The Ethereum Foundation has lost nine researchers and senior figures in 2026, with five of those departures occurring in May alone. The accelerating pace of exits from the organisation that coordinates much of Ethereum’s core research and development has prompted pointed questions about governance, compensation, culture, and the protocol’s ability to deliver on its technical roadmap.
Who Has Left — and When
The departures began earlier in the year but intensified sharply in May. The most recent exits include researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma, who announced they were leaving the Foundation this week. Their departures follow a string of high-profile exits that has now brought the total to nine for the calendar year, according to Investing News.
The names and specific roles of all nine have not been uniformly disclosed, consistent with the Foundation’s historically private approach to personnel matters. What is clear is that the exits span senior researchers, team leads, and technical contributors — not an isolated case of a single dissatisfied individual, but a pattern across different functional areas.
What’s Driving the Exits?
Precise reasons for each departure vary, and the Ethereum Foundation has not issued a comprehensive public statement explaining the departures as a group. Researchers who have commented publicly have offered a range of perspectives.
Some departing contributors have indicated interest in working directly at Layer-2 projects, protocol startups, or in newly funded DeFi research organisations — environments that often offer faster iteration cycles, direct token incentives, and more focused mandates than the broad, consensus-driven work of the Foundation.
Others have pointed to compensation dynamics. The Ethereum ecosystem has spawned enormous wealth at the protocol-adjacent layer, and the Foundation — which funds its work largely from the proceeds of ETH it held from the original token sale — operates on a non-profit model with salaries that, while competitive, cannot match the upside available at equity or token-holding startups.
Cultural factors have also been cited, though rarely explicitly. The Foundation’s shift in recent years toward greater transparency and external accountability — following criticism of its handling of governance questions and its relationship with large ETH holders — has introduced new forms of institutional friction that some researchers reportedly found uncomfortable.
Is This Bad for Ethereum?
The honest answer is: it depends on where those researchers go.
If departing Ethereum Foundation researchers are joining Layer-2 ecosystems like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, or Starknet — all of which are built on top of Ethereum and whose success is tied to Ethereum’s — then the brain drain is, in a meaningful sense, a redistribution of talent into the broader Ethereum ecosystem rather than a pure loss. Research talent flowing to projects that grow Ethereum’s user base and transaction volume is arguably additive to Ethereum’s long-term health.
If researchers are departing for competing Layer-1 ecosystems — Solana, Sui, Aptos, or others — that calculus changes. Core research talent at competitors accelerates the development of alternative platforms and strengthens the case for non-Ethereum infrastructure.
The Foundation’s role is also worth considering. Ethereum’s development is increasingly distributed across independent teams, client teams (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Reth), research organisations, and ecosystem DAOs. The Foundation functions as a coordinator and funder, not a monolithic engineering organisation. Its influence on core protocol direction is significant but not exclusive — a point that cuts both ways when assessing the impact of researcher exits.
The Glamsterdam Upgrade Context
The departures are happening against the backdrop of the Ethereum ecosystem’s focused attention on the Glamsterdam upgrade — a planned hard fork that could triple the network’s Layer-1 throughput capacity. The upgrade has generated significant excitement but also significant complexity, requiring coordination across multiple client teams and careful staged rollout.
Losing experienced researchers during an active major upgrade cycle introduces execution risk, even if the departures are ultimately unrelated to the upgrade timeline. New contributors need onboarding time; institutional knowledge walks out the door with departing researchers; and the social coordination required to land complex protocol changes becomes incrementally harder with personnel turnover.
Ethereum’s defenders will note that the network has successfully executed multiple major upgrades despite ongoing personnel changes, and that its open-source, multi-client architecture is specifically designed to be resilient against single-point organisational failures.
A Governance Moment
Whatever the immediate technical implications, the departure pattern is accelerating a long-overdue conversation about the Ethereum Foundation’s institutional model. Questions about transparency, decision-making authority, compensation structures, and the Foundation’s relationship to the broader ecosystem are now being asked more loudly than at any previous point.
The community’s expectation that the Foundation will eventually address these questions publicly — rather than managing them through individual exit interviews and informal channels — is growing. Whether that produces meaningful governance reform or remains a source of ongoing tension will be one of the defining storylines of Ethereum’s institutional development through the rest of 2026.
FAQs
How many researchers have left the Ethereum Foundation in 2026?
Nine researchers and senior contributors have left the Ethereum Foundation in 2026, with five of those departures occurring in May alone. The most recently announced exits are researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma.
Will the departures affect Ethereum’s development roadmap?
The immediate impact is uncertain. Ethereum’s development is distributed across multiple independent client teams and research groups, reducing the single-organisation risk. However, losing experienced researchers during an active upgrade cycle (Glamsterdam) does introduce some execution risk and knowledge continuity challenges.
Why are Ethereum Foundation researchers leaving?
Publicly cited reasons include opportunities at Layer-2 startups and DeFi research organisations, compensation dynamics (Foundation salaries cannot compete with token upside at startups), and cultural factors. The Ethereum Foundation has not issued a comprehensive public explanation covering all departures.
Sources: Investing News, CoinDesk, Ethereum Foundation, public researcher announcements*
