Author: bootly, BitpushNews

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) once again stands at a crossroads of personnel turmoil.

Tomasz Stańczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, announced that he will step down from his position at the end of this month. This comes just 11 months after he and Hsiao-Wei Wang formed the new leadership core last March, succeeding long-time helmsman Aya Miyaguchi.

His replacement will be Bastian Aue. There is very little public information about this person. The X account has only been registered for eight months and there is almost no record of any speeches. He and Hsiao-Wei Wang will continue to co-lead this organization that controls the core resources and direction of the Ethereum ecosystem.

This seemingly sudden personnel change is actually the inevitable result of the intertwining of internal conflicts, external pressure and strategic transformation of the Ethereum Foundation.

Accepted in times of crisis: A year in turmoil

To understand Stańczak’s departure, one must first go back to the context in which he took office.

At the beginning of 2025, the Ethereum community was in a period of anxiety. At that time, the cryptocurrency market was generally on the rise after the U.S. election. Bitcoin hit new highs repeatedly. Competitive chains such as Solana were gaining momentum. However, the price performance of Ethereum was relatively weak. The Ethereum Foundation itself became the target of public criticism.

The criticism was directed at then-Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi. The developer community complained that the foundation was seriously out of touch with front-line builders, that there were conflicts of interest in strategic directions, and that the promotion of Ethereum was insufficient. Some people question that the foundation is too "Buddhist" and that in its gentle stance of calling itself a "coordinator" rather than a "leader", Ethereum is losing its first-mover advantage.

As the "central mother" of Ethereum, what the foundation is required to do is not to do nothing, but to attack with force.

Amid this storm of public opinion, Miyaguchi stepped aside and joined the board of directors. Stańczak and Wang stepped up to the plate and were thrust into the spotlight.

Stańczak was not a paratrooper. He is the founder of Nethermind, which is one of the execution clients at the core of the Ethereum ecosystem and plays a key role in infrastructure construction. He understands technology, has entrepreneurial experience, and has a personal understanding of the pain points of the community.

In his own words, the instructions he received when he took office were very clear: "The community is shouting - you are too chaotic. You need to be more centralized and accelerated to cope with this critical period."

What did you do this year?

The combination of Stańczak and Wang really made a difference that was visible to the naked eye.

The first is organizational efficiency. The foundation laid off 19 employees, streamlined its structure, and tried to shed its bureaucratic label. The strategic focus has returned from Layer 2 to Layer 1 itself, and it has been clearly stated that priority should be given to expanding the Ethereum mainnet, rather than allowing L2 to do its own thing. The pace of upgrades has been significantly accelerated, and EIP advancement has been more decisive than ever.

The second is posture adjustment. The foundation began to publish a series of videos on social media to proactively explain the technical route and development direction of Ethereum to the public. This "going out" communication method contrasts with the relatively closed and mysterious image of the past.

In terms of strategic layout, Stańczak promoted the exploration of several new directions: privacy protection, quantum computing threat response, and the integration of artificial intelligence and Ethereum. Especially in the direction of AI, he clearly stated that he saw the trend of "agent-based systems" and "AI-assisted discovery" reshaping the world.

At the financial level, the foundation began to discuss more transparent budget management and fund allocation strategies in an attempt to respond to external doubts about the efficiency of treasury use.

Vitalik Buterin said of Stańczak: "He helped greatly improve the efficiency of many departments of the foundation and made the organization more responsive to the outside world."

The implication of the resignation announcement

It’s less than a year, why are you leaving?

Stańczak’s resignation statement was quite candid and somewhat intriguing. He gave several key information points:

First, he believes that the Ethereum Foundation and the entire ecosystem are "in a healthy state." It's time to pass the baton.

Second, he wants to go back to being a "hands-on product builder" and focus on the combination of AI and Ethereum. He said his current mentality is similar to when he founded Nethermind in 2017.

The third and most interesting sentence: "The leadership of the foundation is becoming more and more confident in making decisions and controlling more affairs by itself. As time goes by, my ability to execute independently in the foundation is weakening. If I continue to stay, I will be more like 'waiting to hand over the baton' in 2026."

There are two meanings behind this sentence: First, the new leadership team has developed self-motivation and no longer needs his intervention in everything; second, his actual power space may be shrinking: For a person who is used to personally taking over the situation and has a strong entrepreneurial temperament, this feeling obviously does not suit him well.

He also mentioned, "I know that many of the current ideas about agent AI may be immature or even useless, but it is this kind of game-like experiment that defined the innovative spirit of early Ethereum."

This passage contains a bit of implicit criticism of the current situation: as organizations become more "mature" and decisions become more "robust", will the experimental spirit that grows wildly be lost?

Stańczak’s departure is, on the surface, a personal choice, but behind it is the long-term dilemma faced by the Ethereum Foundation.

This organization has been in an awkward position since its birth. In theory, Ethereum is decentralized and the foundation should not become the power center issuing orders. But in fact, it holds a large amount of funds, core developer resources, and the right to speak in ecological coordination, and objectively assumes the dual roles of "Central Mother" and "National Development and Reform Commission".

This identity paradox has caused the foundation to be in a dilemma for a long time: if it does too much, it will be accused of centralization; if it does too little, it will be criticized for inaction. During the Miyaguchi period, he tended to be positioned as a "coordinator" and was criticized as weak; Stańczak tried to shift to the role of "executor" and the efficiency was indeed improved, but the distribution of power within the organization will naturally become more centralized.

Stańczak’s resignation announcement precisely exposes this tension: As the organization becomes more efficient and decision-making becomes more decisive, the personal space for the founding team members is compressed. For an ecosystem that needs to take into account both "decentralization spirit" and "market competition efficiency", this kind of internal friction is almost unavoidable.

What kind of person is Bastian Aue, who replaces Stańczak?

There is very little public information. His own description on

Aue said in his statement on taking over: "The basis for my decision-making is a principled insistence on certain attributes of what we are building. The foundation's mission is to ensure that truly permissionless infrastructure - with the cypherpunk spirit at its core - can be built."

This passage sounds more like the language style of the Miyaguchi period: emphasis on principle, emphasis on spirit, emphasis on coordination rather than dominance.

Does this mean that the foundation will rebalance its direction from "radical execution" to "principled coordination"? It remains to be seen.

The confusion of Ethereum

Stańczak’s departure comes at a time when Ethereum is discussing a series of major proposals. According to him, the foundation is about to release several key documents, including the specific plan of "Lean Ethereum", future development roadmap, DeFi coordination mechanism, etc.

Among them, the "Lean Ethereum" proposal is dubbed by some community members as "the era of weight loss for Ethereum" - it is intended to simplify the protocol, reduce the burden, and make the main network run more efficiently.

These directional documents will profoundly affect the evolution path of Ethereum in the next few years. Changing the core executive director at this moment will undoubtedly add uncertainty to the implementation of these proposals.

The broader background is that Ethereum is facing challenges from multiple levels: competition from high-performance chains such as Solana, Layer 2 fragmentation issues, new narrative windows for the integration of AI and blockchain, and the impact of overall sentiment fluctuations in the crypto market on ecological funds and attention.

On the same day Stańczak announced his resignation, ETH briefly fell into the $1,800 range. If it continues to fall below this level, an embarrassing fact will emerge: the comprehensive return of holding ETH may be lower than the US dollar cash rate.

The conversion is even more worrying: In January 2018, ETH reached $1,400 for the first time. That $1,400, adjusted for U.S. CPI inflation compounding, equals about $1,806 in February 2026.

In other words, if an investor bought ETH in 2018 and held it naked to this day without ever participating in the pledge, then eight years later, not only did he not make any money, he even lost money on the US dollar cash placed in the bank earning interest.

For the "E Guards" who have believed all the way, the real torture may not be "who wins the route battle", but: how long can it last?

The only thing that is certain is that this core organization, which controls one of the most important ecosystems in the crypto world, is still looking for its position in the rapidly changing industry, and this road is destined to be uneventful.