Ethereum Foundation ditches ‘warrant canary’

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—by Protos Staff

CoinDesk initially reported, and a Protos review has confirmed that the Ethereum Foundation removed a ‘warrant canary’ from its website on February 26, according to a commit to its GitHub repository. 

A warrant canary is a symbol or piece of text that states the entity has not received a certain type of inquiry. By removing the canary, the entity can signal that it has received outreach from authorities. The text that was removed from the Ethereum Foundation website appears to have said:

“The Ethereum Foundation (Stiftung Ethereum) has never been contacted by any agency anywhere in the world in a way which requires that contact not to be disclosed. Stiftung Ethereum will publicly disclose any sort of inquiry from government agencies that falls outside the scope of regular business operations.”

The merge request corresponding to this change on GitHub further notes that the foundation “received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality.”

Read more: Ethereum’s Dencun causes ‘Blast’ layer 2 outage

It is important to note that the request is explicitly described as a ‘voluntary enquiry,’ and it’s not clear what ‘state authority’ may have sent in this request. 

The regulatory status of Ethereum in the United States has been thrust back into the spotlight with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) considering the applications for various spot ether Exchange Traded Products (ETPs).  

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