Ethereum Secretly Funded Rival Geth Team, Ex-Lead Dev Says - Unchained

Péter Szilágyi, who led the development of Ethereum client Geth, has claimed in a series of X posts that he turned down a $5 million offer to quit the Ethereum Foundation

The offer allegedly involved him and his team leaving the foundation and turning Geth into a private company.

“Did you all know [the Ethereum Foundation] started (and funded) a second Geth team *inside* Nethermind? One ‘100% independent fork from us, with no intended collaboration’ according to @0xstark,” Szilágyi said, referring to foundation Co-Chair Josh Stark.

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Geth, short for Go Ethereum, is the most widely used software client for running an Ethereum node. Nethermind is another Ethereum client, but it is written in C#.

Although Szilágyi said he had been fired from the foundation within 24 hours of his discovery of the “secret second Geth team” — while he was on sabbatical — 0xjmederos, another former core developer at Nethermind, said: “The ‘Geth team inside Nethermind’ was *publicly* announced on rollcall [sic] as soon as it was created in October 2024.”