Ethereum Foundation shuffles leadership, splits board and management

The Ethereum Foundation, which backs the development of the Ethereum blockchain, has overhauled its leadership structure to separate the responsibilities of its management team and board of directors.

The board will act as the “security council to protect the heart and soul” of the foundation and set visions for Ethereum, while the new management will be focused on the strategic and operational execution of those visions, the Foundation said in an April 28 blog post.

It added in an April 28 X post that Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak were appointed as co-executive directors on March 2 to deliver on those visions — which are centered around championing censorship resistance, open-source innovation, privacy and security

Wang and Stańczak’s roles took effect on April 28 with the foundation setting a two-year term for Stańczak to address some of Ethereum’s biggest challenges. Stańczak’s new role will be balanced with his work as founder of Ethereum infrastructure firm Nethermind and a soon-to-be-announced Ethereum-focused venture capital firm.

Bastian Aue and Josh Stark are also a part of the management team, with Aue to focus on organizational strategy, hiring and training, and Stark to primarily be tasked with project execution, communications and marketing.

The board consists of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation’s President Aya Miyaguchi, Swiss counsel Patrick Storchenegger, and Wang, who will bridge between the board and management team.

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Buterin will continue providing technical and intellectual guidance on the Ethereum ecosystem, Miyaguchi will oversee the foundation’s vision while managing external relationships, and Storchenegger will keep handling legal and compliance matters.

The board was responsible for selecting Wang and Stańczak as executive directors — a decision they acknowledged was unconventional — and they also have the power to terminate those positions.

The Ethereum Foundation has adopted a more active role in the Ethereum ecosystem in recent months, following criticism from Synthetix founder Kain Warwick that the foundation “doesn’t care” about decentralized finance innovation.

Others in the Ethereum community previously attributed the foundation’s lack of engagement and leadership to Ether’s (ETH) poor price performance relative to Bitcoin (BTC) and Solana (SOL).

The Foundation said its three main focus areas over the next 12 months would be to scale the Ethereum layer 1, scale blobs at the layer 2 level, and improve user experience.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist and protocol support Sophia Gold have already pitched proposals to to address Ethereum’s scaling woes at the base layer under Ethereum Improvement Proposals-9678 and 9698. 

Both EIPs look to raise the gas limit, which should theoretically raise Ethereum’s transaction throughput by the same magnitude.

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