On May 18 and 19, 2026, two more Ethereum Foundation researchers — Carl Beek and Julian Ma — announced they were leaving the organization. Beek, who spent seven years at the EF working on Beacon Chain research, posted his departure on X with a final day of May 29. Ma, who joined roughly four years ago and focused on FOCIL and faster Ethereum Layer 2 finality, posted the same week. CoinDesk reported both exits as they happened.

That brings the count of high-profile departures in 2026 to at least eight, depending on how you count Dankrad Feist's October 2025 move to a part-time advisory role at the EF while joining Stripe- and Paradigm-backed L1 startup Tempo.

The full list, in order:

  • Dankrad Feist — moved part-time, October 2025, to advise Tempo
  • Tomasz Stańczak — co-Executive Director, announced departure February 13, 2026, via EF blog; Bastian Aue named interim co-ED
  • Trent Van Epps — Protocol Guild organizer, last EF day April 10, 2026; announced April 16 on X
  • Josh Stark — board co-steward, seven years, announced April 16, 2026, via X
  • Barnabé Monnot — Protocol cluster co-lead, left as part of May 12 reshuffle
  • Tim Beiko — Protocol cluster co-lead, left as part of May 12 reshuffle
  • Alex Stokes — Protocol cluster co-lead, began open-ended sabbatical, May 2026
  • Carl Beek — researcher, seven years, final day May 29, 2026
  • Julian Ma — researcher, four years, announced exit May 2026

The three Protocol cluster co-leads departed together. On May 12, the EF published a Protocol Cluster update naming Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik Svantes as the new co-leads. That announcement confirmed Monnot and Beiko were leaving and Stokes was stepping away.

The mandate and the collision

The departures land against a specific document. On March 13, 2026, the Ethereum Foundation published what it called the EF Mandate — 38 pages, described on the EF blog as "part constitution, part manifesto, and part guide." The document frames the EF explicitly as "one of many stewards" of Ethereum, not its owner or central authority. It codifies a set of principles the foundation calls CROPS: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. It signals that the EF intends to reduce its own centrality as the network matures.

Taken on its own terms, that framing is coherent with a long-standing Ethereum belief that no single organization should be the single point of coordination or failure for the protocol. The problem is timing. The mandate landed in March. The Protocol cluster reshuffle landed in May. Beek and Ma departed the same week the community was still processing that reshuffle. The message from the EF is "we are deliberately less central." The message the departures send reads differently.

The question the community is asking

Pseudonymous analyst @DefiIgnas crystallized the broader concern in a widely-shared post: "What's happening at the EF? At least 5 high profile EF contributors publicly announced their departures within a month. How many not public? And why?"

That last question is where the motive vacuum sits. In every case, the departing contributors framed their exits in positive or neutral terms. Stańczak's EF blog announcement described his contributions without naming a reason for the exit. Stark's X post said he was taking a break and spending time with family. Ma and Beek cited the work they were proud of. None of the primary announcements offered a reason why.

Trent Van Epps was the closest to an exception. Before announcing his own departure, he publicly described EF leadership's association with the Milady NFT collection as "baffling and sad." That line circulated widely on X. Whether it was a cause or context for his exit is not stated in any primary source.

The EF did not respond to CoinDesk's request for comment on the May 18 article.

What is structurally at stake

The EF funds a meaningful share of Ethereum's L1 core contributors. It has historically been the organizational layer that coordinates protocol upgrades: setting timelines, convening implementer calls, and applying research capacity to shipping. The Glamsterdam fork is currently in mid-devnet. The Protocol cluster, whose three outgoing co-leads are now gone, was the EF's main interface to that process.

The EF's answer to the coordination question is, in effect, contained in the mandate: coordination should be distributed, not concentrated. The new Protocol cluster co-leads — Corcoran, Wedderburn, and Svantes — step into roles that the departing trio built. Whether three new names with less public recognition can hold together the research-to-roadmap pipeline while a fork is in progress is an open question.

The mandate's framing of the EF as "one of many stewards" requires other stewards to fill the space. The Ethereum community has independent coordination bodies — Protocol Guild, EthPM, client teams, the All Core Devs process. But those bodies have never had to operate without the EF holding the center of gravity. The question the departures force is not "is the EF irreplaceable" but something narrower: was the shift from central to distributed coordination planned as a managed transition, or is the community inheriting a gap on a schedule the EF did not choose?

The motive vacuum makes that question impossible to answer from the outside. The EF knows why these people left. The community does not. That gap between what the mandate promises — open, accountable stewardship — and what the departure wave has actually produced — silence on motive, simultaneous exits, no public explanation — is itself the story. Not a purge, not a collapse. A transition whose terms have not been disclosed.

Sources: EF blog, February 13, 2026 (blog.ethereum.org/2026/02/13/leadership-update); EF Mandate blog post, March 13, 2026 (blog.ethereum.org/2026/03/13/ef-mandate); CoinDesk, May 18, 2026; The Defiant, April 16, 2026; DeFi Prime analysis, May 18, 2026; contributor X announcements (Beek, Ma, Stark, Van Epps); @DefiIgnas post on X.