Eight senior researchers and leaders have departed the Ethereum Foundation (EF) in 2026, with five resignations landing in May alone. The exits include all three co-leads of the Protocol Cluster — Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, and Alex Stokes — along with former co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak...
"The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not." — Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Co-Founder, May 24, 2026
Eight senior researchers and leaders have departed the Ethereum Foundation (EF) in 2026, with five resignations landing in May alone. The exits include all three co-leads of the Protocol Cluster — Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, and Alex Stokes — along with former co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak, seven-year veteran Carl Beekhuizen, FOCIL co-author Julian Ma, operations lead Josh Stark, and ecosystem coordinator Trent Van Epps. The departures represent a combined 30+ years of institutional knowledge spanning Beacon Chain design, proof-of-stake coordination, censorship resistance research, and hard fork delivery.
On May 24, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded publicly, stating the EF will become "a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one" that will "sell less ETH." The Foundation holds approximately 102,400 ETH ($210.9 million) across 14 addresses, operates on roughly $100 million in annual expenditures, and has committed to reducing spending to a 5% treasury baseline over five years. Three new Protocol Cluster co-leads — Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik Svantes — were named on May 12. The Glamsterdam hard fork, originally targeted for June 2026, has slipped to Q3.
The exits followed a pattern that accelerated through 2026:
| Date | Name | Role | Tenure | |------|------|------|--------| | February 2026 | Tomasz K. Stańczak | Co-Executive Director | ~2 years | | March 2026 | Josh Stark | Operations & Writing Lead | 7 years | | May 2026 | Barnabé Monnot | Protocol Cluster Co-Lead | Multi-year | | May 2026 | Tim Beiko | Protocol Cluster Co-Lead | Multi-year | | May 2026 | Trent Van Epps | Protocol Cluster Co-Lead | Multi-year | | May 2026 | Alex Stokes | Protocol Researcher | Multi-year | | May 18, 2026 | Carl Beekhuizen | Protocol Researcher | 7 years | | May 18, 2026 | Julian Ma | Protocol Researcher | 4 years |
The departure of all three Protocol Cluster co-leads within the same month is without precedent in the EF's eleven-year history.
The institutional knowledge lost is measurable by contribution, not just headcount.
Carl Beekhuizen spent seven years at the EF contributing to the early design of the Beacon Chain and the KZG ceremony — the cryptographic backbone of Ethereum's data availability layer. His final day is May 29. He cited personal reasons, including time with his newborn child.
Julian Ma co-authored FOCIL (EIP-7805), Ethereum's censorship resistance mechanism, and led the rollout of the 13-second Fast Confirmation Rule. He departed to pursue "product and growth opportunities outside EF." FOCIL is scheduled as a headliner for the Hegotà upgrade, the hard fork after Glamsterdam.
Tim Beiko coordinated Ethereum's All Core Developers (ACD) calls and served as the de facto project manager for multiple hard forks, including the Merge, Shanghai, Cancun, and the Glamsterdam scoping process. His departure removes one of the few people who held the full mental model of Ethereum's upgrade pipeline.
Barnabé Monnot led mechanism design research, producing foundational work on MEV, proposer-builder separation, and the economic modeling that informed ePBS — the system Glamsterdam is designed to enshrine at the protocol level.
Tomasz Stańczak, who served as co-executive director, was viewed by some ecosystem participants as a potentially effective operational leader. Synthetix founder Kain Warwick alleged that Buterin's direct management style contributed to Stańczak's departure, a claim Buterin disputed.
The departures did not occur in isolation. In 2025, Buterin initiated a reorganization that repositioned the EF away from top-down roadmap ownership and toward a focused research and grants hub. According to CoinDesk reporting on May 18, several long-tenured researchers concluded that their work had a better home outside the Foundation under that new mandate.
The restructuring also included leadership changes: Aya Miyaguchi continues as head of the EF, and the Foundation plans to increase the size of its board to dilute the influence of specific individuals. Buterin stated on May 24 that he would reduce his own influence within the board.
The stated goal is institutional longevity. The EF intends to focus exclusively on activities critical to Ethereum's resilience that "would not happen otherwise" — specifically censorship resistance, privacy, and open infrastructure.
The trade-off is scope. Functions previously housed within the EF — hard fork coordination, ecosystem outreach, developer relations — are now expected to migrate to independent teams, L2 foundations, or client teams. Whether those entities can replicate the coordination function is untested.
The EF's financial position provides context for the operational downsizing.
The EF's treasury policy, published June 2025, sets annual spending at 15% of treasury (parameter A) with a 2.5-year operating buffer (parameter B). The Foundation intends to reduce spending linearly over five years to a 5% long-term baseline — consistent with endowment-model organizations.
At current asset levels, the 5% terminal rate implies a long-term annual budget of approximately $32.5 million — a 67% reduction from current spending. Fewer senior researchers means lower payroll, but the operational question is whether a $32.5 million annual budget can sustain credible protocol research on a network securing $287 billion in market capitalization.
On May 12, the EF named three new Protocol Cluster co-leads:
The new leads' stated priorities are: ship Glamsterdam, continue preparations for Hegotà, and advance the Strawmap (the EF's long-term technical roadmap). Glamsterdam devnets are live, and Hegotà scoping is underway with FOCIL as a headliner on the consensus layer side.
The profile of the new leads skews toward security and zero-knowledge engineering — areas aligned with the EF's stated focus on infrastructure and resilience. Absent from the new leadership profile is a dedicated hard fork coordinator in the Tim Beiko mold, raising questions about who manages the multi-client testing and social consensus process for future upgrades.
Glamsterdam, Ethereum's next scheduled hard fork, enshrines Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) at the protocol level and introduces Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) — foundational components for parallel execution and the path toward 10,000 TPS on L1.
The upgrade was scoped before most of the May departures, and the technical work is largely in devnet testing. However, the hard fork has slipped from its original June 2026 target to Q3 2026.
The more material risk lies downstream. If Hegotà and subsequent upgrades lose their coordination layer, the gap between named hard forks could stretch from the current 6–12 month cadence to something longer. The "engineering upgrade era" the EF promised — an acceleration of L1 improvements to keep pace with L2 demand — could quietly stall.
The brain drain is occurring against a backdrop of aggressive hiring by competing ecosystems.
According to reporting from Unchained and CoinDesk, the Solana Foundation and associated entities offer compensation packages that can reach $2 million annually for senior protocol researchers. The EF, operating under a nonprofit mandate with declining budget targets, cannot match those figures without contradicting its own treasury policy.
Sui Network, which launched gasless stablecoin transfers on May 20 — becoming the first L1 to eliminate gas fees for stablecoin payments — represents another well-funded competitor for protocol talent. Sui has surpassed $1 trillion in stablecoin transfer volume since August 2025 and secured Fireblocks integration prior to the gasless launch.
The talent competition is not limited to direct protocol researchers. Tim Beiko's hard fork coordination function and Trent Van Epps' ecosystem development role served as connective tissue between client teams, the research community, and the broader developer ecosystem. Replacing that function requires not just hiring, but institutional trust that takes years to build.
The departures have triggered an increasingly public debate about the EF's direction.
DeFi researcher Ignas publicly asked "What's happening at the EF?" — a question that captured broader community sentiment about transparency. Synthetix founder Kain Warwick alleged Buterin's direct management style caused key departures, specifically pointing to Stańczak's exit.
Buterin's May 24 response addressed several criticisms directly. He disclosed that 90% of his personal net worth remains in ETH. He characterized the EF's new form as "a smaller ship" designed for longevity over breadth. He stated the Foundation would sell less ETH going forward. And he committed to reducing his own board influence.
ETH traded at approximately $2,061 at publication, down 0.37% over 24 hours. The token has underperformed relative to its 2024 cycle highs, though it gained 15.35% over the trailing 30 days — outpacing Solana's 5.02% gain over the same period.
The Ethereum Foundation is undergoing its most significant personnel transition since the 2014 founding. The departures are not random — they follow a deliberate organizational restructuring initiated by Buterin in 2025 that redefined the EF's mandate from broad ecosystem leadership to narrow infrastructure stewardship.
The financial position is stable. The treasury can sustain operations for a decade. The technical pipeline for Glamsterdam is largely intact. The new Protocol Cluster leads bring relevant expertise in security and zero-knowledge systems.
The open question is coordination. Ethereum's upgrade process depends on social consensus among independent client teams, researchers, and the broader community. The EF historically served as the neutral convening authority for that process. Whether that function can be replicated by a distributed set of actors — or whether it atrophies — will determine whether the "engineering upgrade era" delivers on its promise or becomes a planning document without an executor.
The next 90 days are the test case. If Glamsterdam ships in Q3 without material delays beyond the current slip, the market will treat the restructuring as a managed transition. If it slips further, the brain drain narrative hardens into a governance crisis.