Resigned in Less Than a Year After Taking Office, Why Did a Key Figure of the Ethereum Foundation Leave Again?
Original Title: "Another Personnel Change at EF? E Guard: Accustomed"
Original Author: bootly, via BitpushNews
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) once again finds itself at a crossroads of personnel changes.
Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Director Tomasz Stańczak announced that he will step down at the end of this month. This comes just 11 months after he and Hsiao-Wei Wang took over the long-standing leadership of Aya Miyaguchi in March last year to form a new core leadership.
He will be replaced by Bastian Aue. This individual has very little public information available, with an X account registration of only eight months and almost no speaking record. He will work together with Hsiao-Wei Wang to continue co-leading the organization that controls the core resources and direction of the Ethereum ecosystem.
This seemingly sudden personnel change is actually the inevitable result of internal conflicts, external pressures, and strategic transformations within the Ethereum Foundation.
Stepping Up in Crisis: A Turbulent Year
To understand Stańczak's departure, one must first look back to the context of his appointment.
In early 2025, the Ethereum community was in a state of anxiety. At that time, following the U.S. election, the cryptocurrency market was generally bullish, with Bitcoin hitting new highs repeatedly, competitive chains like Solana gaining momentum, and Ethereum's price performance relatively weak, making the Ethereum Foundation itself a target of criticism.
The criticism was largely directed at the then-Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi. The developer community complained that the foundation was severely out of touch with frontline builders, that there were conflicts of interest in strategic direction, and that the promotion of Ethereum was insufficient. Some questioned whether the foundation was too "Buddhist," taking on a mild posture as a "coordinator" rather than a "leader," potentially causing Ethereum to lose its first-mover advantage.
As the "mother of Ethereum," the foundation was asked not to sit idly by, but to make a strong move.
In the midst of this public outcry, Miyaguchi stepped back and joined the board. Stańczak and Wang stepped up to the front line in the face of crisis.
Stańczak was not a parachutist. He is the founder of Nethermind, a company that is one of Ethereum's core infrastructure clients, playing a key role in infrastructure development. He understands technology, has entrepreneurial experience, and has a firsthand understanding of the community's pain points.
In his own words, the instructions he received at the beginning of his term were very clear: "The community is calling out — you are too chaotic, you need to be more centralized, speed up a bit, in order to address this critical period."
What has he done in this year?
The Stańczak and Wang duo did bring about visible changes.
First was organizational efficiency. The Foundation laid off 19 employees, streamlined its structure, and tried to shed its bureaucratic label. The strategic focus shifted from Layer 2 back to Layer 1 itself, making a clear statement that Ethereum's mainnet scaling should take priority over letting L2s go their own way. The upgrade pace noticeably accelerated, with EIPs being pushed forward more decisively than before.
Second was a posture adjustment. The Foundation began posting a series of videos on social media, proactively explaining Ethereum's technical roadmap and development direction to the public. This "going out" communication approach contrasted with the relatively closed, mysterious image of the past.
In terms of strategic layout, Stańczak drove exploration into several new directions: privacy protection, quantum computing threat response, and the integration of artificial intelligence with Ethereum. In particular, in the AI direction, he expressly stated that he saw the trend of "agent-based systems" and "AI-assisted discovery" reshaping the world.
On the financial front, the Foundation began discussing a more transparent budget management and fund allocation strategy, attempting to respond to external doubts about the efficiency of treasury use.
Vitalik Buterin's assessment of Stańczak was, "He has greatly increased the efficiency of multiple departments of the Foundation, making this organization more agile in its response to the outside world."
The Implicit Message in the Resignation Statement
Less than a year, why leave?
Stańczak's resignation statement was quite candid, with some food for thought. He provided several key pieces of information:
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," focusing on the combination of AI and Ethereum. He said his current mindset is similar to when he founded Nethermind in 2017.
Third, and perhaps the most intriguing sentence: "The leadership of the Foundation is becoming more confident in making their own decisions, taking control of more affairs. Over time, my ability to independently execute within the Foundation has diminished. If I were to continue, by 2026, I would mostly be 'waiting to pass the baton.'"
This sentence reveals two layers of meaning: first, the new leadership team has developed self-sufficiency and no longer needs his intervention in everything; second, his actual power space may be shrinking: for someone accustomed to hands-on involvement and possessing a strong entrepreneurial spirit, this feeling clearly does not quite suit him.
He also mentioned, "I know that many ideas about agent-based AI may not be mature at the moment, even useless, but it is precisely this gamified experimentation that defined the early Ethereum's innovative spirit."
This passage somewhat carries a subtle criticism of the current situation: as organizations become more "mature" and decision-making becomes more "prudent," will that kind of rampant experimental spirit be lost?
Stańczak's resignation, on the surface, may seem like a personal choice, but behind it lies the long-standing dilemma of the Ethereum Foundation.
From its inception, this organization has been in an awkward position. In theory, Ethereum is decentralized, and the Foundation should not be a commanding power center. However, in reality, it holds a significant amount of funds, core developer resources, ecosystem coordination discourse, objectively playing a dual role of "central bank" and "economic planner."
This identity paradox has left the Foundation in a dilemma for a long time: do too much and get accused of centralization; do too little and be criticized for inaction. During Miyaguchi's tenure, the focus was on the "coordinator" role, resulting in being criticized for being weak; Stańczak attempted to shift towards the "executor" role, indeed increasing efficiency, but naturally, internal power distribution would become more concentrated.
Stańczak's resignation statement precisely exposed this tension: as the organization becomes more efficient and decision-making more decisive, the personal space for founding team members is instead restricted. For an ecosystem that needs to balance "decentralization spirit" and "market competition efficiency," this kind of internal friction is almost unavoidable.
What kind of person is Bastian Aue, who is taking over from Stańczak?
Public information is scarce. His own description on X is that he previously handled "difficult to quantify but critically important work" at the Foundation: assisting management decisions, communicating with team leaders, budget considerations, strategic alignment, priority setting—a low-key style in sharp contrast to Stańczak's prominent entrepreneurial demeanor.
In his statement upon assuming the role, Aue said, "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 truly permissionless infrastructure—the core being the cypherpunk spirit—can be established."
This passage sounds more like the language style of the Miyaguchi era: emphasizing principles, emphasizing spirit, emphasizing coordination rather than dominance.
Does this mean the Foundation will realign its direction from "aggressive execution" back to "principled coordination"? It remains to be seen.
The Confusion of Ethereum
Stańczak's departure comes at a critical juncture in Ethereum's discussion of a series of significant proposals. According to him, the Foundation is about to release several key documents, including the specifics of "Lean Ethereum," a future development roadmap, a DeFi coordination mechanism, and more.
The "Lean Ethereum" proposal has been jokingly referred to by some community members as the "Slimming Down Era of Ethereum" — aiming to simplify the protocol, reduce burdens, and make the mainnet operate more efficiently.
These directional documents will profoundly influence Ethereum's evolution path in the coming years. And at this moment, changing the core executive in charge undoubtedly adds uncertainty to the implementation of these proposals.
On a more macro level, Ethereum is facing challenges from multiple fronts: competition from high-performance chains like Solana, Layer 2 fragmentation issues, a new narrative window on AI and blockchain integration, and the impact of overall market sentiment fluctuations on ecosystem funds and attention.
On the same day Stańczak announced his departure, ETH briefly fell into the $1800 range. If it continues to break through this threshold, an awkward fact will surface: the overall return on holding ETH may be lower than the US dollar cash rate.
To put it into perspective, in January 2018, ETH first reached $1400. That $1400, compounded with U.S. CPI inflation adjustment, would be equivalent to about $1806 by February 2026.
In other words, if an investor bought ETH in 2018 and has been holding it naked ever since, never engaging in staking, after eight years, not only has he not made money, he may even have underperformed the US dollar cash held in the bank.
For a true believer who has been on this journey all along, perhaps the real question is not "who won the roadmap battle" but: how much longer can this last?
One thing that can be certain is that this core organization that controls one of the most important ecosystems in the crypto world is still seeking its position in a rapidly changing industry, and this path is destined to be anything but calm.
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