A former Ethereum Foundation employee has sued the organization, along with co-founder Vitalik Buterin and four other individuals, alleging that she was fired after disclosing a cancer diagnosis and helping organize a staff letter that challenged a directive tied to the foundation's new mandate.

Kayleen Fulton, who led the foundation's protocol support team and is known in the Ethereum community as “Nixo,” filed the complaint on Nov. 4 in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado. According to the court filing, Bastian Aue, a co-executive director at the time, dismissed her on April 6 — 13 days after she disclosed her diagnosis. The complaint also alleges that Buterin, in his capacity as a board member, helped adopt and enforce the directive. The suit places employment practices at one of crypto's most prominent nonprofit organizations under scrutiny in a public federal forum.

Fulton said she and colleague Trent Van Epps organized a letter in response to the mandate that drew 53 signers. The letter backed the mandate's goals while objecting to a requirement that employees affirm it in order to keep their jobs. The complaint alleges that days after the letter, on April 6, Aue fired Fulton and Van Epps 30 minutes apart.

Fulton alleges disability discrimination, retaliation and interference with her medical leave rights, and is seeking lost pay and damages. Claims of this kind in US federal court typically move through the defendants' formal response — an answer or a motion to dismiss — before any discovery phase, in which the parties gather documents and testimony.

The filing further states that some employees objected to a reference to ritual suicide in the mandate, and quotes Aue as telling staff that the language was figurative.

In a May 14 letter quoted in the complaint, a lawyer for Ethereum Asia Pacific Limited, the foundation's Singapore affiliate, denied that Fulton had been subjected to unlawful conduct or retaliation and said her separation agreement was binding.

Cointelegraph reached out to the foundation, Fulton and Van Epps for comment, but had not received a response by publication.

The foundation, the nonprofit steward of the Ethereum blockchain, published its mandate in March, charting out its role in Ethereum's ongoing and future development. It emphasized censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy and security, and said it would focus on protocol upgrades, research and developer tools.

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