The leadership bench at the Ethereum Foundation is now completely empty at the top. Co-executive director and board member Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned effective Thursday, according to the original report from Unchained. Her exit follows the recent stepping down of fellow co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak. That means both leaders appointed to steer the foundation’s day-to-day operations have now departed within weeks of each other.
It’s not just the top two jobs that sit empty. At least eight senior members have left the Ethereum Foundation over the past five months. The churn touches program managers, researchers, and longtime contributors whose institutional knowledge had anchored the foundation’s work since Ethereum’s earliest days. When an organization loses this many senior people in such a compressed period, the immediate question isn’t about individual motives—it’s about whether the foundation’s structure itself is failing to retain the talent it needs.
A governance vacuum at the worst possible time
The foundation has always occupied an awkward space. It’s not a company, not a political body, and not a pure open-source collective. It funds research, coordinates developers, and holds significant soft power over the roadmap. But the foundation’s authority has been increasingly contested as Ethereum matures and as layer-2 networks, venture-backed client teams, and liquid staking protocols accumulate their own influence. Losing both co-executive directors at once risks creating a governance vacuum precisely when the ecosystem is debating technical upgrades, scaling strategies, and the long-term sustainability of Ethereum’s economic model.
Insiders have long been aware that the foundation’s internal culture can be frustratingly opaque. Budget decisions, grant allocations, and personnel moves often happen behind closed doors. Now, with a wave of exits that includes some of the foundation’s most respected voices, the community has no clear sense of who will set priorities or how the foundation plans to rebuild its leadership layer.
Developer momentum isn’t the problem
Despite the upheaval, Ethereum’s underlying developer activity tells a very different story. The network continues to lead Top 10 Blockchains by Developer Activity This Week metrics, with thousands of monthly active builders shipping code across core protocol work, layer-2 implementations, and application-layer projects. That kind of momentum doesn’t evaporate overnight, and it suggests that what’s happening inside the foundation may be more about organizational design than technical decay.
Still, a leadership void matters. The foundation’s role in coordinating upgrades like Pectra, managing the Ethereum Improvement Proposal pipeline, and representing Ethereum to regulators and institutions can’t be outsourced entirely to the broader community. No single entity runs Ethereum, but someone needs to sign off on budgets, schedule meetings, and make sure that critical infrastructure work doesn’t stall because the people who funded it are no longer there.
What the community will be watching
The foundation’s board now faces urgent decisions. Does it install a single executive director with a clear mandate, or does it experiment with a more distributed leadership model? The recent exits suggest that internal friction over vision, strategy, or management style may have accelerated the departures. If the foundation doesn’t articulate a credible plan soon, it risks a slow bleed of legitimacy at a moment when other blockchain ecosystems are investing heavily in institutional-grade coordination bodies.
Several senior positions—research leads, ecosystem stewards, and heads of key working groups—reportedly remain unfilled or are held on an interim basis. That puts pressure on the remaining team members and makes it harder to attract new talent. The foundation’s ability to function effectively through the next upgrade cycle will depend on whether the board can stabilise the organisation before more contributors decide that their time is better spent elsewhere.
No single departure signals a crisis. Eight departures in five months, including both co-executive directors, sends a different message. The Ethereum ecosystem has proven resilient before, but foundations don’t run on code alone. Right now, the people side of the equation looks deeply uncertain.
