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Ahmed Barakat
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The Ethereum Foundation it is facing strong internal criticism for years, the departure of eight people starting in January 2026, a contested position, and an open debate about whether the non-profit organization from Switzerland is still working in harmony within the environment that it helped to build. Conflict is no longer a hum in the background.
It is now a frontline challenge for network governance to access trillions of dollars in blockchain assets.
What makes this moment different is not just the departures. It’s a clash of competing visions of what Ethereum The foundation is supposed to be, and, by extension, what Ethereum is supposed to be.
The Ethereum Foundation: The Causes of Authority Disputes
The most recent was the publication of the “Mandate” on March 13, 2026, which was described in it as “part of the rules, part of the demonstration, and part of the guide”, which changed EF as the administrator and not the “parent, controller, or final authority” of Ethereum.
The document magnified an old dilemma: should the foundation remain focused on human resources research, or evolve into a mass-market organization capable of competing in the ever-growing commercial blockchain space?
The departure added to the criticism that has been building for months. Zak Cole, who has been supporting Ethereum for a long time, gave a public verdict on Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast: “EF is finished.
He gives money to the hippopotamus in Asia and he does a lot of things that no one in the world does like *** almost Vitalik and his little cabal. ” Cole made it clear: “Ethereum is no longer a startup. It is a mature and dynamic environment. There are billions, trillions of dollars on the line. People’s lives depend on that.”
Former EF analyst Dankrad Feist went further, publicly floating the idea of a $1 billion ETH-related organization to improve the synthesis and capture of value, a direct challenge to the model of the public asset base.
The internal goals of the foundation have also been changing: the leadership of the new protocol group has been tasked with raising the gas limit to 200 million, improving the process of dividing the builders, and pushing the zkEVMs of the mainnet to 128-bit secure authentication.
Vitalik Buterin pushed back last week in a long post, criticizing the EF’s proposed work. “EF is not the ‘capital of Ethereum,'” Buterin wrote. Rather, EF is ‘a single point, with a defined purpose, along with other points.’
He established the limitation of the foundation on its main characteristics – resistance to supervision, openness, privacy and security, written inside “CROPS”, as a deliberate choice: “EF chooses to use its remaining resources to achieve longevity.”
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Why Ethereum Foundation Governance Affects ETH Investors
The transmission process from initial conflicts to the market is indirect but real. Developers’ opinions drive the reliability of the protocol; protocol integrity drives institutional trust; Institutional trust makes ETH an asset and a development bet.
ETH has already been under price pressuresand the uncertainty of authority adds to the reliability that is difficult to quantify but easy to feel in the natural flow.
Chris Buolos, president of Dromos Labs, a leading software development company, said:
EF has tried to be many things in many places at once. ” His defense of the EF is about neutrality: “Having a neutral party in the room when competing groups have to coordinate good practices is more important than they sometimes do.”
These are not directly tradable assets as an ETF approval or bond would be. But the uncertainty of the underlying authority is important in a network where coordination in uploading, roadmap integrity, and trustworthiness are competitive advantages, especially if L1 competitors aggressively scramble for Ethereum keys.
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