Kayleen Fulton, who led the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Support team and facilitated All Core Developers calls under the handle Nixo, filed a federal complaint last Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. The suit alleges disability discrimination and retaliation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), interference and retaliation under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and related Colorado claims after what she describes as a firing tied to her cancer disclosure and to organizing staff opposition to a requirement that employees affirm the foundation’s Mandate or lose their jobs.
Fulton is suing Stiftung Ethereum, the foundation’s Swiss legal entity; Singapore affiliate Ethereum Asia Pacific Limited; employer-of-record firms Lightsource HR Global and Vensure Employer Services; Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Director Bastian Aue; and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
The complaint opens with a blunt framing of the case:
“This is a case about an organization that fired a cancer patient thirteen days after she told its leadership, in writing, that she had cancer, and twelve days after she organized a respectful written objection, signed by half of her department, to a document that its board had ordered every employee to personally affirm under threat of termination.”
That document is the Ethereum Foundation Mandate, a 38-page vision statement the board published on March 13th. Page 11 includes a passage labeled the “Source Seppuku License.” For the unaware, Seppuku is a Japanese ritual of suicide by sword historically associated with honor and avoiding shame. The license text, which remains on ethereum.org and was inscribed on the Ethereum blockchain, reads in full:
“By inclusion of this license, the author, maintainer, editor or (re)distributor (the “Actor”) of this software SHALL uphold the following pledges:
To always make freely available and publicly accessible a full and accurate copy of the source code and associated documents of this software, including all modifications hereto by the Actor.
To take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license, or upon modification or removal of any part of this license.
May the Foundation fall on its own sword if it fails to uphold its solemn promise to Ethereum.”
According to Fulton’s complaint, 79 employees voted to remove the passage after the draft went out in February. One asked in writing whether signing meant he had to commit suicide. Another cited a colleague lost to suicide the year before. Buterin allegedly promised “significant changes” to the draft. However, the complaint says the final Mandate kept the suicide pledge intact and instead moved it into an illustrated image with cartoon cats and a winking anime figure.
On March 20th, according to the complaint, Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Director Bastian Aue told staff to personally commit to the Mandate by the following Monday or be treated as having resigned. Asked about the sword clause, Aue wrote that it was “part of the artwork of the mandate. A cultural reference like other elements in there. Chosen deliberately, but not meant to be taken literally.” Asked who had agreed to include it, he added, “If you are asking more broadly who agreed with including it, I did.” Managers later updated the commitment form to say the affirmation had “nothing to do with literal seppuku.”
The complaint also says Fulton was diagnosed with ovarian cancer on March 19th, the day before the ultimatum. On March 24th, she emailed Aue, two board members, and People Operations to disclose the diagnosis and ask that her employment status not be altered. The next day, she and colleague Trent Van Epps sent the board a letter signed by 53 members of the Protocol cluster, the foundation staff grouped around protocol work. The letter endorsed the Mandate’s general direction and said the signatories “cannot in good faith affirm under these conditions” and “do not resign.” Aue later treated the letter as a commitment and said all 53 could keep their jobs.
On April 6th, the complaint alleges Aue fired Van Epps and Fulton about 30 minutes apart. On the termination call, Aue allegedly told Fulton her “track record is good,” that she had “broad support among colleagues,” and that she had “not been found lacking in any of [her] responsibilities,” while declining to give a reason for the firing.
The complaint also describes a conversation Fulton says she partially recorded with Buterin on May 1. When asked about her termination, Buterin allegedly warned that rewarding employees for “making a stink” could encourage others to organize similar pressure campaigns to influence the Foundation. Fulton argues that the exchange supports her allegation that she was fired in retaliation for organizing the staff letter.
As of Monday afternoon, the Ethereum Foundation had not responded to a request for comment from Gizmodo, and no public statement from the foundation, Aue, or Buterin on the suit had turned up. However, the complaint acknowledges that lawyers for Ethereum Asia Pacific denied allegations of unlawful conduct, retaliation, and wrongful termination in correspondence with Fulton’s attorneys in May.
Protos previously covered how the Mandate’s anime aesthetics associated with the Milady Maker NFT project and the seppuku illustration coincided with a wave of senior departures earlier this year, including protocol leads and researchers, though departing staff did not always name the document as their reason for leaving.
Notably, all the way back in 2010, Foxconn drew ridicule for asking workers to sign a promise not to kill themselves.
Seriously vs. Literally
Outside observers sympathetic to the Ethereum Foundation have argued that no reasonable reader would take the sword clause literally. Crypto attorney Gabriel Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of MetaLeX, wrote on X that the Mandate was “one of Ethereum’s most important and culturally relevant moments” and that “no reasonable person could believe it is asking people to literally agree to commit suicide.”
He also criticized an alleged recording of Buterin without consent described in the complaint as “one of the dirtiest things you can do regardless of whether legal or not,” called a reported $195,000 full-year salary severance offer “very generous,” and warned that juries can still do unpredictable things with “superficially sensational facts like a seppuku license.”
X user @z0r0zzz, who according to the Law of Code podcast is Ethereum developer Ross Campbell, called “seppuku” common internet slang hyperbole. “I have my own beef with lots of [Ethereum Foundation] stuff and whatnot . . . But should be critiqued fairly,” Campbell added.
Bankless co-founder David Hoffman summarized the issue in one line after Shapiro pushed back on readings of the Mandate as a literal death pact. “It does not seriously ask employees to kill themselves,” Hoffman wrote. “But it does literally ask employees to kill themselves.”
it does not *seriously* ask employees to kill themselves
but it does *literally* ask employees to kill themselves
— David Hoffman (@TrustlessState) November 9, 2026
Responding to Shapiro’s defense of the Mandate, Christine D. Kim, who is the founder of the crypto protocol-research outlet Protocol Watch and Fulton’s co-host on the Ready for Merge podcast, argued that the document “caused a lot of division and heartache within the EF” and that a statement asking employees to kill themselves “isn’t appropriate to include in your organization’s mission statement,” even as a joke.
ChainSecurity founding partner Emilie Raffo, who helped organize a public reading of the Mandate at EthCC earlier this year, reacted to the Denver Post coverage by asking whether the event had actually been “a suicide pledge endorsement ceremony.”
I thought we had organized a fun party to read the EF mandate, but … wait … did we actually organize a suicide pledge endorsement ceremony???
Nobody sue me pls. Tysm.https://t.co/r1Q2HBOa88 pic.twitter.com/TXVYqUbryf
— Emilie | ChainSecurity (@EmilieRaffo) November 9, 2026
The suit arrives after a rough stretch for the foundation more generally. Protos has previously covered several other Ethereum Foundation controversies, including a public fight over the firing of Geth lead developer Péter Szilágyi.
The Mandate’s CROPS push, shorthand for censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security, was meant to double down on Ethereum as self-sovereign financial infrastructure, but at the same time, some builders have peeled off toward the more centralized, stablecoin-focused platforms that have started to define the crypto industry. Last year, Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist left to join Tempo, the Stripe-incubated stablecoin chain, a move that crystallized the cultural split between crypto cypherpunk purists and bank-friendly “stablechains.”
