A wave of departures from the Ethereum Foundation has intensified calls from community leaders for a new, well-funded organization built around boosting ETH’s price, a mission critics say the nonprofit was never designed to pursue.

At least eight senior EF researchers and leaders have announced departures this year, with five exits coming in May alone, as the foundation undergoes a leadership reshuffle under new Co-Executive Directors Bastian Aue and Hsiao-Wei Wang, who joined in February after the departure of Tomasz Stańczak. Stańczak stepped down after leading the EF for just under one year.

Stańczak tenure was seen to push the EF to more actively promote and use Ethereum applications, while scaling the L1.

New EF Mandate

Meanwhile, one of the new administration’s first actions was to publish its EF Mandate, which said the non-profit’s focus should be on preserving its core values, such as being censorship-resistant, open source, private, and secure, aka, CROPS.

Shortly after the mandate was published, rumors circulated that EF staff were forced to sign the document or resign. The EF declined to comment on that speculation at the time.

The reorganization’s personnel churn has reignited a long-running debate over whether Ethereum’s core institution is equipped to compete in an increasingly aggressive crypto landscape.

ETH was trading around $2,100 with a market cap of roughly $258 billion at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko, down sharply from prior cycle highs and significantly underperforming rivals like Bitcoin and Solana over the past two years.

The Case for a New Institution

Dankrad Feist, a former EF researcher who last year left to join competitor Tempo, laid out a proposal for a new institution on X on Wednesday. He called on the community to create an organization with at least $1 billion in initial funding, led by someone willing to fight for Ethereum’s competitive position, and permanently funded through staking revenue.

“The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it,” Feist wrote. “Find a leader who is competent and wants to fight — make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it.”

Feist acknowledged the proposal would be a heavy lift. “Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way,” he added.

Crypto investor and Bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams echoed the call, arguing the EF’s structure makes it constitutionally unsuited to the role of ETH advocate.

“It’s clear the future of Ethereum can’t depend on the EF,” Adams wrote on May 19. “We need an org that wants ETH the asset to win — number go up. And gets loud. And executes hard. The EF is not that, never will be.”

Adams later endorsed Fundstrat and Tom Lee’s firm BitMNR as candidates best positioned to fill that role.

‘Original Sin’

Journalist Laura Shin, host of the Unchained podcast, framed the current discontent as the product of years of decisions that deprioritized tokenomics.

“I think Ethereum’s original sin was not considering tokenomics with every move it made from Dencun on,” Shin wrote on Wednesday. “The ultrasound money thesis was a good one and with Dencun — or the L2 roadmap generally — they should have stopped to say that this was going to hurt the ultrasound money thesis and consider how to preserve it.”

Shin argued ideology and economic incentives need not be in conflict. “I don’t think ideology and capitalism/tokenomics/number go up are mutually exclusive,” she wrote. “Giving a shit about price and tokenomics and BD doesn’t hurt CROPS. It just helps ensure that these principles get spread to more people.”

The Dencun upgrade, completed in March 2024, dramatically reduced transaction fees on Ethereum layer-2 networks by introducing “blobs” for cheaper data storage, a move widely praised for scalability but criticized for cutting into ETH’s fee-burn mechanism and diluting the deflationary pressure that underpinned the ultrasound money narrative.

‘Maximally Self-sovereign’

Not everyone agrees that injecting price-consciousness into Ethereum’s core institutions would be healthy. Jason Chaskin, EF app relations lead, defended the nonprofit’s protocol-centric mandate.

“The Ethereum Foundation is doubling down on what it uniquely should be doing: making the entire Ethereum experience, from the protocol to wallets to middleware to apps, maximally self-sovereign, private, secure, resilient, and easy to use,” he wrote.

Critics of the price-focused approach also note that the EF’s deliberate separation from market pressures has historically allowed it to pursue long-horizon technical work, including the multi-year transition to proof-of-stake, that may not have survived under a return-driven governance model.