The Ethereum Foundation, the nonprofit organization that has long served as the closest thing Ethereum has to a central steward, has been facing renewed questions about its future after a wave of high-profile departures and mounting criticism from across the crypto industry.
In recent weeks, critics have accused the foundation of becoming insular, slow-moving and disconnected from the increasingly competitive realities of the blockchain industry, reigniting a years-long debate over whether the EF still serves a meaningful role inside Ethereum’s sprawling ecosystem, or whether the network has begun to outgrow the institution that helped create it.
“The EF is completely out of touch,” said Zak Cole, a longtime Ethereum contributor, during a recent appearance on Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast. “They’re funding hippos in Asia and doing a bunch of stuff nobody in the world gives a s*** about other than Vitalik and his little cabal.”
The backlash intensified after several prominent contributors departed the foundation earlier this year — a total of eight since January 2026 — fueling speculation about whether the EF was entering a period of decline at a moment when Ethereum itself has become increasingly important to the broader crypto economy.
That question carries weight because the foundation has historically occupied a uniquely influential, and often deliberately ambiguous, position inside the ecosystem.
Founded in 2014 ahead of Ethereum’s launch, the Switzerland-based nonprofit originally functioned as the network’s organizing body. In Ethereum’s earliest years, the foundation funded client teams, coordinated developers, supported research and helped shepherd the network through technical upgrades and existential crises alike.
“The Ethereum Foundation started as the single sole organization around Ethereum,” said Hudson Jameson, a former coordinator at the Ethereum Foundation now serving as head of ecosystem at Certik. “Over time it has tried to minimize itself in order to raise other organizations and coordinating entities up.”
When Ethereum launched in 2015, few other institutions existed around the network. But over the last decade, Ethereum evolved from an experimental blockchain project into the financial backbone for much of crypto, underpinning decentralized finance, stablecoins, tokenized assets and an expanding network of layer-2 chains.
Today, Ethereum secures a significant volume of assets across its ecosystem. Yet the institution at its center still operates more like a research nonprofit than a traditional corporate entity, embracing a culture rooted in open-source coordination, decentralization and long-term experimentation rather than aggressive execution or market competition.
As Ethereum expanded into a sprawling ecosystem of companies, developers, layer-2 networks and venture-backed startups, the foundation increasingly attempted to step back from its role as Ethereum’s de facto center of gravity — at least in theory.
“There was still this need for a central coordinator,” Jameson said, particularly around network upgrades and ecosystem-wide technical coordination.
Source: The Ethereum Foundation Is Under Fire — and Questioning Its Own Role