Ethereum Foundation Rejects Governance Overhaul as Core Staff Exodus Accelerates

Published by James Harris on June 22, 2026June 22, 2026

The Ethereum Foundation is publicly rejecting calls to reshape itself around community approval, even as it loses staff at a pace that raises real questions about whether it can maintain the infrastructure Ethereum actually runs on. That tension, between institutional self-definition and operational capacity, is the story underneath the personnel headlines.

Since January, at least eight senior figures have departed, including researchers Dankrad Feist and Barnabé Monnot, coordinators Tim Beiko and Trent Van Epps, and most recently co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang, who stepped down on June 22 after eight years at the Foundation. The reasons given range from personal decisions to disagreements with management, and the Foundation itself has framed some departures as deliberate restructuring. That framing is being tested publicly: Coinbase’s head of engineering described “dysfunction at the Ethereum Foundation,” and former researcher Dankrad Feist attributed the exits to management problems rather than strategic design. Interim director Bastian Aue has declined to discuss individual cases but did confirm the Foundation will not restructure for ecosystem popularity, a position that reads less as confidence and more as defensiveness when paired with the funding picture.

The Client Incentive Program, which funded the teams maintaining Ethereum’s core software clients, expired in April. Nobody has announced a replacement.

Former contributor Trent Van Epps has estimated that sustaining the client teams, research, and coordination work costs roughly $30 million per year, and that the gap will produce talent loss and stalled upgrades within three to nine months. The Foundation reportedly holds between $500 million and $900 million in liquid assets, which makes the funding crisis harder to explain and easier to criticize: Marc Zeller of Aave Chan Initiative has called the Foundation’s financial management “incompetent,” pointing out that staking its reserves years ago could have funded operations indefinitely. Protocol Guild, an independent collective that has distributed roughly $38 million since 2022, is being discussed as a partial alternative, but it runs on voluntary contributions rather than a structured budget.

The timing matters because Ethereum is mid-cycle in a period where its competitive position against alternative Layer 1s and its own Layer 2 ecosystem is under genuine pressure. A funding gap in core client development does not produce immediate failures, but it compounds slowly, and the 2024-2025 window is when several protocol upgrades need sustained coordination to ship. Vitalik Buterin has outlined a tighter mandate around censorship resistance, privacy, and security, which is a reasonable long-term frame, but mandates do not pay engineers.