The Ethereum Foundation (EF) lost its second co-executive director in four months on June 18 when Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned, bringing the total senior departures to eight in five months and approximately 19 layoffs and exits across the organization in 2026. The same day, former EF coordinator Trent...
"Legitimacy is downstream of repeated competency, which is itself downstream of resources." — Trent Van Epps, Former Ethereum Foundation Core Development Coordinator
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) lost its second co-executive director in four months on June 18 when Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned, bringing the total senior departures to eight in five months and approximately 19 layoffs and exits across the organization in 2026. The same day, former EF coordinator Trent Van Epps warned that Ethereum's core protocol development — maintained by more than ten client teams at an estimated cost of $30 million per year — faces a funding shortfall within three to nine months following the April expiration of the Client Incentive Program (CIP) with no replacement announced.
Simultaneously, Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork, originally targeted for June 2026, has slipped to H2 2026 after engineering progress on Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (EIP-7732) fell behind schedule. The upgrade entered its final devnet phase on June 17, locking in ten EIPs and a 200-million gas-limit floor — a 3.3x increase from the current ~60 million — but public testnet deployment and mainnet activation remain months away.
The convergence of a leadership vacuum, structural funding gap, and delayed protocol upgrade presents the most concentrated organizational risk Ethereum has faced since its proof-of-stake transition in 2022.
Hsiao-Wei Wang, who joined the EF research team in 2017 and helped shape Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake, announced her immediate resignation as co-executive director and board member on June 18, 2026. "I've come to feel that this is the right moment for me to step back," Wang wrote on X. "Ethereum has always been bigger than any one role, any one organization, or any one moment."
Wang's exit follows co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak's earlier departure, leaving Bastian Aue as the sole acting director. The EF has not announced a permanent replacement for either role.
The departures extend well beyond the executive level. Since January 2026, the Foundation has lost at least eight senior figures, including:
Five of the eight departures occurred in May alone. The EF has seen roughly 19 total layoffs and exits across the organization in 2026, according to multiple reports.
The immediate fiscal concern centers on the Client Incentive Program (CIP), a four-year staking-reward-based initiative that directly funded execution and consensus client teams. CIP expired in April 2026. No successor program has been announced.
Van Epps, who coordinated EF core development funding before his own departure, published a warning on June 18 estimating the annual cost of maintaining Ethereum's more than ten client teams and associated infrastructure at approximately $30 million. Without CIP or an equivalent mechanism, he projected a funding shortfall within three to nine months.
The EF's staking position — approximately 70,000 ETH staked by April 2026 — generates an estimated $3.9 million to $5.4 million per year in yield. That covers 13% to 18% of core development costs.
The gap is structural. The EF historically spent $105.4 million in 2022 and $134.9 million in 2023, with roughly 25-30% of annual spending directed to Layer 1 R&D. Its Ecosystem Support Program allocated $11.4 million to 109 projects in Q1 2024 alone. The current trajectory of deliberate spending reductions, combined with CIP's expiration, creates a mismatch between infrastructure maintenance costs and available funding.
The EF's treasury, tracked via Arkham Intelligence, shows approximately $270.9 million in total assets across 14 addresses, with roughly 102,400 ETH (~$210.9 million) as the dominant holding. Smaller positions include USDC, BNB, and a fraction of a bitcoin.
The Foundation staked 70,000 ETH between February and April 2026, completing the target on approximately April 3. Additionally, the EF sold at least 15,000 ETH via OTC transactions in 2026, including a confirmed 10,000 ETH sale to BitMine finalized May 1 at approximately $22.9 million.
Under the EF's Treasury Policy, published June 2025, annual operating expenditure targets 15% of treasury with an operating buffer of approximately 2.5 years, followed by a roughly linear reduction over five years toward a 5% endowment-level baseline. At the 15% target on a $270.9 million treasury, implied annual spending is approximately $40.6 million — a steep reduction from the $135 million spent in 2023.
The math presents a tension. At $40.6 million in total annual spending, and $30 million required just for core development, the EF would have roughly $10.6 million for everything else — grants, Devcon, developer tooling, community programs, and internal operations. This compression explains the urgency behind calls for alternative funding mechanisms.
Ethereum's next hard fork, Glamsterdam, was originally scheduled for June 2026. It has been pushed to H2 2026, with current estimates from Everstake's technical review pointing to end of August as the best-case mainnet activation.
The delay stems primarily from EIP-7732 (Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or ePBS), which moves the block proposer-builder coordination from an external relay system into the consensus protocol itself. ePBS touches practically every layer of the block production path, and interoperability challenges between consensus clients and execution clients on multiple testnets caused engineering timelines to slip.
On June 17, the Glamsterdam devnet entered its final phase with ten EIPs locked for inclusion:
| EIP | Description | |-----|-------------| | EIP-7708 | EOF Enhancements | | EIP-7732 | Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation | | EIP-7778 | Validator Set Size Reduction | | EIP-7843 | Blob Throughput Increase | | EIP-7928 | Block-Level Access Lists | | EIP-7954 | Wallet Permissions | | EIP-7976 | Consensus Changes | | EIP-7981 | Account Abstraction | | EIP-8024 | Execution Layer Optimization | | EIP-8037 | Quantum-Resistant Security |
The upgrade establishes a 200-million gas-limit floor, a 3.3x increase from the current ~60 million, and includes a quantum-resistant wallet protection mechanism costing approximately $0.07 per account.
The Soldøgn interop devnet concluded May 2 with a stable multi-client deployment. Public testnets (Sepolia and Hoodi) are expected to follow before mainnet activation. However, the timeline remains dependent on testnet validation — a process that historically runs longer than initial estimates.
Protocol Guild, a collective funding mechanism for Layer 1 R&D contributors, has emerged as the primary alternative to EF-centralized funding. The program lists 188 contributors and distributes long-term token-based allocations funded by donations.
Unlike traditional grant programs, Protocol Guild does not determine protocol priorities. It provides unrestricted support to active contributors, with day-to-day coordination continuing through All Core Devs calls regardless of funding source.
Van Epps, who now works with Protocol Guild, has argued that grant programs alone cannot provide the long-term predictability required for core development. Scaling Protocol Guild or any equivalent to reliably cover $30 million annually is qualitatively different from running periodic grant rounds. The mechanism requires sustained, large-scale donations from ecosystem participants — a dependency that has not been stress-tested at this scale.
The EF's stated strategy is deliberate decentralization of responsibility, internally described as "Subtraction." The premise: the Foundation should reduce its central role and encourage the broader ecosystem to fund and govern Ethereum's development independently.
Consensys CEO Joe Lubin, speaking to CoinDesk on June 7, defended this approach. "It is important that the Ethereum Foundation be credibly neutral above reproach," Lubin said. "The opportunity for conflicts of interest between the business side and the builders is just not a credibly neutral way to run your decentralized protocol ecosystem. What's happening at the EF is cleaning that up."
The tension is between philosophical intent and operational reality. Subtraction works when alternative institutions are ready to absorb the responsibilities being shed. The current situation — CIP expired without replacement, eight senior departures in five months, no permanent co-directors, and a delayed major upgrade — suggests the subtraction is outpacing the substitution.
The EF's 2026 protocol priorities document, published February 18, outlined seven focus areas including Layer 1 and Layer 2 development, applied zero-knowledge cryptography, and developer tooling. Executing against those priorities with a compressed budget and depleted leadership bench is the central operational question facing Bastian Aue, the sole remaining acting director.
Ethereum's organizational infrastructure is undergoing its most significant stress event since the Merge. The combination of leadership attrition, funding mechanism expiration, and protocol upgrade delays creates compounding risk that cannot be dismissed as routine turnover. The $30 million question — whether decentralized, donation-driven funding can sustain core protocol development at scale — will likely be answered within the three-to-nine-month window Van Epps has identified. Glamsterdam's progress through testnets will serve as a real-time indicator of whether the current team can deliver under these constraints.
The network itself continues to function. Validators run, blocks finalize, and Layer 2 ecosystems operate on top. But the organizational layer that coordinates upgrades, funds client teams, and maintains the protocol's competitive development pace is structurally thinner than at any point in Ethereum's history. How quickly Protocol Guild and other mechanisms can scale to fill the gap will determine whether "Subtraction" proves to be a prescient governance evolution or a premature withdrawal of essential support.