The Ethereum Foundation lost three more senior team members in the span of 48 hours this week, pushing the total count of high-profile departures to nine in 2026 and igniting the most sustained public debate about the organization's internal stability since Vitalik Buterin began restructuring it in 2025.

Protocol researchers Carl Beekhuizen and Julian Ma announced their resignations on Monday, May 19, followed by senior solutions architect Pablo Voorvaart on Tuesday, May 20. Beekhuizen spent seven years at the EF contributing to the early design of the Beacon Chain and the KZG ceremony. Ma spent four years co-authoring FOCIL (EIP-7805), an Ethereum censorship-resistance proposal, and leading the rollout of the 13-second Fast Confirmation Rule. Voorvaart anchored the Devcon and Use Case Lab teams for four years.

The three departures complete a full sweep of the EF's Protocol Cluster leadership. Banteg, a prominent Ethereum community figure, posted on X: "situation: all three ef protocol leads have left," alongside a screenshot of the foundation's org chart with the names struck out. The departing trio joins Protocol Cluster leads Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko, who stepped down in May. Alex Stokes, a third Protocol Cluster co-lead, remains with the foundation but is currently on a planned sabbatical.

Earlier in the year, co-Executive Director Tomasz Stańczak stepped down on February 13 via the EF blog, roughly eleven months after taking the role. He had been credited with stabilizing the foundation after a turbulent 2024. The broader May wave also includes P2P networking lead Raúl Kripalani, Operations Lead Josh Stark after seven years of service, and Protocol Guild founder Trent Van Epps. Five of the nine departures have come in May alone.

The trigger: mandate friction

The departures accelerated after two events. First, Buterin's 2025 reorganization recast the EF's role - narrowing it to a research and grants hub and pushing execution responsibility outward to independent client teams. Then, in March 2026, the EF published a 38-page Mandate reanchoring the organization in cypherpunk principles, which initially came with a request that staffers sign a manifesto. The request drew public outcry and was reversed within days. The combination of structural repositioning and cultural friction appears to have created a mismatch between the EF's new operational model and the expectations of contributors hired under a broader mandate.

DeFi researcher Ignas (@DefiIgnas) put the community's frustration directly: "What's happening at the EF?" he asked on X. "How many not public? And why? Stopped believing in Ethereum? Pay is low and competitors paying more? Or just tired? Would love to know the REAL reasons."

Upgrade risk: what the EF says vs. what the community fears

The most concrete question is whether the departures affect the Glamsterdam network upgrade, currently in the devnet stage. The EF confirmed in a protocol update that Glamsterdam devnets are already live and preparations for the subsequent Hegotà upgrade are underway - signaling that the immediate development pipeline has not halted. But the EF did not address the longer-term coordination capacity question directly, and the loss of experienced protocol coordinators across multiple layers of the network is difficult to dismiss as purely symbolic.

The departing members represent significant institutional knowledge: Beekhuizen on consensus layer architecture, Ma on mechanism design and censorship resistance, Monnot on cryptoeconomics research, Beiko as the public face of core developer coordination for years.

Competing interpretations

The community reaction has split cleanly into two camps.

Ryan Berckmans, a long-time Ethereum investor, pushed back against the alarm: "The time for new blood is here." His argument is that the exits reflect a deliberate handoff to a younger generation of developers, and that internal disagreements over operational sub-strategies are normal for any organization undergoing a structural transition. He argues the EF remains intensely focused on long-term Ethereum dominance, particularly around post-quantum security and scaling.

Ryan Sean Adams of Bankless moved further, arguing the EF's limitations are structural rather than transitional. "It's clear the future of Ethereum can't depend on the EF," he wrote, calling for new institutions that will push ETH as an asset: "We need an org that wants ETH the asset to win - number go up. And gets loud. And executes hard."

David Phelps responded with skepticism: "it's a bit like if the president of the united states said 'I don't think about americans' financial situation.' unpopular take, but the core institution of an economy should care about economics."

On the financial side, Fundstrat's Tom Lee has framed the governance turbulence as short-term noise. His 2026 ETH thesis rests on Spot ETH ETF inflows continuing to mature, Layer-2 fee revenue compounding, and ETH's framing as an institutional "Internet Bond" - none of which depend on who holds internal EF coordinator roles.

Market context

ETH was trading near $2,131 on May 22 per BitPinas price data. That is down roughly 40% over the past year according to Cryptopolitan's reporting. The governance debate lands against a backdrop where ETH's relative performance versus BTC has been a persistent point of frustration for Ethereum advocates - and where the question of whether the EF's asset-agnostic research mandate matches what the ecosystem's holders want from its flagship institution is now, finally, being debated openly.

The argument between Ryan Sean Adams's "ETH must win" framing and the EF's research-first positioning has existed for years beneath the surface. Nine departures in five months, culminating in the removal of every active Protocol Cluster lead from the org chart, made it unavoidable.

Whether the post-reorganization model holds depends on a claim that cannot yet be tested: that independent client teams and a leaner EF can coordinate complex network upgrades with less institutional connective tissue than before. Glamsterdam's devnet progress suggests the short-term pipeline is intact. The longer question - whether the EF's new shape can maintain Ethereum's protocol velocity through the next upgrade cycle and beyond - will take longer than a week of departures to answer.

Event date: May 19-20, 2026. Sources: Unchained Crypto (May 20, 2026); DeFi Prime (point-in-time May 18, 2026); X posts by @DefiIgnas, @banteg, @ryanberckmans, @RyanSAdams, @divine_economy; Fundstrat/Yahoo Finance (May 21-22, 2026).