The Ethereum Foundation (EF) — the non-profit steward of the world's second-largest blockchain by market capitalization — is in the midst of its most destabilizing governance crisis since inception. On February 13, 2026, co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak announced his departure after less tha...
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) — the non-profit steward of the world's second-largest blockchain by market capitalization — is in the midst of its most destabilizing governance crisis since inception. On February 13, 2026, co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak announced his departure after less than twelve months in the role, marking the fourth leadership transition at the top of the Foundation in just over a year. His successor, interim co-executive director Bastian Aue, now shares leadership duties with Hsiao-Wei Wang — the Foundation's third leadership configuration since January 2025.
The churn is not cosmetic. It reflects deep structural fractures that have accumulated over years of governance-by-vibes, a $970 million treasury managed without a formal policy until June 2025, conflict-of-interest scandals involving senior researchers accepting millions of dollars in tokens from protocols they were positioned to influence, and a community that increasingly blames the Foundation for Ethereum's price underperformance against Bitcoin and Solana. ETH lost 12% of its value in 2025 — a year in which Bitcoin gained ground and Solana surged — and the ETH/BTC ratio has sunk to historically low levels.
This report examines the structural governance failures at the Ethereum Foundation, the economic consequences of leadership instability for the $236 billion Ethereum ecosystem, and whether the ongoing reforms — the Silviculture Society, the 15% opex treasury cap, and the pivot toward institutional outreach via Etherealize — represent genuine restructuring or merely the latest episode in a cycle of crisis-response-repeat.
The Ethereum Foundation's executive leadership has turned over at a pace unprecedented for any organization managing a protocol of this scale:
| Date | Event | |------|-------| | January 2025 | Vitalik Buterin publicly acknowledges "large changes to EF leadership structure" underway for nearly a year[^1] | | February 2025 | Aya Miyaguchi steps down as Executive Director after seven years, transitions to ceremonial President role amid intense community criticism[^2] | | March 2025 | Tomasz Stańczak (Nethermind founder) and Hsiao-Wei Wang appointed as co-executive directors[^3] | | March 2025 | The Silviculture Society — a 15-member advisory body — is launched as an "experimental" governance layer[^4] | | June 2025 | EF publishes its first-ever formal treasury policy after years of ad-hoc ETH sales[^5] | | September 2025 | Etherealize raises $40 million to serve as the Foundation's institutional outreach arm to Wall Street[^6] | | February 13, 2026 | Stańczak announces his departure; Bastian Aue named interim co-ED alongside Wang[^7] |
The velocity of change is itself a governance signal. Miyaguchi's seven-year tenure was criticized for conservatism — a "culture of not competing" that community members blamed for Ethereum's declining developer share relative to Solana. But her replacement lasted less than a year. Stańczak framed his departure as mission-accomplished — "core restructuring objectives... are either completed or structurally embedded" — but the timing, coinciding with Ethereum trading at ~$1,960 (down from $3,336 at the start of 2025), suggests the restructuring is far from resolved[^8].
The governance crisis did not begin with leadership shuffles. It began with a scandal that struck at the Foundation's core claim to neutrality.
In May 2024, two senior Ethereum Foundation researchers — Justin Drake and Dankrad Feist — disclosed that they had accepted advisory roles at the Eigen Foundation, the entity behind EigenLayer, the $19.5 billion restaking protocol. Drake acknowledged receiving "millions of dollars" worth of EIGEN tokens in compensation. Feist disclosed a "significant allocation" without specifying the amount[^9].
The revelations were explosive. EigenLayer's entire value proposition — restaking Ethereum's security layer to bootstrap new protocols — depends on design decisions made at the Ethereum protocol level. The researchers accepting compensation from EigenLayer while positioned to influence Ethereum's roadmap created a textbook conflict of interest that the Foundation had no formal policy to prevent.
Both researchers eventually relinquished their EigenLayer advisory positions in November 2024, with Drake committing not to take any future advisory roles or investments. But the damage was done. Miyaguchi's response — promising to "formalize a conflict-of-interest policy" and acknowledging that "relying on culture and individual judgment has not been sufficient" — effectively conceded that the Foundation had been operating a $100 million annual budget without basic governance controls that any traditional institution would consider table stakes[^10].
The scandal illuminated a structural vulnerability: the Ethereum Foundation employs researchers whose technical decisions can create or destroy billions of dollars in protocol-level value, yet had no formal mechanism to prevent those researchers from being financially captured by the protocols they influence.
As of October 2024 — the most recent comprehensive disclosure — the Ethereum Foundation held approximately $970 million in total treasury, comprising $789 million in crypto (predominantly ETH) and $181 million in non-crypto investments. This represented a 39% decline from $1.6 billion approximately 2.5 years prior[^11].
For an organization spending approximately $100 million annually — roughly 38% on internal operations and 62% on external grants and ecosystem support — the trajectory was unsustainable. The Foundation was liquidating ETH reserves to fund operations without a formal policy governing the rate, timing, or transparency of those sales. Community members watched on-chain as the Foundation periodically sold ETH, often interpreting the sales as bearish signals[^12].
The June 2025 treasury policy represented a belated but significant reform:
The policy was a necessary corrective, but it raises a deeper question about economic value distribution. The Ethereum network generated over $2 billion in annualized fee revenue in 2024, yet the Foundation — the network's primary public goods funder — operates on a depleting endowment rather than a sustainable revenue mechanism. The Foundation captures zero direct economic value from the protocol it maintains. This structural disconnect between value creation and value capture at the governance layer is perhaps the most underappreciated risk in the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
Markets are governance mechanisms, and ETH's price performance has been delivering a harsh verdict. The numbers tell a story of relative decline:
The community has increasingly assigned blame to the Foundation. The argument is straightforward: while competitors like Solana invested aggressively in developer experience, marketing, and ecosystem growth, the Ethereum Foundation maintained an "ivory tower" posture — spending on research and grants while refusing to engage in what Miyaguchi once dismissed as a "culture of competing and winning."
The counterargument is that the Foundation's metrics tell a different story at the protocol level: Total Value Locked (TVL) rose from 25 million to 31 million ETH during 2025, monthly DEX volumes climbed from $67 billion (Q4 2024) to $86 billion (Q4 2025), and institutional adoption accelerated — Fidelity, SWIFT, and Robinhood all chose Ethereum for their tokenization initiatives[^17]. The disconnect between strong fundamentals and weak price action suggests the market is pricing governance risk as a discount factor on the entire network.
The Foundation has launched three structural reforms intended to address its governance deficits:
1. The Silviculture Society (March 2025) A 15-member external advisory body tasked with preserving Ethereum's foundational values — privacy, security, decentralization, and open-source principles. Members include Matthew Green (Johns Hopkins cryptography professor) and Lefteris Karapetsas (Rotki founder), with the majority remaining pseudonymous. Buterin framed the Society as "experimental" — notably declining to call it a governance council. The Society has no binding authority, raising questions about whether it is a genuine accountability mechanism or a symbolic gesture[^4].
2. Etherealize (January 2025, $40M raised September 2025) A startup led by Vivek Raman and former EF developer Danny Ryan, Etherealize received an initial grant from Buterin and the EF to serve as Ethereum's institutional bridge to Wall Street. It raised $40 million from Paradigm and Electric Capital in September 2025. Etherealize represents an implicit acknowledgment that the Foundation itself is structurally incapable of performing institutional outreach — requiring an entirely separate entity to do what Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation, and competitors handle internally[^6].
3. Treasury Policy and Transparency Commitments (June 2025) Beyond the 15% opex cap and spending glide path, the Foundation committed to publishing quarterly financial reports and annual disclosures. This was a direct response to years of criticism about opaque ETH sales and unclear budget allocation[^5].
Whether these reforms are sufficient remains an open question. The Silviculture Society lacks teeth. Etherealize is structurally independent from the Foundation. And the treasury policy, while sound, merely formalizes a depletion schedule rather than solving the fundamental problem of revenue sustainability.
The most uncomfortable governance question in the Ethereum ecosystem is also the most important: What is Vitalik Buterin's actual role?
In January 2025, Buterin stated plainly that he "personally decides the new Ethereum Foundation leadership team," noting that one reform goal is to give the EF "a proper board" — but until that happens, it's him[^1]. This is an extraordinary admission for the steward of a network that purports to be the world's most decentralized smart contract platform.
Former Ethereum Foundation developer Péter Szilágyi amplified the tension in a public letter questioning Buterin's "outsized influence," claiming that most Ethereum projects are controlled by "a tight-knit group of five to 10 individuals backed by one to three venture capital firms"[^18]. Meanwhile, 62% of adopted EIPs in 2025 originated from non-core developers — suggesting the technical governance layer is more distributed than the organizational governance layer.
The paradox is structural: Ethereum's protocol governance is genuinely decentralized, but Ethereum's institutional governance — the Foundation, the treasury, the leadership appointments — remains concentrated in a single individual who explicitly acknowledges this and frames it as temporary. The question is whether "temporary" has a deadline.
Four leadership transitions in twelve months signal structural instability at the Ethereum Foundation, not healthy iteration. The velocity of executive churn undermines institutional credibility with the very institutional investors the Foundation is now courting.
The EigenLayer conflict-of-interest scandal exposed the absence of basic governance controls at an organization managing $970 million and influencing a $236 billion network. The subsequent policy reforms were necessary but reactive.
The Foundation's treasury is a depleting endowment, not a sustainable revenue engine. The 15% opex cap and glide path to 5% spending by 2030 formalize the depletion rather than solve it. The structural disconnect between Ethereum's $2 billion+ annual fee revenue and the Foundation's zero direct value capture represents a critical governance design flaw.
ETH's persistent underperformance against Bitcoin and Solana functions as a market-delivered governance referendum. While protocol-level fundamentals remain strong, the market is pricing leadership instability and organizational dysfunction as a discount on the entire network.
The Buterin Paradox — a single individual selecting the leadership of a $236 billion "decentralized" network — remains unresolved. Until a proper board structure is established, the Ethereum Foundation's governance model is functionally autocratic, regardless of the protocol layer's genuine decentralization.
The Ethereum Foundation is not failing. It is, however, governing a $236 billion network with the institutional maturity of a Series A startup — cycling through executives, formalizing policies years after they were needed, and relying on a single founder's judgment to appoint leaders for an organization that controls nearly $1 billion in assets.
The reforms underway — Silviculture, Etherealize, the treasury policy, the new co-executive director model — represent real progress. But they are incremental patches on a structural problem: the Ethereum ecosystem has outgrown the Foundation's governance architecture. The network generates billions in economic value annually. The protocols built on it custody hundreds of billions. The institutions investing in it manage trillions. And the organization responsible for stewarding all of it has no sustainable revenue model, no independent board, and has now installed its fourth set of executive leadership in twelve months.
The economic value framework demands a simple question: Does the Ethereum Foundation's governance structure create or destroy value for the network it serves? The answer, as of February 2026, is uncomfortably ambiguous — and for a $236 billion network, ambiguity is a luxury it cannot afford.
[^1]: CoinDesk, "Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin Goes on Offense Amid Major Leadership Shake-up," January 2025. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2025/01/21/ethereum-s-vitalik-buterin-goes-on-offense-amid-major-leadership-shake-up [^2]: CoinDesk, "Ethereum Foundation's Aya Miyaguchi Leaving Executive Director Role," February 2025. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2025/02/25/ethereum-foundation-s-aya-miyaguchi-leaving-executive-director-role [^3]: The Block, "Vitalik and new Ethereum Foundation co-executive directors outline updated board structure, mission," March 2025. https://www.theblock.co/post/352217/vitalik-new-ethereum-foundation-executive-directors-updated-board-cypherpunk [^4]: BeInCrypto, "Ethereum Foundation Announces Silviculture Society," March 2025. https://beincrypto.com/ethereum-foundation-announces-silviculture-society/ [^5]: Ethereum Foundation Blog, "Ethereum Foundation Treasury Policy," June 2025. https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/06/04/ef-treasury-policy [^6]: CoinDesk, "Etherealize Raises $40M to Bring Ethereum to Wall Street," September 2025. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/09/03/etherealize-raises-usd40m-to-bring-ethereum-to-wall-street [^7]: CoinDesk, "Ethereum Foundation Leadership Shake-up: Tomasz Stańczak Out as Co-Executive Director," February 2026. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/02/13/ethereum-foundation-leadership-shake-up-tomasz-stanczak-out-as-co-executive-director [^8]: Ethereum Foundation Blog, "An update from Tomasz," February 2026. https://blog.ethereum.org/en/2026/02/13/tomasz-update [^9]: CoinDesk, "Ethereum Researchers Relinquish EigenLayer Roles Over Conflict of Interest Concerns," November 2024. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/11/02/ethereum-researchers-relinquish-eigenlayer-roles-over-conflict-of-interest-concerns [^10]: CoinDesk, "Second Ethereum Foundation Researcher Acknowledges Advisory Deal Paid in EIGEN," May 2024. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/05/21/second-ethereum-foundation-researcher-acknowledges-advisory-deal-paid-in-eigen [^11]: CoinDesk, "Ethereum Foundation's Treasury Shrunk 39% Over 2.5 Years to $970M," November 2024. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/11/08/ethereum-foundations-treasury-shrunk-39-over-2-12-years-to-970m [^12]: Blockworks, "Ethereum Foundation under fire for lack of transparency in treasury management," 2025. https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-foundation-treasury-management-concerns [^13]: CoinDesk, "Ethereum Foundation Unveils New Treasury Policy With 15% Opex Cap," June 2025. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2025/06/05/ethereum-foundation-unveils-new-treasury-policy-with-15-opex-cap [^14]: FXStreet, "Can Ethereum leap out of its four-year shadow in 2026?" December 2025. https://www.fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/ethereum-annual-price-forecast-eth-poised-for-growth-in-2026-amid-regulatory-clarity-and-institutional-adoption-202512241600 [^15]: CoinMarketCap, "Ethereum Price Today," February 2026. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/ [^16]: Decrypt, "The Year in Ethereum 2025: Institutions Embrace ETH as the 'Ivory Tower' Crumbles," December 2025. https://decrypt.co/352160/the-year-ethereum-2025-institutions-embrace-eth-ivory-tower-crumbles [^17]: AMBCrypto, "Bitcoin & Ethereum 2025 - Year in review and 2026 outlook," December 2025. https://ambcrypto.com/bitcoin-ethereum-2025-year-in-review-and-2026-outlook/ [^18]: The Block, "Former Ethereum Foundation developer questions Buterin's influence, sparking debate," 2025. https://www.theblock.co/post/375461/ethereum-foundation-debate-vitalik