Ethereum Foundation: Former Team Lead Sues, Saying She Was Fired for Leading Staff Resistance to a 'Suicide Pledge'

On a Friday in March 2026, every employee of the Ethereum Foundation received a 38-page document called "The Ethereum Foundation Mandate", setting out its leaders' vision for the next 1,000 years. Staff were told to sign up to it by Monday or leave. On page 11, between anime-style drawings, was a pledge to "take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license."

That is how a lawsuit filed on Wednesday 4 November 2026 in the US District Court for the District of Colorado describes it. The plaintiff is Kayleen Fulton, a Boulder resident who led the foundation's Protocol Support team. She is suing Stiftung Ethereum, the foundation's legal name in Switzerland, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, and others. She alleges she was fired for organising staff against the clause.

Everything below is her side of the story, taken from her complaint as reported by The Denver Post and the crypto news site Protos. None of it has been tested in court. The foundation had not answered publicly when this article was published.

Who is being sued

The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit registered in Switzerland. It does not own Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain network in the world, but it pays for much of the research and software work that keeps it running. A blockchain is a shared public ledger that no single company controls, and Ethereum's own coin, ether, is the second-biggest digital currency after bitcoin. The Denver Post, citing the lawsuit, puts the network's value at about $300 billion.

Buterin holds no formal control over the network, but his writing steers its plans. The complaint also describes the part played by Bastian Aue, the foundation's co-executive director, in the mandate and the firing. The court docket, case 1:26-cv-05818, names six defendants: Stiftung Ethereum, Ethereum Asia Pacific Limited, Buterin, Aue, and two employment firms, Lightsource HR Global and Vensure Employer Services. It lists the case under the Americans with Disabilities Act and assigns it to Timothy P. O'Hara.

According to the complaint, the foundation "does not hire or pay its United States staff in its own name." It uses employer-of-record companies instead, outside firms that legally employ and pay a company's staff in a country where it has no local entity, much as a temp agency does.

The clause

The wording came from something called the "Source Seppuku License". Seppuku is the Japanese ritual of suicide by sword. A software licence is the set of terms attached to a piece of code that says how others may use it, in the same way a lease sets the terms for a flat. This one bound the authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of "this software" to keep it free and open to the public, and to take their own lives with a sword if they failed.

Fulton alleges the board first circulated a draft of the mandate in late February, with the licence in the main text. Staff asked on internal forums whether they were being asked to pledge suicide, and whether the clause was a loyalty test. One employee, according to the complaint, wrote: "I have a new hire joining tomorrow. The first thing he's going to see", before going on to describe a motion to drop the sword clause.

She says 79 employees voted to remove the section. The Denver Post puts it as nearly 80 of about 250 staff. Buterin allegedly promised "significant changes." The final version kept the pledge word for word, but moved it from the body of the text into an illustration. The foundation then recorded the mandate on the Ethereum blockchain with the clause in it. Because a blockchain record cannot be edited, that copy is permanent.

Was it meant literally?

The complaint itself records the foundation's position at the time. Aue, it says, told employees the pledge was "part of the artwork of the mandate", and "a cultural reference like other elements in there. Chosen deliberately, but not meant to be taken literally." After staff pushed back, managers changed the sign-up form to say it had "nothing to do with literal seppuku."

The complaint says the drawings themselves were contested too: a board member objected to imagery the complaint links to a controversial online personality, and Buterin is quoted replying that "the controversialness (sic) of those aesthetics is itself part of the point."

The form, the letter and the firing

The sign-up form offered two boxes, according to a copy included in the filings. The first read: "I personally commit to the direction set out in the mandate, I commit to help translate it into thoroughly reasoned strategies for my domain, and I commit to an exclusive and energetic focus on the mission-critical tasks necessary for its implementation. From today and until my last day at the EF." The second read: "I cannot confidently commit to the above and would like to request my extra months of compensation and leave the EF without undue delay."

Aue, the complaint alleges, said that anyone who did not commit would be treated as having resigned. Fulton and a colleague, Trent Van Epps, sent the board a letter signed by 53 members of the protocol team. Per the complaint, it backed the mandate's general direction but "declined to affirm [the Mandate] under coercion", and said its signers had not resigned.

The 53 kept their jobs at the time. Fulton did not. According to the complaint, Aue fired her and the colleague who had helped her organise the letter. She had just been diagnosed with cancer.

The complaint quotes a recorded conversation in which Buterin explained the firing to her as a question of the "dynamics you want to reward inside of the EF." He is quoted as saying: "If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF."

What she is claiming

Fulton earned $195,000 a year. She is suing for disability discrimination, retaliation, interference with her rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act (a US law that protects the jobs of employees who need time off for a serious illness), unfair employment practices and related claims. No damages figure has been reported.

The complaint also describes what it calls an exodus. The board member who objected to the artwork began a sabbatical the day Fulton was fired and resigned in June. By September, it says, eight senior employees had left, and most of the 53 who signed the letter had resigned or been let go. Senior departures from the foundation through 2026 were reported at the time by outlets including The Block; the link to the mandate is her claim.

One of her lawyers, James Bartolomei, declined to comment to The Denver Post, saying the lawsuit spoke for itself.