Why the Ethereum Foundation is suddenly again at the center of crypto’s culture war

In this week's edition of The Protocol Newsletter, we're diving deep into the institution that has been the main steward for the Ethereum blockchain, and why its been back in the spotlight.

What to know:

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 revamping the newsletter to bring you a deeper look at the biggest trends, breakthroughs and debates shaping blockchain technology each week.

This week, we’re diving into why the Ethereum Foundation is at the center of crypto’s culture war, again.

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 trillions of dollars in 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.

Chris Buolos, president of Dromos Labs, the main developer firm behind decentralized exchange Aerodrome which is on top of Ethereum layer-2 network Base, said the foundation still plays a role few other organizations in the ecosystem can credibly replicate.

“The EF is at its best as a research org, a credibly neutral convener, and a leading voice for advocacy, standards and roadmap,” Buolos said. “Having a neutral party in the room when otherwise-competing teams need to align on best practices is worth more than it sometimes gets credit for.”

That balancing act, remaining influential while trying not to appear controlling, has long defined the Ethereum Foundation. It has also made the organization a recurring lightning rod during periods of market stress, leadership transitions or ideological disagreements about Ethereum’s future.

Some critics argue the foundation has failed to adapt as Ethereum matured into critical financial infrastructure.

“Ethereum is no longer a startup,” Cole said. “It’s a mature and robust ecosystem. There’s billions, trillions of dollars on the line. Livelihoods are dependent on that.”

CoinDesk reached out to a representative at the foundation for comment, and had not heard back at the time of publication.

Others have previously accused the EF of prioritizing ideology over execution and moving too slowly as rival blockchain ecosystems aggressively compete for developers, users and institutional capital.

Buolos said some of the criticism directed at the foundation is justified, particularly around product direction and coordination with Ethereum’s application layer.

“The substantive critique, that direction has been unclear and wasteful and that the app layer has been a secondary concern, is fair,” he said. “The EF has tried to be many things to many constituencies at once, which is not only difficult to execute on but takes focus away from perhaps more product-oriented players.”

Jameson, however, argued that the recurring backlash reflects a deeper identity crisis inside Ethereum itself. “The biggest reason for there to be hoopla every time there is a communication crisis from the Ethereum Foundation is because every cycle we get new people and old people leave,” Jameson said.

Ethereum’s tensions sometimes reflect competing visions for what the network is supposed to become, according to Jameson. Some participants view Ethereum primarily as a financial asset and market platform, while others still see it as a broader social and technical project centered on self-sovereignty, neutrality and censorship resistance.

“People think they know what Ethereum is to them,” Jameson said.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, pushed back last week against many of the recent criticisms in a lengthy post published last week, arguing that critics fundamentally misunderstand what the Ethereum Foundation is trying to become.

“EF is not a ‘center of Ethereum,’” Buterin wrote. “Rather EF is ‘one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes.’”

According to Buterin, the foundation was never intended to function as a permanent executive authority over Ethereum, nor compete with venture-backed crypto companies focused on aggressive expansion or market capture. Instead, he said the EF is intentionally narrowing its scope around what he described as Ethereum’s core values: censorship resistance, openness, privacy and security, internally referred to as “CROPS.”

“The EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth,” Buterin wrote. “The EF focuses specifically on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise.”

Whether the Ethereum Foundation is actually shrinking into irrelevance, or simply evolving into a smaller and more narrowly defined institution, remains an open question.

Still, Buolos said framing the foundation’s current transition as existential likely overstates the situation.

“A smaller org concentrated on the research only it can credibly do, such as post-quantum work, privacy, neutrality and other long-horizon questions that don’t have a commercial sponsor, is probably a healthier shape than the sprawl of the last few years,” he said. “The talent loss is real and the transition will be painful, but a leaner org aimed at hard problems with long timelines is useful to the ecosystem.”

But the debate itself reflects a broader reality: Ethereum today is no longer merely an experimental blockchain project. It is simultaneously an ideological movement, a financial system and a piece of global digital infrastructure. And the institution that helped build it is still struggling to define what role it should play next.

Read more: Ethereum’s identity crisis is deepening after high-profile 'brain drain' frustrates the community

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