Author: Lucas Tcheyan, Vice President of Galaxy Digital Research; Source: Galaxy Digital; Compiler: Shaw, Golden Finance

The Ethereum Foundation once again saw a number of high-level resignations, triggering a new round of scrutiny from the outside world. Researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma announced their resignations last Monday. Notable personnel who have resigned this year include Co-Executive Director Tomasz Stańczak, Council Co-Head Josh Stark, Protocol Guild contributor Trent Van Epps, Protocol Team Leaders Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko; researcher Alex Stokes has also started a three-month leave.

In just five months, eight core members have left, five of whom were concentrated in May. The situation has further escalated: David Hoffman, co-founder of the podcast column Bankless, once said that 99% of his personal assets are ETH. He revealed last Wednesday that he had liquidated all his ETH holdings.

This round of personnel changes occurred after the foundation released the March Agenda. This 38-page document formally establishes the core principles of CROPS (ensuring Ethereum’s censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security). It also makes it clear that the foundation is only one of the many maintainers of the ecosystem and is not the leader in the promotion of the Ethereum ecosystem.

At present, there is no official explanation for the unified reason for the large-scale resignations. Celebrities in the community have expressed concerns and asked the foundation to give a clear explanation. Prysm client developer Potuz bluntly said that the successive resignations are "a typical case of organizations being coerced by interests". Dankrad Feist, a researcher who left the foundation last year to join Tempo, a public chain project invested by venture capital Stripe, proposed the establishment of an independent fund with a scale of US$1 billion overseen by ETH holders.

Our point of view

At the moment, feelings of exhaustion and confusion envelope the entire Ethereum ecosystem. The community has long been tired of the repeatedly adjusted development route and vague value capture logic, and no longer agrees with the rhetoric that "every embarrassing transformation is a normal manifestation of decentralization."

Many negative sentiments also stem from the fact that the price of ETH did not perform as expected. In the early days of the development of the encryption industry, the native tokens of the leading general-purpose underlying public chain have always been a sound investment choice, but now this logic has expired. The "fat protocol" theory is gradually being replaced by the "fat application" theory:The total market value of the Ethereum network exceeds US$300 billion, but most of the economic benefits within the ecosystem are divided up by upper-layer applications, and the value support of the public chain itself becomes increasingly weak.

The clarification of the regulatory environment and the lowering of investment thresholds have further exacerbated this dilemma. In the past, most of the incremental buyers of ETH were native crypto industry practitioners, who were willing to regard network neutrality as a core value. Nowadays, mainstream allocation funds will compare ETH with various targets horizontally: against Bitcoin ETF as a reserve asset track, against HYPE as an on-chain transaction track, against ZEC as a privacy track, and against VVV as an artificial intelligence circulation and deflation track.

Because of this, the public opinion storm caused by the resignation of Ethereum Foundation personnel has a far greater impact than before. Each person who resigned may have a reasonable reason at the personal level, but the official has never clearly explained the reasons behind it. Everyone has begun to interpret it on their own: staff burnout, salary issues, factional struggles, ideological differences, loss of confidence, forced restructuring and other explanations are emerging one after another. At the same time, other public chain tracks are emerging, and the Ethereum ecosystem is becoming increasingly diffuse.

The core of the contradiction is that the market increasingly hopes that the foundation will act as a market-oriented operating entity to fully promote the development of ETH and boost currency prices; however, the "March Agenda" clearly states that the foundation does not assume this role. The document states that the mission of the foundation is to adhere to the neutrality of the underlying network and implement CROPS principles, rather than to push up the price of ETH, maximize the income of currency holders, or coordinate the commercial expansion of the ecosystem. Although the foundation has reached a consensus on this development positioning, a large number of participants in the ecosystem no longer agree with this direction.

It will not be easy for Ethereum to get back on track, but it is not without precedent in the industry. The most similar recent case is Solana after the FTX thunderstorm: at that time, the market value of the SOL token plummeted, and the project's reputation was also damaged due to negative people associated with it. Afterwards, the project team set out to solve the technical bottleneck, establish a clear positioning - a high-throughput public chain for the public, and rely on the Meme currency track to seize traffic, and finally achieve recovery. Of course, the two projects cannot be completely equated. Ethereum is larger, has a higher proportion of institutional holdings, and is more constrained by its “net neutrality” positioning. But Solana's road to recovery remains relevant.

Ethereum now also needs the same firm execution: first solve existing shortcomings to avoid the continued exodus of users and developers; at the same time, plan in advance the core tracks of the next cycle, including underlying expansion, on-chain privacy, post-quantum security, native artificial intelligence economic infrastructure, etc. Efforts are planned in the Strawmap roadmap.

The bigger challenges come from the organizational structure and commercialization levels. Ethereum needs to lock in tracks with natural barriers: high-value DeFi, asset issuance, RWA tokenization, stablecoin settlement, private financial infrastructure, and future AI Agent business, and concentrate resources on deeply cultivating these areas. In a track where "trusted neutrality" can create actual value for users, Ethereum has a competitive advantage.

In addition, a concise and unified value narrative must be established for ETH and implemented to the end. The current positioning is too complicated: it not only advertises as a “stable digital asset”, but also serves as a technology sector target, second-tier network collateral, institutional reserve assets, AI Agent circulation currency, and privacy infrastructure, while maintaining the general positioning of a “global computer.” The overlay of multiple labels will ultimately only weaken the market's value.

The short-term action goals are very clear: promote the upgrade of Glamsterdam as scheduled and ensure the steady implementation of the Hegotá project; disclose the internal power and responsibility structure of the foundation; focus on its own advantageous track; and clearly explain the value capture logic of ETH in one sentence.

If the above measures can be successfully completed, this year's turmoil will eventually be regarded as a painful restructuring of rights and responsibilities. On the contrary, continued personnel turmoil will make the market believe that the core advantage of Ethereum-the decentralized community collaboration network has evolved into the biggest collaboration problem.