Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik will jointly run the Protocol cluster, the EF's core group responsible for designing and developing Ethereum's base layer. They step in as Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko depart the foundation and Alex Stokes takes a sabbatical. The outgoing trio oversaw delivery of the Fusaka upgrade to mainnet in December 2025, which introduced PeerDAS (a data availability feature) and established a gas limit baseline of approximately 36 million. Glamsterdam, the next scheduled upgrade, targets a gas limit of between 180 and 200 million, a significant increase from that post-Fusaka level.

Who's Coming In

Each new co-lead brings a distinct technical focus. Corcoran has served as a Research Coordinator within the Protocol cluster, working across areas including zkVM proving (a method of verifying computation without re-running it), post-quantum consensus research, and the Fast Confirmation Rule. He has also coordinated community calls and in-person protocol events, giving him broad cross-team visibility.

Wedderburn leads the zkEVM team. A zkEVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) is an execution environment that can process transactions using cryptographic proofs rather than redundant computation. The EF described Wedderburn as bringing combined research-and-engineering expertise with a "first-principles approach to technical decision-making."

Fredrik directs Protocol Security and the Trillion Dollar Security initiative, an EF effort to harden Ethereum's base layer against large-scale security threats. He has been central to cross-cluster coordination and is already listed as a lead on the "Harden the L1" track in the EF's February 2026 strategic roadmap.

The EF's announcement noted that the Interop developer event provided a natural handoff setting. "At Interop, there were several impromptu conversations and strategic meetings between the incoming and outgoing groups, the perfect setting to begin this transition without distracting from hardening and shipping Glamsterdam," the foundation wrote.

What's on the Roadmap

The incoming team inherits a specific and near-term delivery schedule, with immediate priorities spanning Glamsterdam, Hegotà, and the Strawmap roadmap. Multi-client devnets for Glamsterdam, targeted for H1 2026, are already live, meaning independent software teams are testing the upgrade in parallel. Glamsterdam's headline changes include EIP-7732 (Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, which reforms how blocks are constructed and reduces manipulation risk) and EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists, which improve execution efficiency). Projections put the average gas fee reduction at roughly 78%, with the gas limit climbing to between 180 and 200 million.

After Glamsterdam, the team will turn to Hegotà, targeting the second half of 2026. That upgrade introduces FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, a censorship-resistance mechanism), with prototypes already functional, and native account abstraction via EIP-7701. Account abstraction allows wallets to behave like programmable smart contracts, lowering the barrier for onboarding users and making it easier to build mobile-first and recovery-friendly wallet experiences.

Tim Beiko, meanwhile, said he plans to shift focus toward "frontier use cases" at the application layer while remaining in an advisory role.

South Asia and Africa in Focus

The leadership change has direct implications for users in South Asia and Africa, two of the fastest-growing regions for on-chain activity.

Devcon 8, the Ethereum Foundation's flagship developer conference, is scheduled for Mumbai from November 3 to 6, 2026. India now has more than 17 million developers registered on GitHub and has been the single largest source of new crypto developers since 2023. Wedderburn's zkEVM mandate and the Hegotà account abstraction work are both relevant to developers in the region building on L2 networks (secondary chains that sit on top of Ethereum) like Polygon and Arbitrum, which dominate Indian fintech applications.

Gas fees have historically priced out smaller transactions on Ethereum's main chain. A 78% reduction matters in markets where a single transaction sometimes cost more than $10, pushing users toward L2 networks.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, stablecoin transaction volume grew more than 180% year over year, concentrated in cross-border remittances, merchant payments, and savings dollarization. Fredrik's Trillion Dollar Security work is particularly relevant here. Concerns about smart contract exploits and bridge vulnerabilities (weaknesses in software that moves assets between chains) have slowed institutional and fintech adoption across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. A more credibly hardened L1 lowers counterparty risk for projects building dollar-substitute financial tools in those markets. Hegotà's Open Intents Framework, which addresses cross-L2 interoperability, adds another dimension of relevance for African remittance corridors, where users currently lose value moving assets across incompatible chains and bridges.

Both regions continue to face developer tooling gaps and limited local node infrastructure. FOCIL's censorship-resistance properties carry particular weight for jurisdictions dealing with inconsistent internet connectivity and regulatory pressure, making the governance of the upgrade process as consequential as the technical changes themselves.

The Broader Picture

The Protocol cluster leadership change is the latest in a series of structural shifts at the EF. The foundation reorganized its research and development operations in mid-2025, a process that included staff layoffs and a strategic rethink of its design-and-development approach, and moved to a cluster model. Executive leadership has also turned over: Bastian Aue currently serves as interim co-Executive Director alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang, having stepped into the role after Tomasz Stańczak stepped down in February 2026. Ethereum itself recorded 200.4 million transactions in Q1 2026, a record high, while roughly 37 million ETH (about one-third of total supply) remains staked. DeFi TVL on the network sits near $45.7 billion, tokenized U.S. Treasuries on Ethereum have reached a record $8 billion, and real-world assets on the network have grown from $5.6 billion to $19 billion. The new Protocol co-leads take over with a technically active network and a congested near-term delivery calendar.