The Ethereum Foundation has appointed Pascal Caversaccio, known in the developer community as “pcaversaccio,” to its board of directors for an initial one-year term, the organization announced on July 29. Caversaccio is co-founder and lead of SEAL 911, a volunteer crypto security response group that has become a first responder for exploited protocols, and he will serve on the board on a voluntary basis.
He joins a board that now numbers four members: Foundation president Aya Miyaguchi, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Swiss counsel Patrick Storchenegger, and Caversaccio himself. The Foundation described the board's role as “protecting its mission and ensuring compliance as a Swiss foundation,” functioning less like a corporate board and more like a security council that checks management's decisions against the organization's founding values.
Caversaccio is a longtime Ethereum contributor and a member of the Foundation's Silviculture Society, an advisory group focused on censorship resistance, open-source development, privacy, and security. He is also the author of two works central to Ethereum's privacy discourse: The Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto, published in 2024, and Ethereum Privacy: The Road to Self-Sovereignty, released in 2025.
Privacy as a “Non-Negotiable” Protocol Guarantee
The appointment follows a shift the Foundation made public in June, when it elevated privacy and security to what it called “non-negotiable protocol guarantees” rather than optional features layered on top of the base chain. Bringing SEAL 911's lead onto the board formalizes that shift at the governance level, pairing Ethereum's day-to-day security response infrastructure with oversight of the Foundation itself.
The board's mandate is protecting its mission and ensuring compliance as a Swiss foundation.
Why SEAL 911's Involvement Matters
SEAL 911 has built a reputation as one of the ecosystem's fastest-moving incident-response outfits, coordinating with protocols during live exploits to freeze funds, contact validators, and limit damage in real time. Placing its co-founder on the Foundation's board gives that operational security expertise a direct line into how the organization sets priorities, an unusually tight link between crisis response and institutional governance for a foundation of Ethereum's size.
The move also comes as the Foundation has faced broader scrutiny over how it balances Vitalik Buterin's outsized influence, its Swiss nonprofit obligations, and the technical direction of a protocol that underpins hundreds of billions of dollars in on-chain value. Adding a security-focused, community-elected voice to a historically small board is one way the Foundation appears to be answering that scrutiny without expanding its size dramatically.
