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The Ergo Foundation#

The Ergo Foundation is the legal and treasury entity created to bootstrap Ergo's early ecosystem. Its role has changed over time: the Foundation no longer operates as a large independent funding source, but it still provides governance continuity, transparency, and a legal wrapper for community-led initiatives that need a formal counterparty.

Use these pages for the main Foundation records:

  • Treasury: current holdings, treasury withdrawals, spending breakdowns, and salary summaries.
  • Votes: historical Foundation votes and treasury-control decisions.
  • Future: transition toward community-led funding, Foundation signatory services, and long-term direction.
  • Scope: areas where the Foundation has historically supported the ecosystem.
  • Timeline: historical milestones.

Mission#

The Ergo Foundation is a community-led organization with a focus on the following areas:

  • Encouraging the non-breaking development of the Ergo Platform protocol;
  • Advocating for the widespread adoption and use of the Ergo Platform and its native token (ERG);
  • Fostering the growth of the ecosystem around the Ergo Platform;
  • Promoting the use of the Ergo Platform and blockchain technology for societal benefit;
  • Supporting truly decentralized infrastructure;
  • Upholding privacy as a fundamental human right.

Structure#

The Ergo Foundation is composed of members who primarily function as multi-signature custodians and governance participants. Historically, they voted on proposals to allocate treasury funds in alignment with the Foundation's mission. Today, with liquid treasury funds limited, the Foundation's role is increasingly focused on continuity, accounting, signatory services, and handover to community-led groups.

Foundation members have historically handled organisational work such as exchange and market-maker discussions, internal accounting, budgeting, and third-party coordination. This has included:

  • Contracting and compensating developers.
  • Allocating 'bounties' on core repositories.
  • Guiding core protocol development.
  • Overseeing wallet development.
  • Coordinating exchange listings.
  • Managing payments to third parties for administrative and miscellaneous expenses.
  • Facilitating partnership-related expenses.
  • Organizing and funding hackathons and summits.
  • Directing marketing and promotional initiatives.
Scope

For more information about the scope of the Foundation's work, please refer to the Scope section.

Ergo Foundation Members#

Justin Simpson has over 13 years of experience in Investment Banking and has been involved with crypto and Bitcoin since 2013. He is now exclusively focused on crypto and is passionate about open, permissionless, and decentralized blockchain platforms.

  • Role & Responsibilities: No official EF duties other than voting. He works in various roles behind the scenes such as investor relations, Chinese marketing strategy, banking, and accounting and is currently unpaid.

Mark Glasgow works across various roles in Ergo, including community management and developer education. As a Computing Science graduate passionate about improving inclusive systems, he also serves as the Technical Director for Disabled Students UK CIC, a non-profit named one of the most influential disability-led organizations in the UK.

  • Role & Responsibilities: Official duties within the EF are to convey concerns from the community to the EF. Salaried for Community Management/Editorial/Documentation/etc.

Alexander Slesarenko (morphic) is a graduate of Applied Mathematics from Udmurt State University. He has over 25 years of experience in software development in various roles such as team leader, software architect, engineer, and researcher. His main focus has been on programming language design and implementation. He also served as an Expert Team Leader at Huawei Research Lab, focusing on high-performance computing and big data processing. He manages sigmastate-interpreter and other JVM-related development.

  • Role & Responsibilities: No EF duties other than voting. Salaried as a Core Developer (Sigma) but unpaid for EF participation.

Alison Robson (anon_br), serving in Developer Relations, is a software engineer passionate about facilitating crypto adoption through enhanced user experience.

  • Role & Responsibilities: Director of Engineering/ Developer Adoption: work with community developers to support new frameworks, integration, and tooling needed by the development community. (Fleet, Nautilus, Ledger)

Ergo Foundation Honorary Members#

Mohammad Hasan Samadani (mhs_sam) holds a PhD in computer science and has over 12 years of experience in security and software development as a product owner, researcher, and team leader. He became a board member of the Ergo Foundation in 2020 after making significant contributions to the development of the Ergo mining infrastructure, Stratum server, and ergopool (a smart contract-based pool to bypass pool resistance of Autolykos v1).

  • Role & Responsibilities: In addition to his voting duties within the EF, he fosters innovation by incubating projects. His notable contributions include the development of Ergo Raffle, ErgoWell, Minotaur Wallet, and the Rosen Bridge.

Joseph Armeanio has been involved in crypto on the investment side since 2013 and was a partner CIO at Big Bear Investments. He has been on the board of the Universal Education Foundation, a 501©3 organization, since 2008. He is passionate about counter-economic frameworks and tools for societal benefit. His role as a business developer involves creating partnerships in the crypto industry, educational partnerships, and research opportunities while promoting the adoption of Ergo tooling in the public and non-profit sectors.

  • Role & Responsibilities: His role in the foundation is related to business development, and he co-founded Rosen with mhs_sam.

Ergo Foundation Officers#

While Officers don’t have voting rights, they work closely with the foundation members, help with discussions, and share insights and critiques to aid them in making better decisions.

Anastasiia Sidorova serves as the Treasurer of the Ergo Foundation. She holds a degree in "Mathematical methods in Economics" and worked as a banking analyst for four years before transitioning into hospitality. However, her passion for Analytics and Accounting has always remained.

  • Role & Responsibilities: Official duties include; Producing financial reports, maintaining internal accounting, payroll, secretarial services & compliance.

Angie Har: Graduated with a Masters degree in International Management. Angie has served as the Head of Customer Service for a company group, Business Development and Marketing for a Tier 1 media business and several product companies. The scope of her work has covered a broad outlook in the digital sector. An expert in crypto marketing, Angie has worked in the blockchain industry since 2017.

  • Role & Responsibilities: Managing the editorial team, events

Ergo Foundation Advisors#

Daniel Friedman is a Strategic Advisor to the Ergo Foundation. He began his professional career as a developer for a San Francisco-based software company, 2Bridge. After relocating to Japan, he became CTO of an Osaka-based software development firm specializing in Augmented Reality mobile applications. He serves as a strategic advisor to the Ergo Foundation Board and a business developer for IOHK.

  • Role & Responsibilities: Supports the EF Business Development with advice. Acts as an ambassador for Ergo, and engages with the community on weekly AMAs and elsewhere.

Editorial/Marketing#

  • Andy Lowe: Video Editor
  • Sean Rice: Editor
  • Eva Qing: Chinese Community Management
  • Marcelo Roncatti (Marcello) is a Brazilian multifaceted designer and art director working over 20 years in the graphics and visual arts Co-Founder and Partner of the graphic design studio called Estudio Colletivo, a multidisciplinary design office that works on branding projects, graphic design and interface design.

Contributors and Development#

The Ergo ecosystem is made up of salaried contributors, volunteers, bounty collectors, and independent project developers. There is no single designated "core" development team. Contributors who make significant additions to core repositories may be invited to core development discussions regardless of employment status.

DevDAO#

Alexander Chepurnoy (kushti) has been active in the blockchain field since 2011. He has authored over twenty academic papers and has more than fifteen years of experience in software development. Prior to co-founding Ergo, he co-founded smartcontract.com (now Chainlink), served as a core developer at NXT, and was one of the first employees at IOHK, where he held the positions of Research Fellow and Team Scorex Manager. He manages any bounties relating to the reference client repository and keeps a watch over sigma-rust development and any other high-level development and research not covered otherwise.

  • Role & Responsibilities: Alex stepped back from the Foundation in January 2024 to focus solely on development; see his announcement post here. He helped move development coordination toward DevDAO and continues to manage communications between developers and EF where needed.

Outgoings#

Historical Foundation outgoings included member compensation, marketing/editorial work, development salaries, bounties, exchange and market-maker costs, infrastructure, events, grants, and legal or operational expenses. Current and historical figures are maintained in the Treasury page.

Spendings

A detailed breakdown of our expenditure can be found in the Treasury section.