The Ethereum Foundation is facing renewed scrutiny after co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang announced she is stepping down from her leadership role. The decision made public Monday has brought back into play questions concerning the organization’s future as well as its capacity to help Ethereum achieve its next phase of development.
Wang, who has been one of the most renowned researchers in the Ethereum universe for many years, says that she intends to switch back to a more research-oriented role.
Although she is not stepping down from Ethereum altogether, Wang’s exit from the organization’s leadership team comes amid a string of departures that the Foundation is currently experiencing.
Over the course of the last five months, at least eight key members have quit the Foundation.
What does EF do?
The Foundation holds a distinctive position in the ecosystem. While it does not control the network, it assists in coordinating the efforts related to research, protocol development, fundraising, and other long-term endeavors aimed at promoting the development of Ethereum. Thus, due to its influence on the ecosystem, leadership change at the Foundation garners a lot of interest from outside the organization as well.
Wang’s departure is just another event in a chain of events which marked the transitional period for the Swiss-based nonprofit organization.
Meanwhile, the organization has attempted to redefine its mission through a new framework called CROPS. The letters in the acronym stand for the values of cypherpunk, resilience, open-source development, permissionlessness, and security.
According to the representatives of the Foundation, this framework reflects the principles of the platform as it evolves and becomes more and more decentralized.
Many supporters consider CROPS to be a way to remember the principles which made Ethereum so successful.
Critics question whether CROPS solves deeper organizational issues
On the contrary, some people disagree. Some critics argue that while the framework clearly outlines Ethereum’s ideals, it does little to address concerns about leadership, decision-making, and organizational effectiveness.
One of the strongest critiques came from former Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist.
Responding to discussions about the recent departures, Feist argued that the issue is not Ethereum’s strategy but how the Foundation is being managed.
“The people who are leaving the Ethereum Foundation are CROPS believers,” he wrote on X. “The problem isn’t with the strategy, it’s with management.”
His comments stood out because they challenged a common assumption that staff departures were being driven by disagreements over the Foundation’s direction.
Instead, Feist suggested that many of those leaving actually support the organization’s stated mission and values. If that is the case, he argued, then the loss of experienced contributors points to deeper management issues.
“The exodus of talent is truly bearish for Ethereum, sadly,” he added.
His remarks struck a chord with parts of the community that have been increasingly vocal about governance and leadership concerns.
Coinbase engineering leader Yuga Cohler also weighed in, expressing frustration over the situation.
“It makes me sad to see the dysfunction at the Ethereum Foundation,” he wrote.
They are indicative of the growing concern within certain circles of Ethereum enthusiasts that problems from the inside may turn into a distraction just as the competitive struggle in the blockchain world is heating up.
Ethereum is currently the largest platform for decentralized finance and tokenized assets as well as blockchain applications in general. Competing platforms, however, persistently try to grab their slice of the market by offering faster transaction processing and lower fees or different ways of developing blockchain.
This is why stability in the Ethereum Foundation is so crucial for many people in the crypto community.
At the moment, Wang’s leaving has only fueled the existing discussion of leadership and responsibility within one of the biggest crypto organizations. Although the Foundation claims to concentrate on its work, the growing number of departures has raised doubts as to whether the current problems are transitional or there are bigger issues that have to be solved.
