Eight senior researchers have left the Ethereum Foundation (EF) in 2026. Five of those departures occurred in May alone, hollowing out the Protocol Cluster — the unit responsible for steering Ethereum's base-layer upgrades. The exits include protocol leads Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko, consensus ...
"If we're honest, the Foundation holds less than 0.1% of all ETH and has no direct flow of staking or fee revenue. We need a new organization with at least $1 billion in ETH, a board who want ETH to go up, and a leader who is competent and wants to fight." — Dankrad Feist, Former Ethereum Foundation Researcher (now at Stripe/Tempo)
Eight senior researchers have left the Ethereum Foundation (EF) in 2026. Five of those departures occurred in May alone, hollowing out the Protocol Cluster — the unit responsible for steering Ethereum's base-layer upgrades. The exits include protocol leads Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko, consensus researcher Alex Stokes (sabbatical), Beacon Chain architect Carl Beek, mechanism designer Julian Ma, operations lead Josh Stark, solutions architect Pablo Voorvaart, and former co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak.
The departures come at a structurally inconvenient time. Glamsterdam, Ethereum's next hard fork featuring enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), is targeting a mid-2026 mainnet launch, and devnets are already live. The ETH/BTC ratio hit 0.027 on May 21, a 2026 year-to-date low, extending a multi-year trend of underperformance against Bitcoin. JPMorgan issued a research note on May 19 stating that ETH is "unlikely to reverse its multi-year underperformance against BTC without meaningful improvements in network activity, DeFi adoption, and real-world use cases."
Against this backdrop, former EF researcher Dankrad Feist proposed creating an entirely separate organization with at least $1 billion in ETH funding, an explicit mandate to defend ETH's competitive position, and a leader "who wants to fight." The proposal has split the community between those who see a failing governance model and those who argue that Ethereum's decentralized design is working as intended.
The following table summarizes the eight confirmed senior departures from the Ethereum Foundation in 2026:
| Name | Role | Tenure | Key Contributions | Departure Date | |------|------|--------|-------------------|----------------| | Tomasz Stańczak | Co-Executive Director | ~1 year | Led EF alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang | February 2026 | | Tim Beiko | Protocol Cluster Co-Lead | ~4 years | AllCoreDevs coordination, hard fork management | May 2026 | | Barnabé Monnot | Protocol Cluster Co-Lead | ~4 years | MEV research, mechanism design | May 2026 | | Alex Stokes | Consensus Researcher | ~4 years | Consensus-layer protocol development | May 2026 (sabbatical) | | Carl Beek | Core Researcher | 7 years | Beacon Chain architecture, proof-of-stake transition | May 29, 2026 | | Julian Ma | Researcher | ~4 years | FOCIL (EIP-7805), Fast Confirmation Rule | May 2026 | | Josh Stark | Operations/Writing Lead | Multi-year | EF communications, ecosystem documentation | 2026 | | Pablo Voorvaart | Senior Solutions Architect | Multi-year | Developer relations, infrastructure | May 20, 2026 |
The concentration in May is notable. All three Protocol Cluster leads — Monnot, Beiko, and Stokes — departed or stepped back within the same month. This is the unit that coordinates Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), runs AllCoreDevs calls, and manages the sequencing of hard forks.
Carl Beek's seven-year tenure makes his exit particularly significant. He was directly involved in the Beacon Chain design that undergirded Ethereum's 2022 transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake — the most consequential upgrade in the network's history.
Julian Ma's departure leaves two critical in-progress protocol features without their primary designer. FOCIL (Fork-Choice enforced Inclusion Lists, EIP-7805) is a censorship-resistance mechanism scheduled for inclusion in the Hegotà upgrade. The Fast Confirmation Rule, which compressed Layer 1-to-Layer 2 bridging time to approximately 13 seconds, remains in development.
Tracking departure destinations reveals a pattern: EF talent is not retiring — it is being absorbed by better-funded competitors.
Dankrad Feist, who left the EF in 2025, joined Tempo, the blockchain project built by payment processor Stripe and crypto venture firm Paradigm. Max Resnick, another former EF researcher, moved to Anza, Solana's core development firm. These are not peripheral departures; they represent protocol-level expertise migrating to direct competitors.
Julian Ma announced plans to "focus on product and growth opportunities outside EF" but did not specify a destination. Carl Beek cited personal reasons, including the birth of a child, with no announced next role. The remaining departures have similarly not disclosed where they are going.
The competitive dynamic is clear. Stripe, with $6.5 billion in 2024 revenue, can offer compensation packages that a Swiss nonprofit spending approximately $100 million annually cannot match. Solana's development ecosystem, funded through the Solana Foundation and firms like Anza and Jump Crypto, competes directly for the same cryptographic and distributed-systems expertise.
The EF moved to fill the Protocol Cluster leadership gap on May 11, naming three new co-leads: Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik. Corcoran will coordinate zkVM proofs and post-quantum consensus research. Wedderburn leads the zkEVM team. Fredrik heads Protocol Security and the "Trillion Dollar Security" initiative.
This is the second major leadership replacement cycle in six months. In February, co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak stepped down after less than a year, replaced by interim co-executive director Bastian Aue alongside continuing co-ED Hsiao-Wei Wang. Stańczak himself had been brought in after long-time executive director Aya Miyaguchi transitioned to the newly created role of president in 2025, following sustained community criticism over the Foundation's direction.
The throughput of leadership churn is high. Since Vitalik Buterin's 2025 reorganization — which repositioned the EF away from top-down roadmap ownership and toward a research-and-grants-only role — the Foundation has cycled through two executive-level leadership configurations and one complete Protocol Cluster leadership team.
The EF's treasury composition constrains its ability to compete for talent. According to Arkham Intelligence data, the Foundation holds approximately 102,400 ETH (~$210.9 million) across 14 tracked addresses, with total assets of approximately $270.9 million.
Annual operating expenditure runs at roughly $100 million. In February 2026, the EF completed a 70,000 ETH staking initiative, generating an estimated $3.9 million to $5.4 million in annual staking yield. This shifts the treasury model from periodic ETH sales toward yield-based funding, but the yield covers only 4-5% of annual expenses.
Current treasury policy targets 15% of assets for annual operating expenditure and maintains a 2.5-year runway. The Foundation intends to reduce annual spending linearly over five years to a 5% baseline — a standard endowment draw rate.
The structural issue: the EF operates as a Swiss Verein (nonprofit association). It cannot issue equity, cannot offer token-based compensation tied to ETH price appreciation, and holds less than 0.1% of total ETH supply. This limits both compensation flexibility and strategic influence over the ecosystem.
On May 21, Dankrad Feist published a proposal calling for a new organization separate from the Ethereum Foundation, with four requirements:
The proposal directly challenges the EF's philosophical model. Since its founding, the EF has maintained a stance of "credible neutrality," deliberately avoiding advocacy for ETH as a financial asset. Feist's argument: this neutrality has become a liability as competing ecosystems deploy billion-dollar war chests for developer acquisition, business development, and market-making.
Community reaction was divided. Ethereum consensus researcher potuz warned that if such an organization controlled governance, it would effectively turn Ethereum into "another corporate chain." Community member FigoETH argued Ethereum is "a global decentralized movement coordinated by social consensus, not a single org."
The proposal remains unfunded and has no formal organizational structure. It functions, for now, as a public litmus test of how far the community has drifted from the Foundation's credible-neutrality doctrine.
Glamsterdam, Ethereum's next scheduled hard fork, centers on two EIPs: EIP-7732 (enshrined proposer-builder separation, ePBS) and EIP-7928 (block-level access lists). Devnets are live. Public testnet activation on Holesky and Sepolia is expected in the coming months, with a mainnet target of mid-2026 — though developers have acknowledged the timeline could slip to Q3 or Q4.
According to the EF's May 11 Protocol Cluster update, scoping for Hegotà (the subsequent upgrade) is underway, with Julian Ma's FOCIL (EIP-7805) scheduled as a "headliner" on the consensus-layer side. Ma's departure raises questions about who will champion and refine this specification through implementation and testing.
The new Protocol Cluster leads must simultaneously:
Ethereum client teams (Geth, Prysm, Lighthouse, Besu, Nethermind) continue to operate independently and have their own engineering capacity. The EF's protocol team coordinates but does not build. Whether the leadership transition materially delays timelines depends on how much institutional knowledge was retained through documentation versus carried in the heads of departed staff.
The ETH/BTC ratio hit 0.027 on May 21, its 2026 year-to-date low. The ratio is down more than 35% from its August 2025 peak of 0.04324. For context, it bottomed at 0.01770 in April 2025 during the "Liberation Day" tariff selloff.
JPMorgan's May 19 research note stated ETH is "unlikely to reverse its multi-year underperformance against BTC without meaningful improvements in network activity, DeFi adoption, and real-world use cases."
MEXC Research identified five structural factors behind the gap: (1) L2 activity fragmentation reducing L1 fee revenue, (2) Bitcoin's ETF-driven institutional demand, (3) Solana capturing retail and memecoin activity, (4) uncertainty around EF governance, and (5) the absence of a clear ETH price-accrual narrative.
Tom Lee of Fundstrat has called the governance situation "short-term noise," pointing to spot ETH ETF inflows and institutional accumulation as the dominant signal. The data does not yet confirm which interpretation is correct.
The Ethereum Foundation is undergoing its most significant personnel turnover since the organization's founding. The departures are concentrated in the protocol research layer — the people who design the upgrades that define Ethereum's technical trajectory.
The question is whether this matters structurally or only optically. Ethereum's architecture deliberately distributes execution across independent client teams, and the EF's 2025 reorganization further reduced the Foundation's direct role in protocol development. If that decentralization thesis holds, the departures represent normal turnover in a coordinating body, not an existential risk.
If it does not hold — if the institutional knowledge, coordination capacity, and research continuity that walked out the door cannot be replaced at equivalent quality — then the impact will show in delayed upgrades, reduced protocol innovation velocity, and continued talent migration to better-funded competitors.
The market is not waiting for that answer. ETH/BTC at 2026 lows, a $1 billion rival-institution proposal, and a complete Protocol Cluster leadership rotation within a single month all point in the same direction: the question of who speaks for Ethereum, and whether anyone should, is now being priced.