Eight senior researchers and leaders have left the Ethereum Foundation in 2026, five of them in May alone. The departures include architects of Ethereum's proof-of-stake transition, its censorship-resistance framework, and its core protocol coordination function. The exodus has triggered a public...
"Find a leader who is competent and wants to fight — make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it." — Dankrad Feist, Former Ethereum Foundation Researcher
Eight senior researchers and leaders have left the Ethereum Foundation in 2026, five of them in May alone. The departures include architects of Ethereum's proof-of-stake transition, its censorship-resistance framework, and its core protocol coordination function. The exodus has triggered a public reckoning over whether the nonprofit — which holds a $970 million treasury but controls less than 0.1% of ETH supply — can retain the institutional knowledge needed to ship critical upgrades on schedule.
The crisis is not merely organizational. It arrives as Ethereum's weekly active developer count has fallen 34% in three months, ETH trades near $2,126 — down 57% from its 2025 peak above $4,900 — and the Glamsterdam upgrade faces delays in its enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation implementation. Former researcher Dankrad Feist has proposed creating a separate $1 billion ETH-aligned organization, effectively a vote of no confidence in the Foundation's current structure. The proposal has split the community between those who see it as necessary intervention and those who warn it would reduce Ethereum to "another corporate chain."
The Ethereum Foundation's 2026 restructuring began in February when co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak announced he would step down after less than a year in the role. Stańczak had joined in March 2025 during a prior governance crisis involving undisclosed advisory roles held by senior researchers. The board named Bastian Aue, whose background spans grants and enterprise relations, as interim co-executive director alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang.
The pace of departures accelerated through spring:
| Name | Role | Tenure | Departure Date | |------|------|--------|---------------| | Tomasz Stańczak | Co-Executive Director | ~11 months | February 2026 | | Josh Stark | Operations & Writing Lead | 7 years | March 2026 | | Trent Van Epps | Protocol Support | Multi-year | Q1 2026 | | Barnabé Monnot | Protocol Researcher | Multi-year | May 2026 | | Tim Beiko | Protocol Coordinator | Multi-year | May 2026 | | Alex Stokes | Researcher (Sabbatical) | Multi-year | May 2026 | | Carl Beekhuizen | Protocol Researcher | 7 years | May 29, 2026 | | Julian Ma | Protocol Researcher | 4 years | May 2026 |
A ninth departure — senior solutions architect Pablo Voorvaart — was confirmed the day after Beekhuizen and Ma's announcements, according to reporting by The Block.
The departures are not administrative. They represent a loss of deep protocol-level institutional knowledge.
Tim Beiko served as Ethereum's de facto protocol coordinator, managing the All Core Developers (ACD) calls that govern consensus on Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). His departure removes the primary interface between client teams and the broader developer community.
Barnabé Monnot researched mechanism design and economic modeling for Ethereum's consensus layer — work directly relevant to ongoing debates over MEV mitigation and validator economics.
Carl Beekhuizen spent seven years at the Foundation contributing to the early design of the Beacon Chain and leading the KZG ceremony, a cryptographic setup critical to Ethereum's data availability layer (danksharding).
Julian Ma co-authored FOCIL (EIP-7805), Ethereum's proposed censorship-resistance mechanism, and led the rollout of the 13-second Fast Confirmation Rule. Both are components of Ethereum's roadmap that lack obvious replacements.
Alex Stokes contributed to consensus-layer research and is technically on sabbatical, though multiple sources describe the leave as a departure in practice.
The Foundation has named Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik Svantes as replacements to lead its Protocol Cluster, the internal team responsible for coordinating Layer 1 development. According to the Foundation, the trio contributed to the Fusaka upgrade, PeerDAS data sampling, and a recent mainnet gas-limit increase.
The departures are downstream of a deliberate organizational shift. In mid-2025, facing criticism over execution efficiency and governance transparency, the Foundation initiated what it calls a "Lean Ethereum" strategy — a philosophical reframing of the EF as a steward of the network rather than its operator.
The practical expression of this strategy included laying off 19 employees and restructuring research and development teams. The stated goal: cut bureaucracy and refocus on core protocol tasks.
Critics argue the strategy has produced the opposite effect. What was intended as streamlining has, according to CoinDesk reporting, triggered "something more existential: a public reckoning over whether Ethereum's most influential institution still understands the ecosystem it was built to steward." Community members on X questioned the Foundation's direction, leadership structure, and communication practices, arguing the EF failed to clearly explain the rationale behind the changes.
An insider account published by CryptoPotato attributed the departures to a combination of factors: misalignment between the new leadership's vision and researchers' expectations, compensation dissatisfaction, and a sense that the Foundation's reduced ambition left insufficient room for high-impact work.
As of October 31, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation reported a treasury balance of approximately $970.2 million, comprising $788.7 million in cryptocurrency (predominantly ETH) and $181.5 million in non-crypto holdings.
The Foundation introduced its first formal treasury policy in 2026, capping annual spending at 15% of total treasury assets with a target to reduce that to 5% over five years. A 2.5-year operating expense buffer was established.
In February 2026, the Foundation launched a Treasury Staking Initiative, targeting approximately 70,000 ETH. By April 3, total staked holdings had surpassed 69,500 ETH — worth approximately $93 million at the time of deposit — generating recurring yield denominated in ETH.
A structural constraint remains: the Foundation holds less than 0.1% of total ETH supply and collects no share of staking or transaction fee revenues at the protocol level. Its treasury depletes with spending; it does not regenerate from network activity. At 15% annual drawdown, the treasury faces a roughly seven-year depletion curve absent ETH price appreciation — a timeline that compresses if ETH continues to underperform.
On May 21, 2026, former researcher Dankrad Feist published a proposal calling for the creation of a new institution separate from the Ethereum Foundation. The proposal specifies four requirements:
Feist's core argument: the Foundation's philosophical commitment to neutrality has left Ethereum without an entity willing to advocate aggressively for its economic interests. In his framing, the EF's "credible neutrality" doctrine has become operational passivity.
The proposal divided the community. FigoETH, a prominent community member, argued Ethereum is "a global decentralized movement coordinated by social consensus, not a single org." Ethereum consensus researcher potuz warned that if the new organization controlled governance, it would effectively turn Ethereum into "another corporate chain."
As of publication, no formal fundraising structure or leadership candidate has been announced. The proposal remains a public discussion document.
The Foundation's talent loss occurs against a broader contraction in Ethereum's developer base. According to data reported by CoinDesk and Electric Capital:
The primary driver: an exodus of engineering talent toward AI development. Monthly active developers working on crypto projects hit their lowest level since 2022 in early 2026. However, established developers (those with more than two years of crypto experience) actually increased 27% year-over-year, suggesting the loss is concentrated among newer contributors rather than core protocol engineers.
The Foundation's departures represent a distinct category — these are not junior developers following market trends, but senior protocol architects whose knowledge cannot be replicated by onboarding new hires.
Ethereum's next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, targets the first half of 2026 and includes several technically complex components:
The departure of researchers directly involved in ePBS design and mechanism economics — particularly Monnot and Beekhuizen — raises questions about whether the replacement Protocol Cluster leadership can maintain delivery timelines. The Foundation has stated that Glamsterdam work continues, but has not publicly addressed whether the departures affect scope or scheduling.
Glamsterdam is followed by Hegotá, planned for later in 2026. Delays in Glamsterdam would compress the timeline for Hegotá or push it into 2027.
ETH traded near $2,126 as of May 22, 2026 — down approximately 57% from its peak above $4,900 in late 2025. For context:
The price decline is not unique to ETH — Solana has fallen approximately 51% year-to-date, and the broader crypto market has contracted. But the combination of price erosion, institutional brain drain, and governance uncertainty creates a compounding narrative risk that is specific to Ethereum.
The Ethereum Foundation's 2026 exodus is not a single event but a systemic response to structural misalignment between the organization's self-imposed constraints and the competitive demands of its market position. The Foundation chose to become smaller and more focused. The researchers who left chose to go where the scope of action is larger.
Whether this reconfiguration strengthens Ethereum by distributing leadership across more entities, or weakens it by fragmenting the coordination capacity that delivered the Merge and subsequent upgrades, depends on execution over the next 12 months. The Glamsterdam upgrade is the immediate test. If the new Protocol Cluster leadership delivers on schedule, the departures become a footnote. If delays compound, they become the origin story of a governance failure.
The Feist proposal — regardless of whether it materializes — has surfaced a tension that will not resolve quietly: whether a decentralized protocol can compete at the institutional level without a centralized advocate willing to fight for its economic interests. The Ethereum Foundation, by design, will not be that advocate. The question is whether anyone else will.