Two more contributors announced their exits from the Ethereum Foundation on May 18, 2026 — Carl Beek and Julian Ma — extending a personnel exodus that has now claimed co-executive leadership, two senior management figures, and several protocol researchers over roughly three months.
CoinDesk reported Monday that the departures of Beek and Ma add to a broader wave that includes Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, and Alex Stokes, whose exits were announced in the EF's Protocol Cluster Updates earlier this month. The combined toll since February now makes this the most significant period of leadership turnover at the foundation in its recent history.
The timeline
The departure wave began publicly on February 13, 2026, when Tomasz Stańczak announced on the EF blog that he was stepping down as co-executive director at the end of that month — roughly eleven months after taking the role alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang in March 2025. "I am stepping down from my co-ED role at the EF at the end of February 2026," Stańczak wrote. "The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for the EF, and for me."
The same day, the EF's board posted a separate leadership update announcing that Bastian Aue would serve as interim co-executive director, effective immediately. The post described Aue as having "been a part of decision-making alongside co-EDs Hsiao-Wei and Tomasz, with a prior focus on grants, enterprise, and operations." Wang remains co-executive director; Aya Miyaguchi serves as chair.
Two months later, in mid-April, Trent Van Epps — a five-year contributor working on Protocol Guild grants — announced on X that he had left the foundation the previous Friday. The announcement came days after Van Epps publicly expressed what he called "baffling and sad" dissatisfaction with EF leadership's association with the Milady NFT collection. He did not directly cite that issue as the reason for his departure, and has said he plans to continue working within Ethereum "as long as funding is available."
On April 16, Josh Stark posted on X that he would leave the foundation at the end of that month. Stark had spent five years at the EF, rising to a senior management role after joining the Special Projects team in 2019. He was one of only four people listed under "Management" in the EF's organizational structure — a tier where, by the foundation's own description, nearly all staff report upward. He wrote that he had "no plans for the future, other than taking a long break to reset and spending time with my family & friends." His decision to leave had been made in early March 2026.
The protocol researcher cluster exits — Monnot, Beiko, and Stokes — were announced in May through EF internal communications, not a public blog post, per DeFi Prime's contemporaneous account.
What the org chart reveals
The EF's management structure has long been deliberately flat and small. The "Management" layer that Stark occupied sat atop the entire organization, meaning his departure — alongside Stańczak's — removed half of the executive-adjacent layer within roughly two months.
The foundation is a Swiss non-profit that holds a significant ETH treasury and funds a large share of core Ethereum protocol research, including client teams, cryptography research, and developer tooling. That mission depends on institutional continuity: researchers who leave take institutional knowledge, working relationships, and in some cases grant-oversight responsibilities with them.
The exits have coincided with the EF publishing a new organizational mandate in March 2026 — a 38-page document that, per contemporaneous reporting, re-anchored the foundation's self-described identity in cypherpunk principles and aimed to clarify its role within the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Whether the mandate preceded, precipitated, or simply accompanied the departures is not established by any primary statement from those who left.
What leadership has said
Stańczak's February blog post offered optimism but no structural critique: "I have been exploring what the future of Ethereum looks like." He said he would remain active as an Ethereum core developer.
The EF's leadership-update post characterized Aue's appointment as a natural transition, noting that "transitional moments are an opportunity to reflect on how far we have come and to refocus on the work ahead."
No public statement from Vitalik Buterin on the personnel changes has been confirmed in any primary source as of this writing.
The governance question the departures raise is structural rather than personal. An organization with four people at the management tier, one of whom has now left, has limited redundancy in institutional decision-making. The foundation has not publicly described how it intends to rebuild that layer, whether Aue's "interim" designation points toward an external search, or how grant and research oversight responsibilities have been redistributed.
What is confirmed: the Ethereum Foundation that enters the summer of 2026 looks materially different from the one that began the year.