The Ethereum Foundation completed a significant governance overhaul in the first quarter of 2025, appointing two co-Executive Directors and moving longtime leader Aya Miyaguchi into a newly created President role. The changes, formally announced on March 1, 2025, were Vitalik Buterin's direct response to sustained community criticism over slow execution and the foundation's perceived detachment from application builders. Less than a year after the structure launched, one of the two co-EDs had already departed.

What Changed and Why

Buterin did not leave the selection of new leadership to committee. "The person deciding the new EF leadership team is me," he stated publicly in January 2025, alongside an outline of what he expected the new structure to deliver: faster execution, better support for app developers, and clearer ecosystem communication.

The foundation appointed Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak as co-Executive Directors, effective March 17, 2025. Wang, a seven-year EF veteran and core researcher on Ethereum's beacon chain (the proof-of-stake consensus layer that replaced energy-intensive mining in 2022), was also placed on the Board of Directors to serve as a link between board oversight and daily operations. Stańczak brought a different profile: he founded Nethermind, one of Ethereum's primary execution clients (software that processes transactions on the network), after discovering the project in 2015 or 2016 while working at Citibank. His appointment came with an explicitly scoped two-year term.

A follow-up post from the EF, published on April 28, 2025 to clarify how the co-ED roles interact, described the arrangement as "an unconventional decision" intended to pair Wang's protocol knowledge with Stańczak's operational track record. Miyaguchi, meanwhile, shifted to the President role on the four-person Board of Directors, which also includes Buterin, Swiss legal counsel Patrick Storchenegger, and Wang. The foundation describes that board as "a security council to protect the heart and soul of EF," consistent with its obligations as a Swiss non-profit.

Stańczak's Early Exit

Stańczak did not complete his two-year term. In February 2026, he announced his resignation on X, writing: "I am stepping down from my co-ED role at the EF at the end of February 2026. Bastian Aue is taking over the co-ED role alongside Hsiao-Wei. The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for the EF, and for me." He cited a desire to return to a technical builder role. Buterin was reported to have praised his work ethic, noting that Stańczak helped increase the Foundation's efficiency and pushed the foundation to think more seriously about how artificial intelligence could intersect with blockchain systems. Bastian Aue, who had been handling organizational strategy and hiring as part of the management layer, stepped into the interim co-ED position alongside Wang. Josh Stark, who oversees project execution and communications within the same management layer, continues in his role alongside Aue.

On-Chain Context

The leadership restructuring is playing out against a backdrop of continued network growth. At its 2025 peak, Ethereum held roughly 68% of total value locked across decentralized finance protocols globally, with more than $99 billion locked, according to DefiLlama. Stablecoin transaction volume processed on Ethereum reached $18.8 trillion during the same period. Developer activity also hit a record in Q4 2025, with 8.7 million smart contracts deployed on the network, surpassing the previous high of 6 million set in Q4 2021. More than 16,000 new developers joined the Ethereum ecosystem in 2025, bringing monthly active contributors above 5,200.

What This Means for Builders in Africa and South Asia

That scale of activity underscores why the EF's governance decisions carry weight for builders far beyond its Swiss headquarters. For developers and researchers outside the United States and Europe, the foundation's internal shifts have direct practical consequences. The Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) is a primary funding channel for builders in emerging markets, and the pace at which it processes grants is partly shaped by how well the management layer functions. An August 2025 EF blog post indicated that structural changes to the ESP are underway, a development that makes the current leadership transition particularly consequential for grant-dependent builders in these regions. In Q2 2024, four African projects were among 98 global ESP grant recipients, including a Starknet (an Ethereum scaling network) bootcamp and hackathon in Nairobi. Nigeria alone accounts for approximately 300,000 blockchain developers, 39% of whom work in Solidity, Ethereum's smart contract language.

The EF's repeated framing of its mission around cypherpunk principles, including censorship resistance, privacy, and permissionless access, carries added resonance in regions where state restrictions on crypto activity remain active concerns. India's crypto tax regime and Nigeria's central bank restrictions on crypto activity are live policy environments, not abstractions.

What Comes Next

The most concrete near-term event for regional builders is Devcon 2026, Ethereum's flagship developer conference, scheduled for November 3 to 6 in Mumbai at the JIO World Center. The conference will be the first major gathering under the post-restructuring leadership and the most direct opportunity for developers across South Asia and Africa to engage with EF management. Whether Bastian Aue's interim role becomes permanent, and what the ESP grant pipeline looks like under the revised structure, remain the two open questions with the most practical consequences for the global builder community.