Two more Ethereum Foundation researchers announced their exits on May 19. Carl Beek, who spent seven years at the EF and helped architect the Beacon Chain, said his last day will be May 29. Julian Ma, who spent four years working on cryptoeconomics and co-authored EIP-7805 — the Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) proposal central to Ethereum's censorship-resistance roadmap — also announced his departure. Together they extend a departure wave that has now claimed most of the EF's senior Protocol Cluster leadership in the space of four months.
The timeline
The sequence is worth naming plainly. Tomasz Stańczak, who shared the co-executive director role with Hsiao-Wei Wang since early 2025, stepped down at the end of February 2026. Barnabé Monnot, who led the Robust Incentives Group for over six years, left the Protocol Cluster leadership around the same period; Tim Beiko, who had coordinated Ethereum's core developer process, departed alongside him; Alex Stokes took a sabbatical. In April, Josh Stark — one of just four individuals listed under "Management" on the EF's org chart and a senior figure since 2019 — announced on April 16 that he would leave by month's end. Trent Van Epps announced his own departure a day earlier. Now Beek and Ma. Six months, roughly ten names of substance, spanning executive leadership, protocol research, and core coordination.
Who they were and what they built
Beek's own words on X framed it plainly: "from the KZG ceremony, to helping architect the early design of the Beacon Chain, and a lot in between." The Beacon Chain, launched in 2020, was the scaffolding that made Ethereum's 2022 proof-of-stake transition possible. The KZG ceremony — a trusted-setup process underlying EIP-4844's proto-danksharding — was the cryptographic foundation for Ethereum's current fee compression on L2s. These were not marginal contributions.
Julian Ma's work sits at a layer that is less visible but arguably more consequential for Ethereum's long-term neutrality. As a member of the Robust Incentives Group, Ma co-authored the FOCIL proposal (EIP-7805) with Thomas Thiery and others, and co-authored research on transaction fee mechanism design under bribery attacks — the academic groundwork for building censorship resistance into Ethereum's protocol layer rather than depending on social norms or validator altruism. FOCIL is currently deferred to the Hegotá upgrade, scheduled after Glamsterdam in the second half of 2026. Ma also co-authored "An Economic View of the Ethereum Roadmap" with Monnot and Thiery — the kind of work that shapes how researchers and builders think about the protocol's incentive structure. That bench is now significantly thinner.
The structural context: mandate, loyalty, and culture
The EF published a 38-page mandate in March 2026 — a document framing Ethereum's purpose around individual self-sovereignty and clarifying the foundation's stewardship role. The mandate came after Tomasz Stańczak's departure and amid community criticism that the EF had been insufficiently focused on execution layer scaling and mainnet competitiveness.
The loyalty pledge controversy is a separate thread, though it ran in parallel. The Block and others reported that the EF's internal mandate and leadership's association with the Milady NFT collection created what departing contributor Trent Van Epps called "unnecessary cultural schism" in the Ethereum community. Van Epps, who left one day before Josh Stark in April, said the association was "baffling and sad." The EF has not publicly acknowledged the cultural friction as a departure driver, and Beek's exit statement on X expressed gratitude without citing internal disagreements. The EF has not yet commented publicly on the specific reasons behind the current departure wave.
What the EF has said, through the mandate and through Bastian Aue taking Stańczak's co-ED role alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang, is that the restructuring is intentional — a clarification of purpose, not a crisis. The new Protocol Cluster leadership is focused on Glamsterdam and Hegotá. The roadmap continues.
The research continuity question
The honest question the departure wave raises is not whether Ethereum will survive it — the protocol is developed across client teams, independent researchers, and universities, well beyond what any single organization employs — but whether the research pipeline that produced FOCIL, MEV-burn, attester-proposer separation, and the broader censorship-resistance literature retains the institutional density to execute on Hegotá's ambitions. FOCIL in particular requires careful implementation: it is a deep interaction with consensus rules, which is why it was deferred from Glamsterdam in the first place. The researchers who designed its incentive structure and fee mechanism are now outside the EF.
The EF has historically operated on the premise that its value is in research quality and coordination, not headcount. That premise is being tested. Ethereum faces a market environment where Solana's throughput story and L1 competition have made protocol roadmap credibility a competitive variable, not just an academic one. Delays or ambiguity in the Hegotá cycle will be measured against that backdrop.
Sources: Carl Beek X announcement, May 19, 2026; Julian Ma X announcement, May 19, 2026; EF Blog, "An update from Tomasz," February 13, 2026; The Defiant, "Two Long-Time Ethereum Foundation Contributors Announce Departures," April 16, 2026; ForkLog, "Leadership Change at Ethereum Foundation's Technical Division"; CoinDesk, "Ethereum Foundation publishes new mandate," March 13, 2026; ETHNews, "Ethereum Targets Censorship Resistance With FOCIL in Hegotá Upgrade"; Robust Incentives Group publication archive, rig.ethereum.org; EIP-7805 GitHub PR #9010.