The Ethereum Foundation has now lost at least nine senior researchers and protocol leads in 2026, with five of those departures occurring in May alone. The sustained wave of exits has moved from a background concern in the Ethereum community to an active topic of debate about the organisation’s direction, its ability to retain technical talent, and the long-term stewardship of the world’s second-largest blockchain network.
The latest confirmed departures are Carl Beek and Julian Ma, both of whom announced their exits this week. They join a 2026 roster that includes Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, Trent Van Epps, Alex Stokes, Josh Stark, Pablo Voorvaart, and former co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak, who stepped down earlier in the year.
Who Has Left and What They Did
The departures span every layer of the Ethereum Foundation’s research and coordination function:
Tim Beiko served as the primary coordinator for Ethereum’s core developer process — the All Core Devs calls that define which upgrades go into each fork. His role was the closest thing Ethereum had to a technical programme manager at the protocol level.
Barnabé Monnot was a senior research scientist focused on mechanism design, economic security, and the formal analysis of Ethereum’s consensus layer. His work on Proposer-Builder Separation was foundational to Ethereum’s current block production architecture.
Alex Stokes worked on consensus layer research, including contributions to the beacon chain specification. Trent Van Epps led protocol support and served as a key liaison between the Foundation and external developer teams.
Josh Stark handled communications, writing, and institutional outreach — a critical function for an organisation that maintains significant influence through publishing and public coordination rather than direct product development.
Tomasz Stańczak, who briefly served as co-executive director, departed after a tenure that was widely seen as an attempt to inject operational structure into the Foundation’s historically flat organisational culture.
Carl Beek and Julian Ma were both active on consensus layer research, bringing the total of May 2026 departures to five.
Is This a Crisis?
The honest answer is: it depends who you ask, and the disagreement reflects genuine uncertainty about what the Ethereum Foundation actually is.
One interpretation is that this is healthy. Ethereum’s protocol development is increasingly distributed across independent research teams, client developer groups, and funded projects like the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship. The Foundation was never meant to be the permanent home for every Ethereum researcher, and the departure of senior people who go on to build independent companies, join other ecosystems, or start research groups could be read as the ecosystem growing up.
Several of the departing researchers have spoken positively about their time at the EF and have indicated they are leaving for opportunities rather than fleeing dysfunction.
The alternative interpretation — shared by a vocal segment of Ethereum’s technical community — is that the Foundation has developed structural problems that are driving out talent it cannot afford to lose. Specific concerns raised in public discussions include: unclear strategic direction under the current leadership, tensions between Ethereum’s identity as a credibly neutral infrastructure layer versus a platform with active development goals, and compensation structures that have become uncompetitive with private-sector alternatives.
The Glamsterdam Connection
The timing of the research exits sits alongside Ethereum’s most ambitious technical upgrade in years. The Glamsterdam hard fork, targeting a tripling of Layer-1 execution capacity, is currently in final specification phases. Some community observers have noted a degree of irony: Ethereum is preparing its most significant scaling push at a moment when its research organisation is dealing with sustained attrition.
Proponents of the Foundation’s current trajectory argue that Glamsterdam’s near-completion demonstrates that the development process is robust enough to proceed independently of personnel at the Foundation level. Much of the specification work for Glamsterdam was completed before the recent departures, and client teams implementing the upgrade are largely external to the Foundation.
Critics counter that research continuity matters for the longer-term roadmap items — particularly the work on stateless clients, Verkle trees, and the eventual transition to a more scalable consensus layer — that require the kind of sustained, foundational research that is harder to distribute across independent teams.
The Broader Question of Ethereum’s Institutional Model
What the 2026 departures have forced into open discussion is a question that has been latent in the Ethereum ecosystem for years: what is the Ethereum Foundation for at this stage of the network’s development?
The Foundation was created as a bootstrapping organisation — essential when Ethereum was a research project and early-stage network with no established developer community. A decade later, Ethereum has a multi-billion dollar DeFi ecosystem, institutional ETFs with billions in assets under management, and a client developer community that spans dozens of organisations globally.
Several departing researchers have described feeling that the Foundation’s role has become less clear as the ecosystem has matured. The lack of a published strategic roadmap from Foundation leadership has been a recurring point of frustration.
Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin has remained publicly active in research, publishing several major proposals in 2026. But the Foundation as an institution has been less visible in articulating where it sees its distinctive contribution to a now-large and self-sustaining ecosystem.
Investor Reaction
Ethereum has not experienced dramatic price movement in direct response to the departures, though ETH has underperformed Bitcoin over the past month. Analysts caution against reading too much into the correlation — Ethereum’s short-term price is driven primarily by macro factors and ETF flows rather than Foundation personnel.
Longer-term, however, institutional investors have begun citing governance risk as a factor in Ethereum allocation decisions. The sustainability of the Foundation’s research function — particularly for the long-horizon items on Ethereum’s roadmap — is a legitimate question for investors with multi-year positions.
The community’s response to the departures will be watched closely over the coming months, particularly whether the Foundation takes steps to clarify its institutional direction or whether the current pattern continues into the second half of 2026.
FAQ
Does this mean Ethereum development will slow down?
Not necessarily in the short term. Ethereum’s development is distributed across many independent teams, and the Glamsterdam upgrade is proceeding on schedule. The concern is more about long-term research continuity for complex, multi-year protocol work.
Why are so many Ethereum Foundation researchers leaving at once?
Public comments from some departing researchers point to a mix of factors: career opportunities outside the Foundation, unclear strategic direction, and compensation that has become less competitive with private-sector roles. No single reason has been confirmed as the common driver.
Is the Ethereum Foundation in financial trouble?
No. The Foundation holds substantial ETH reserves and has not indicated financial difficulty. The departure wave appears to be driven by organisational and strategic factors rather than funding constraints.
Sources: Unchained Crypto, Phemex, Yahoo Finance, CryptoNews, CoinInsider
