According to foreign media reports, the information disclosed by the Ethereum Foundation’s Github code 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 still unclear at this time.
In a commit submitted by Pablo Pettinari, a front-end developer at the Ethereum Foundation, on February 26th, it was stated that this commit removed an image of a canary that represents the Ethereum Foundation never having been contacted by any institution in a “confidential manner” (the image was previously deleted in 2019, but that was simply an operational mistake and was quickly re-added to the website). It also removed a text description that read, “The Ethereum Foundation (Stiftung Ethereum) has never been contacted by any institution anywhere in the world in a manner that requires confidentiality.”
Some individuals and media have interpreted this as “the Ethereum Foundation undergoing investigation or scrutiny 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. The term “voluntary” here mostly refers to the fact that the initiating national agency did not use coercive measures (such as court orders or compulsory subpoenas) to request the information. Instead, it may imply that the national agency wishes to obtain the necessary 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 meant to attract readers’ attention and does not align with the facts, especially considering that this happened three weeks ago.
