What would change if EF had term limits? I keep circling the same weekend thought. If Dankrad had not joined Tempo and instead joined Arbitrum or OP, would the reaction have been calmer or louder? I honestly do not know. Maybe it’s from my PTSD, but that uncertainty is the tell. The problem is the optics machine we have built around EF and neutrality. When someone senior at EF moves, the room stops talking about the work and starts reading tea leaves. Who benefits. Which stack tilts. What this means for grants, roadmaps, and soft signals. There is no falsifiable sentence you can say that ends the whispers. It does not undo years of relationships or the way influence pools. So I keep coming back to a small, boring idea: term limits for EF leadership roles. Just a design choice that makes neutrality less about personalities and more about structure. What that would do in practice: 1. Make exits normal. Leaving becomes the norm. 2. Rotate legitimacy on a clock. Authority decays as a feature. 3. Diffuse talent. People carry skills into clients, L2s, infra teams, research labs. Decentralization as a lived reality. 4. Lower the temperature. Predictable movement reduces the energy spent on gossips. Recusal and disclosure remain necessary - they resolve conflicts within an org. They do not create talent diversity or refresh leadership. Term limits would sit above those tools. Scope matters. I am talking about full-time EF leads, especially in roles that shape grants, research priorities, or roadmap signals. If I were writing a small test, I would try something like this: three or four years per role, at most two consecutive terms. Credible neutrality is a design problem. Today, it feels much more like gossiping. Boring structures beat explanations. If the goal is to keep Ethereum resilient, then making exits ordinary and power recyclable feels like the right kind of boring. So, should the EF have term limits?

@DisruptionJoe But can’t remember a lot of *