Yes, the goal of @paradigm and many other VCs is to suck as much value as possible from the Ethereum and broader ecosystem, while also adding value to the ecosystem in the service of maximizing their own gains. Paradigm is particular good at this. Subgoals include progressing the systems of the world towards rigorous decentralization, credibly neutrality, censorship resistance, and intrinsic privacy/confidentiality to the extent that such a world is more profitable -- and healthy in other ways -- for themselves and their investors. As @fede_intern indicated, it is not news that Paradigm has been working to "own" Ethereum for years.  That said, I don't believe there is reason for concern, and consider this kind of behavior natural and inevitable. And the gold rush of corpo-chains is validating for the traditional economy and signals our mainstreaming.  Yes, I would prefer that Mallesh and Dankrad would focus their talent and energies fully on Ethereum. But both probably do need a fresh context to energize them, and since both are pure researchers, I expect they will continue to write papers and contribute broadly, as they indicated they would. We need VCs for now because they represent a comfortable bridge for the world's capital to flow into our ecosystem. Very soon better, fairer, more broadly accessible onchain investment platforms with healthy tokenomics will mature sufficiently so that VCs will have no choice but to set up shop on these platforms, if they want to stay in the game. In bringing progressive decentralization to everything -- even up through layers of identity, reputation and governance -- we are on the precipice of totally changing the way the world works. Ethereum will win -- already has won -- its niche: rigorously decentralized, credibly neutral digital asset settlement ledger infrastructure.  It will establish itself as the world ledger, and then ethos/philosophy and economics will enable it to expand "up the stack" to become the world computer, as more apps get built and protocolized and tokenized.  Corpo-chains will be important infrastructure built on top of neutral permissionless chains, just as SQL, No SQL, graph and vector DBs and many other kinds of database connect commercial endeavors to the internet and web. Next generation databases will validate, be verifiable, will be tamper-proof, will maintain an inspectable log of their history and they will all speak token -- the language of the decentralized economy. When all of this matures, the world will finally have a secure global information infrastructure. Best wishes to Dankrad and Mallesh. They will always be friends and teammates.(Joseph Lubin)