At 1:13 AM on February 19, 2019, Afri Schoedon tweeted “I did not quit social media, I quit Ethereum. I did not go dark, I just left the community. I am no longer coordinating hard-forks, building testnets, or contributing otherwise. I did not work on Polkadot, I never did, I worked on Ethereum. I did not hate Ethereum, I loved it.”

Afri Schoedon, Ethereum Core Developer, tweeted on Sunday, “no longer respond on Gitter, Skype, Discord, Slack, Wire, Twitter and Reddit.”  He stated on twitter that he was quitting.  This step back he attributes to the fierce online criticism.  This also meant that he was quitting the Ethereum community.

Afri Schoedon is one of the top Ethereum developer. He also stated: “I am no longer coordinating hard-forks, building testnets, or contributing otherwise.”

For now, all the tweets that were posted ever since 2017 have been deleted other than the tweets explaining that he is quitting Ethereum Community.

Schoedon has been contributing to the Ethereum community ever since 2015.  Several developers were shocked by this decision of Schoedon.  They expressed their outrage over the actions that triggered this decision.

Hudson Jameson, the community relations manager expressed his concerns by stating:

“I’m so angry and disappointed of the Ethereum community. You ran out our best contributor for dumbest reasons. More people should have spoken in support.  There needs to be less vitriol.”

The destructive comments that triggered Schoedon’s decision came in response to the candid remarks from Schoedon last Thursday when he compared Polkadot and Serenity. 

He tweeted: “‘Polkadot delivers what Serenity ought to be.’ Change my mind.”

The major focus agenda of Polkadot was to transmit information in the most secure manner with fulfillment of the initiated transaction.  Being a sub-technology of blockchain, Polkadot has the capability to take the blockchain technology to a completely new level. While Parity is one of the main clients of Ethereum, Polkadot is a direct competitor or Ethereum.

Earlier this month, there was a publication in Ethereum’s GitHub:  “Phase 0 in v0.1 is relatively feature complete and approaching stable.”

Polkadot Blockchain is being widely talked to be a threat to Ethereum.  Primarily, Polkadot provides for security assistance, interoperability, and scalability.  Polkadot by virtue of its own consensus has the potential to form bridges with different chains like Ethereum.

Yaz Khoury, the director of developer relations for Ethereum Classic Cooperative stated, “This mob behavior versus Afri and Parity [Technologies] is due to toxic tribalism.”

Schoedon also stated that all of his Ethereum contributions have been unpaid except for the work he did on the Parity Ethereum Client.  Having the payment issues in mind, he is not prepared to spend his free time with the Ethereum Community.

He however, concluded stating: “I did not hate Ethereum, I loved it.”