Ethereum - stormy weather

By neonor | Cryptoztuff | 24 May 2026

Stormy Weather at the Foundation:
But Ethereum Will Thrive

When eight senior researchers depart the Ethereum Foundation inside a single year, the instinct is to reach for the panic button. Names like Tim Beiko, Barnabé Monnot, Josh Stark, and Trent Van Epps carry real weight in the Ethereum world. Their exits - many following a controversial internal restructuring that began in 2025, have unsettled even veteran observers. The question worth asking, though, isn't "why are they leaving?" It's "does it actually change what Ethereum is?"

The answer, when you look at the on-chain data, the upgrade pipeline, and the sheer gravitational weight of the ecosystem, is a confident no. Ethereum is not the Ethereum Foundation.

A Restructuring, Not a Collapse

The Ethereum Foundation didn't just lose key people, it chose to change the way it works. Vitalik Buterin's 2025 reorganisation repositioned the Ethereum Foundation away from top-down roadmap ownership, reframing the foundation as one steward among many rather than the singular guardian of the protocol.

In a 38-page mandate released in early 2026, the EF explicitly stated it no longer saw itself as Ethereum's central authority. Some of the departures that followed were, by the foundation's own account, the restructuring working as intended.

The protocol does not run on the Ethereum Foundation headcount. It runs on client software, validator participation, and a multi-team upgrade process, all of which are functioning normally.

Ethereum has the most active developers, the most active users, and a market cap that is 5× bigger than its closest competitor.

The On-Chain Picture Is Remarkably Strong

Strip away the institutional turbulence and the numbers that actually matter, the ones written permanently into blocks, tell a different story entirely.

$45B+ Ethereum DeFi TVL
54% Share of all DeFi TVL
9,744 Active ecosystem developers
73 Active L2 rollups

Ethereum commands over 54% of all decentralised finance total value locked, more than every competitor combined. That $45 billion sitting in Ethereum's DeFi ecosystem isn't sentiment; it's cryptographically locked collateral representing real economic conviction.

Protocols like Aave, Lido, and Uniswap have years of battle-hardened track record that no rival chain can replicate overnight. The network effect here is profound and deeply sticky.

The L2 layer tells an equally bullish story. L2BEAT tracks 73 active rollups with a combined TVL above $48 billion, processing over 320 transactions per second collectively. Thanks to EIP-4844, fees on networks like Arbitrum and Base have fallen by over 90% from 2023 levels - for most users, L2 transactions are now effectively free.

Ethereum didn't lose the scaling race. It won it by becoming the settlement layer for an entire galaxy of faster execution environments.

The Developer Ecosystem Is Vast and Self-Sustaining

Yes, core Ethereum Foundation contributors have dipped from 225 in May 2025 to around 169 a year later. That's a real decline worth watching.

But zoom out: the total number of active Ethereum ecosystem developers sits at over 9000. The core researchers are the tip of a very large iceberg. Thousands of independent teams are building on Ethereum and its L2s, contributing to clients, tooling, applications, and infrastructure that the EF doesn't control and cannot easily lose.

This distributed model is, paradoxically, precisely what makes Ethereum resilient. When a single company's engineering team implodes, the product dies. When a protocol's foundation restructures, the protocol - owned by no one and operated by everyone, keeps producing blocks every twelve seconds.

The Upgrade Roadmap Hasn't Stopped

Ethereum's technical trajectory remains ambitious and on schedule.

The Fusaka upgrade shipped in December 2025, introducing PeerDAS and meaningful data-availability sampling improvements without incident.

Glamsterdam, the next major hard fork, introduces parallel transaction execution, 100M+ gas per block, and Proposer-Builder Separation - the foundation for a potential path toward 10,000 transactions per second on L1.

After that comes Hegota, targeting the second half of 2026 with a focus on statelessness work tied to The Verge and The Purge phases of Ethereum's long-term roadmap.

This is not a network coasting on past success. These are meaningful, technically complex upgrades being delivered by a multi-client ecosystem of independent teams; Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Lighthouse, Prysm - none of whom report to the Ethereum Foundation and none of whom are going anywhere.

Institutional Money Has Already Voted

Record ETF inflows into Ethereum through 2026, rising corporate adoption, and a reduced liquid supply driven by staking activity have all reinforced Ethereum's value case at the institutional level.

Staking locks up a growing percentage of the ETH supply, creating consistent buy-side pressure that doesn't depend on which researcher is or isn't on the Ethereum Foundation payroll this month.

More than half of the global stablecoin supply is issued on Ethereum or an Ethereum L2. The world's largest financial institutions are building on Ethereum rails. Tokenised real-world assets are increasingly settling on the network.

The Bigger Picture

The departures from the Ethereum Foundation are real, and the questions they raise about governance and institutional direction are legitimate. But they are a story about an organisation, not about a protocol.

Ethereum's on-chain activity, its developer ecosystem, its L2 flywheel, its institutional adoption, and its relentless upgrade cadence all point in one direction.