Eight senior names, five months, and an exit list that hurts

The departures around Wang are not junior researchers nobody outside Ethereum has heard of. Carl Beek, Julian Ma, Barnabe Monnot, Tim Beiko, Alex Stokes, and longtime ecosystem coordinator Trent Van Epps have all left or announced exits in 2026. Five of those happened in May alone. Counting Stanczak and Wang, that is roughly ten senior names off the org chart in under six months, with about 19 layoffs and exits across the Foundation in total this year. Whatever is going on internally at EF, it is not a quiet trickle anymore. The people leaving are mostly the ones who knew where the wires connect, and that knowledge is now walking out the door.

The departures sit on top of a separate and equally awkward problem. Van Epps used his own exit window to publicly flag that the people maintaining Ethereum's base layer could face a real funding shortfall in the next three to nine months. He puts the cost of keeping core development running at roughly $30 million a year. The Foundation has been cutting spending across the board, and the Client Incentive Program that helped pay execution clients wound down in April. The math from there is not friendly, and Van Epps is not exactly a stranger to how this sausage gets made.

The "stake to fund" plan isn't covering it

Earlier this year the Foundation pivoted to a "stake to fund" model, putting around 70,000 ETH (roughly $143 million at the time) into staking to generate yield instead of selling treasury straight into the market. The headline math is straightforward and not great, since staking returns work out to something like $4 to $5 million a year against a $30 million annual need. To cover the difference, the Foundation has been quietly drawing down ETH anyway. About 17,000 ETH was unstaked in April, another 21,270 ETH (around $50 million) was unstaked in May, and at least 15,000 ETH has gone out in OTC sales to BitMine, including a 10,000 ETH deal closed on May 1 for about $22.9 million. The "we will not sell ETH" optics are getting harder to defend with that kind of paper trail.

The strange part is that all of this is happening while the network itself looks fine. On-chain activity is healthy, the post-Merge stack is stable, the validator set is enormous, and Ethereum is still the settlement layer most serious L2s build on. The risk is not the protocol layer, it is the coordination layer around it. If client teams and core researchers cannot be reliably funded, upgrade roadmaps slow down, security work gets thinner, and the people who do that work start fielding offers from L2 foundations and large stakers who can pay. That is not a tomorrow problem, that is a next year, possibly sooner problem, which is exactly the window Van Epps was pointing at on his way out.

What ETH holders should actually take from this

None of this means Ethereum is in trouble in the way crypto Twitter would like to dramatize it on a slow Saturday. ETH the asset and ETH the network are not the same thing as the Foundation that helped midwife them, and there are well-funded ecosystem players, including client teams, L2 foundations, and very large stakers, who have every reason to keep the lights on even if EF cannot write the check. But it does mean the institutional center of gravity that used to live inside one organization in Zug is fragmenting in real time. Some of that may be healthy decentralization, since one Swiss nonprofit probably should not be the load-bearing wall for the second largest crypto network. Some of it is normal turnover during a stressful market. And some of it is a $30 million funding hole that someone is going to have to write a check to close before client teams start making different decisions. The next few months will tell us which one of those it actually is, and Wang's exit is a useful marker of how late it is in the day.