Ethereum under governance attack: A selfish group of miners have created EGL token that seeks to artificially control the gas limit, against network’s design. Over 20% of the hashpower has signed up for this already

A token claiming to assist in ethereum governance has been created (EGL token – Ethereum Gas Limit) and around 20% of the hash power of ETH has already signed up for this and are collecting these tokens, which threatens to disrupt the governance process of Ethereum and manipulate gas limit in favour of miners.

In regular process, the gas limit used on the network is voted on by miners in coordination w/ core devs. The miners can vote on the protocol’s gas limit. In regular course, the miners are incentivised to act in the best interests of the protocol and retain this governance. However, with proof of stake merge cutting miners out, they are now acting in selfish interest.

However, EGL now seeks to bribe miners to tokenize & sell this control to the market instead, ignoring due process. Such a proposal will never pass EIP process, but now due to greedy miners this attempt at power grab is being played out.

Miners are taking this step because of the upcoming proof of stake merge, that threatens to cut miners out of the picture. Hence, they are attempting to divest their control on the network in this fashion, by selling their governance out in collaboration with some rogue VC funds, and trying to seek rent on the governance process.

The Ethereum team must make it clear that they don’t endorse this EGL project. People buying this in the market are just helping rouge miners cash out and providing liquidity to bad actors.