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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has topped the Crypto X leaderboard for popular crypto figures, despite criticism about Ethereum Foundation’s regular selling of Ether. He explained these sales fund the salaries of Ethereum network maintainers. Buterin also noted the Foundation’s hesitation to stake all its Ether due to potential major forks. He suggested that the Foundation could instead award staked Ether grants or delegate its staking responsibilities to different organizations. Buterin, recently vocal in addressing Ethereum FUD, has been advising on Ethereum’s technical roadmap and the impact of the stages dubbed Merge, Surge, Scourge, and Purge.

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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin topped the leaderboard for popular figures in the crypto world last week on Crypto X, despite facing a lot of criticism about the blockchain and the Ethereum Foundation.

Andy, the host of the crypto podcast The Rollup, quoted data from Kaito AI which showed that Buterin held the top position over the past week with a 1.69% share. Coming in second was Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz with a 1.18% share.

Buterin had to write a long post on X recently in response to criticism of the Ethereum Foundation’s regular selling of Ether (ETH). Buterin hit back at the critics by explaining that the sales are used to pay the Ethereum developers and researchers who maintain the network’s proof-of-stake mechanism. This mechanism allows transactions to be included in less than 30 seconds at low costs, maintains privacy features with zero-knowledge proofs, and keeps the network running with no downtime since 2016. He asked the critics to show some respect.

When asked why the Ethereum Foundation doesn’t stake all of its Ether and use the income to cover costs instead of selling, Buterin explained that the Ethereum Foundation wants to avoid making an “official choice” in the event of a contentious hard (major) fork.

However, Buterin stated that the Ethereum Foundation is looking into other ways to use staking, including giving grants in staked Ether which would let grant recipients control when they withdraw and keep the rewards.

Buterin also talked about assigning the Ethereum Foundation’s staking responsibilities to different organizations.

Recently, Buterin has been quite vocal on X, especially with the constant Ethereum FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) circulating.

A lot of the negative sentiment comes from Ether’s weak price performance compared to Bitcoin (BTC) and Solana (SOL), Ether’s layer 2 scaling strategy, and the reduced revenues resulting from it on the main layer.

Buterin has been focusing on Ethereum’s technical roadmap lately, offering his thoughts and advice on how the “Merge,” “Surge,” “Scourge” and “Purge” stages could affect Ethereum’s future.

Source: Cointelegraph