The People Who Built Ethereum Are Walking Out the Door — And Joe Lubin Says It's 'Not a Crisis'

Eight. That’s how many senior Ethereum Foundation researchers have quit in 2026. Five of them left in May alone.

On Saturday, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin went on the record with CoinDesk and said: “It’s not a crisis.”

You don’t usually need to tell people something isn’t a crisis unless it kind of is.

Who Left — and Why It Matters

These weren’t interns. These were the architects:

• Tim Beiko — ran the All Core Devs calls, the biweekly meetings where Ethereum’s hard fork decisions actually get made. For years he was the public face of Ethereum’s upgrade process.
• Carl Beek — 7 years at the EF. Worked on the Beacon Chain since the beginning. The proof-of-stake transition was partly his work.
• Barnabé Monnot — led proposer-builder separation and MEV mitigation research. One of the most cited researchers in EF history.
• Trent Van Epps — founded Protocol Guild, the mechanism that pays hundreds of independent Ethereum contributors. He built the system that keeps the ecosystem together.
• Julian Ma — mechanism designer who led FOCIL (EIP-7805), a censorship-resistance mechanism critical to Ethereum’s long-term neutrality.
• Tomasz Stańczak — was literally co-executive director. Left February 28, saying restructuring “objectives were either completed or structurally embedded.”
• Alex Stokes — consensus-layer research and MEV-resistance work.
• Josh — 7 years running EF operations and institutional writing.

This isn’t a normal attrition cycle. It’s a near-complete rebuild of the research tier.

What Triggered It: The “Lean Ethereum” Mandate

In 2025, Vitalik Buterin oversaw a strategic pivot that repositioned the EF as a “research-and-grants” steward rather than a central execution organization. The “Lean Ethereum” mandate was designed to make the foundation more credibly neutral — less involved in roadmap ownership, more hands-off.

The logic is reasonable: if the EF doesn’t commercially benefit from Ethereum’s success, it can’t be accused of steering protocol decisions for profit.

The side effect: a lot of the people who signed up to build things found themselves in an org whose mission was narrowing. Many left for protocol teams, independent DAOs, or competing ecosystems.

Lubin’s Defense — and What He’s Really Saying

Joe Lubin, Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO (who has no formal role at the EF), gave CoinDesk his take on Saturday:

“It is important that the Ethereum Foundation be credibly neutral above reproach. 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.”

Translation: the EF should not be fighting for ETH’s price, market position, or commercial success. It should be a neutral steward. Other orgs should pick up the commercial mandate.

The problem? No other org of that caliber exists yet.

The Community Is Already Trying to Fill the Gap

Former EF researcher Dankrad Feist has proposed a new independent organization with at least $1 billion in initial funding to explicitly do what the EF can’t: fight for Ethereum’s competitive position in the market.

The entity would be funded through permanent staking revenue streams and would align organizational income with ETH holder interests. Ryan Sean Adams (Bankless) publicly backed the concept, calling out that “the future of Ethereum cannot depend solely on the Ethereum Foundation.”

The EF currently holds less than 0.1% of ETH supply — meaning it has almost no ability to influence tokenomics or deploy capital on behalf of token holders.

Meanwhile, ETH Is Getting Crushed

The departures aren’t happening in a vacuum:

• U.S. spot ETH ETFs just logged 17 consecutive days of net outflows totaling $401 million — a new record
• ETH is down 11% over two weeks, 7% over the past week
• Year-to-date, ETH is in negative territory while BTC and Solana gained
• Price is targeting the $1,500 support level, which would be a multi-year low

Whether the EF restructuring is a cause of ETH’s underperformance or a symptom of Ethereum’s broader identity crisis is the debate splitting the community right now.

Why This Matters for Crypto Jobs

The Ethereum Foundation departure wave is a signal for anyone building a career in Web3:

Protocol research is migrating. The EF was the gold standard employer for Ethereum R&D. Now that talent is dispersing — to Solana, to Eigenlayer, to independent DAOs, to L2 foundations. If you want to work on core Ethereum infrastructure, the path no longer runs through the EF.

New org creation means new hiring. If Dankrad Feist’s $1B proposal moves forward, it will need researchers, economists, engineers, and ecosystem builders. Watch that space.

The EF is shrinking its scope, not its influence. Grants are still flowing. Research is still publishing. But the execution-focused roles — the ones that actually shipped Ethereum upgrades — are leaving. That’s a different kind of job market forming around Ethereum’s ecosystem.

L2 and restaking jobs are quietly booming. The people who left the EF didn’t leave Ethereum. They’re working at Optimism, Arbitrum, EigenLayer, and independent projects. Ethereum-adjacent hiring is accelerating even as the core foundation contracts.

---

If you’re a builder, researcher, or engineer watching the Ethereum Foundation restructure in real time — the jobs aren’t disappearing. They’re relocating.

Find your next Web3 role at Cryptogrind — the job board built for crypto and blockchain professionals.