My personal investigation into Ethereum uncovers a darker, more sinister purpose of what is the project really is for.

Ethereum was initially a tech startup company and the Ether token was launched as a fundraising mechanism for the Ethereum business venture. They printed themselves to be the largest shareholder of Ether, approached a bunch of investors, pitched the investors a whitepaper and said if you give us money we will deliver you this roadmap and we will also print you a X% share of the network. To those from the business world, that sounds a lot like a stock offering. Ethereum even used the term "IPO" in their marketing, as the term "ICO" wasn't popular yet. 72 million Ether were premined, contrasting that to the 116 million current total Ether in circulation means that 62% of all current Ether supply was printed before the network even went live.

XRP often gets dunked on for largely being a stock ticker for Ripple Labs, but there aren't very many differences between Ripple and Ethereum concerning the launch. Both launched as a premine and they both printed themselves a big bag to periodically sell to "fund" operations. The Ethereum Foundation sold $115,000,000.00 of ETH on Kraken at the literal top on May 17th, 2021. (Link to etherscan). Jed McCaleb, founder of Ripple, also sold about $275,000,000.00 dollars worth of XRP in the month of May 2021. Because of the similarities of the launches, the outcome of the SEC vs Ripple court case in the US will likely also negatively affect the legal status of Ethereum.

Vitalik Buturin and the Ethereum Foundation together hold a whopping $3,000,000,000.00 USD worth of Ethereum in their publicly disclosed wallets that they printed for themselves. Maybe I'm off base here, but I don't think billions of dollars are necessary to "fund" a small team of developers. What are they even doing with all of that money? I dug around on their website, I found no documents disclosing what they do with their funds. Moreover, Vitalik was recently on a Lex Friedman podcast talking about his trading habits with other coins, and Vitalik discussed how he tried to time the top on certain coins like Dogecoin this market cycle. That discussion raised my eyebrows because I never recalled hearing Vitalik disclose that he owned any other wallets. I decided to dig through their website to find anywhere where they disclose their other wallets... and again, I found no such disclosures. Since Vitalik is confirmed to have undisclosed crypto investments, it's safe to assume that Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation likely hold significantly more Ethereum than what is known in the publicly disclosed wallets. Since there are no regulations in crypto, Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation have no legal obligation to be transparent about any of their finances or trades.

Do you really think Ethereum would have spent the last 5 years working towards transitioning to PoS if the founders didn't hold large ETH stacks? The day PoS goes live on the Ethereum mainnet, is the day that both Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation's wallets become permanent endowment funds, essentially, destined to forever sit as King of the Hill, collecting taxes as staking rewards while being mathematically shielded from ever seeing their controlled market share diminish.

I guess the point I'm making is that Ethereum didn't have to launch like this. They could have had a clean, immaculate conception like Bitcoin. Proof of work consensus chains are supposed to start at the genesis block, the premine was 100% unnecessarily tacked on to self-serve the financial interests of the founders. Rather than making Ethereum a fully decentralized public good, the team opted to make Ethereum their own private business venture.