A timeline of the Ethereum Foundation's ongoing shakeup

In this week's edition of The Protocol Newsletter, we're unpacking the timeline of all the changes at the Ethereum Foundation this year.

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's tech newsletter covering the most important stories in blockchain. I'm Margaux Nijkerk, a reporter at CoinDesk. We're giving you a deeper look at the biggest trends, breakthroughs and debates shaping blockchain technology each week.

This week, we're unpacking the timeline of all the changes at the Ethereum Foundation since the year began.

Early Pressure and Leadership Change

The Ethereum Foundation entered 2026 under mounting pressure. Developers, investors and prominent Ethereum community members had spent months criticizing the organization's pace of execution, governance and technical priorities, with many arguing Ethereum's roadmap had become overly focused on layer-2 scaling while neglecting improvements to the base layer.

The first major shakeup to the foundation came in February, when co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak announced he would step down after helping lead the foundation through its initial restructuring.

A few weeks later, the foundation published a new mandate outlining a narrower vision for its role within the Ethereum ecosystem. Built around the CROPS framework - censorship resistance, resilience, openness, privacy and security - the document recast the foundation as a long-term steward rather than the ecosystem's primary builder or coordinator.

Wave of Departures

The leadership transition was followed by a steady stream of departures. Over the following months, nine senior foundation leaders, researchers and executives left the organization, marking one of the largest periods of turnover in its 12-year history.

The exits fueled speculation about the foundation's future even as its leadership insisted the changes were not a sign of decline, but rather a necessary part of a broader organizational reset.

June Restructuring

That reset accelerated in June. Co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned, and days later the foundation announced its largest restructuring to date. It cut roughly one-fifth of its workforce, eliminating 54 positions, and reduced its annual operating budget by about 40% as part of a plan to make the organization leaner and more financially sustainable.

Remaining staff were reorganized into five core operating groups focused on the areas the foundation said only it was uniquely positioned to support.

New Ecosystem Institutions

The June overhaul also coincided with the emergence of new institutions designed to take on work that had traditionally fallen to the foundation.

• ETHLabs, a new organization backed by several of the ecosystem's largest ETH treasury companies, launched with the aim of accelerating protocol research, ecosystem coordination and product development outside the foundation itself.
• Separately, in July, Ethereum Institutional was unveiled - another dedicated initiative focused on supporting enterprises, asset managers and nonprofits adopting Ethereum through research, education and standards development.
• A few weeks later, yet another organization shared its ambitions to take on another role in the ecosystem. The latest spinout organization, EthSystems, has established itself as a new for-profit company aimed at building infrastructure that keeps transactions confidential for financial institutions using Ethereum.

Taken together, the events of 2026 have amounted to the most significant reorganization in the Ethereum Foundation's history. What began with criticism from the community over governance and technical priorities ended with a smaller foundation, new leadership, a redefined mandate and an ecosystem increasingly reliant on independent organizations to drive research, institutional adoption and protocol development.

Read more: Ethereum's newest nonprofit wants to become Wall Street's guide to crypto

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CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B.

Why it matters: CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B.