As more and more people leave the Ethereum Foundation, community leaders are increasingly calling for a new, well-funded organization built around revitalizing the Ethereum Foundation. $ETHThe cost of, critics of its mission argue, the nonprofit was never designed to pursue.
At least eight senior EF researchers and leaders have announced their departures this year, with five expected to leave in May alone, with a change in the foundation’s leadership under new co-executive directors Bastian Aue and Xiaowei Wang, who joined in February following the departure of Tomasz Stanczak. Stanczak led EF for just under a year before stepping down.
Stańczak’s tenure is seen as pushing EF to more actively promote and use Ethereum applications while expanding L1.
new EF directive
Meanwhile, one of the new administration’s first actions was to publish the EF Mandate, which says nonprofits should focus on upholding core values such as censorship resistance, open source, private, and secure (also known as CROPS).
Shortly after the mandate was announced, rumors circulated that EF staff were being pressured to sign the document or resign. EF declined to comment on the speculation at the time.
The talent drain resulting from this reorganization has reignited a long-standing debate over whether Ethereum’s core institutions are equipped to compete in an increasingly aggressive cryptocurrency environment.
$ETH According to CoinGecko, at the time of writing, it was trading at around $2,100, with a market capitalization of around $2,100, a significant drop from previous cycle highs and well below rivals like Bitcoin and Solana over the past two years.
For new institutions
Danclad Feist, a former EF researcher who left last year to join competitor Tempo, announced his proposal for a new agency to X on Wednesday. He called on the community to create an organization with an initial capital of at least $1 billion, led by someone willing to fight for Ethereum’s competitive position, and permanently funded by staking proceeds.
“EF currently holds less than 0.1% of the total $ETH. There is no Ethereum staking or fee income stream there,” Feist wrote. “Find a leader who is capable and wants to fight, and hold him accountable. $ETH It is a charter that holds organizations accountable for raising their standards. ”
Feist acknowledged that the proposal is a daunting task. “It’s very difficult to imagine now, but I think this is the only way,” he added.
Cryptocurrency investor and Bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams echoed this call, arguing that EF’s structure is constitutionally unsuitable for the role of a financial institution. $ETH advocate.
“It is clear that the future of Ethereum cannot depend on EF,” Adams wrote on May 19th. $ETH The assets you gain — the numbers go up. And it gets noisy. And do it hard. EF is not and never will be. ”
Mr Adams then endorsed Mr Fundstrat and Tom Lee’s company BitMNR as the best candidates to fill the role.
‘original sin’
Journalist Laura Shin, host of the podcast Unchained, said the current dissatisfaction is the product of years of decisions to deprioritize Tokenomics.
“I think Ethereum’s original sin was not considering tokenomics in every move from Denkun,” Shin wrote on Wednesday. “The ultrasonic money theory is a good thing, and Denkun, or the L2 roadmap in general, should have stopped saying this is a negative impact on the ultrasonic money theory and looked at ways to preserve it.”
Singh argued that ideology and economic incentives do not necessarily have to be contradictory. “I don’t think ideology and capitalism/tokenomics/better numbers are mutually exclusive,” she wrote. “Not caring about price, tokenomics, or BD does no harm to CROPS. It just ensures that these principles reach more people.”
The Dencun upgrade, completed in March 2024, significantly reduced transaction fees on the Ethereum Layer 2 network by introducing “blobs” for cheaper data storage. This move has been widely praised for its scalability, but criticized as reducing scalability. $ETHfee burn mechanism and weaken the deflationary pressures that underpinned the ultrasonic money story.
“Maximum self-sovereignty”
Not everyone agrees that introducing price consciousness into Ethereum’s core institutions is healthy. EF app relations director Jason Chaskin defended the nonprofit’s protocol-centric mission.
“The Ethereum Foundation is uniquely doubling down on what we need to do: to make the entire Ethereum experience, from protocol to wallet to middleware to apps, as autonomous, private, secure, resilient, and easy to use as possible,” he wrote.
Critics of the price-driven approach also point out that the EF’s deliberate isolation from market pressures has historically allowed it to pursue long-term technical work, including a multi-year transition to proof-of-stake, which may not have been sustainable under a returns-driven governance model.
