The "us" are the people responsible for contributing to the Podcasting 2.0 project which develops this standard:

https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/main/docs/1.0.md

Somewhere along the line, the funkwhale developer saw mention of a way to pay podcasters with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin (which has nothing to do with this and people can choose not to implement it). They then decided to ignore the entire effort.