deleted an image of a canary that represents the Ethereum Foundation being contacted in a “confidential manner” by any organization (the image was previously deleted in 2019, but that was a simple operational error and was quickly re-added to the website). It also deleted a text description that reads, “The Ethereum Foundation (Stiftung Ethereum) has never been contacted by any organization anywhere in the world in a manner that requires confidentiality.”

Some individuals and media have interpreted this as “the Ethereum Foundation is undergoing investigation or review by regulatory agencies.” However, Adam Cochran, a partner at CEHV, believes that this interpretation is somewhat exaggerated because the original text on Github states that the regulatory agency sent a “voluntary” general information request to the Ethereum Foundation, and the term “voluntary” mostly refers to the fact that the initiating national agency did not use coercive measures (such as court orders or subpoenas) to request information. Instead, it may mean that the national agency wishes to obtain the required information through cooperation rather than through legal enforcement.

Adam Cochran criticized the use of “Ethereum Foundation under official investigation by a certain country” as a news headline, stating that it is only intended to attract readers’ attention and does not match the facts, especially since this happened three weeks ago.