Feist posted the proposal on X on May 21, 2026, amid a wave of high-profile departures from the Ethereum Foundation that has shaken confidence in the organization's long-term direction. His core argument is straightforward: the Foundation holds less than 0.1% of all ETH in existence and receives no direct cut of staking rewards or transaction fees generated by the network. With no financial stake in Ethereum's market performance, it has no institutional incentive to aggressively advocate for Ethereum's value or market position.

"The way to save Ethereum is for the community to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it," Feist wrote. He specified the group should be led by someone "competent and wants to fight," backed by "a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it."

Feist acknowledged the idea is a long shot: "Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way."

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The Foundation's Financial Reality

The numbers behind Feist's argument are worth unpacking. The Ethereum Foundation currently holds a treasury of roughly $970 million, more than 81% of which is in ETH. Annual operating costs run approximately $100 million. The Foundation targets spending roughly 15% of its treasury annually, with a plan to reduce that rate to 5% over five years. To address a growing funding mismatch, the Foundation recently staked 70,000 ETH (worth about $143 million at current prices) as part of a new treasury strategy. At an estimated yield of 3.5 to 4% annually, that stake generates somewhere between $3.9 million and $5.4 million per year in staking income. That covers less than 6% of the Foundation's yearly expenses.

Feist's proposed organization, by contrast, would start with at least $1 billion in capital. At current staking yields of approximately 3.5 to 4% per year, that would produce $35 million to $40 million annually in ETH-denominated revenue, enough to sustain meaningful operations indefinitely while keeping the institution's financial health tied directly to ETH's performance.

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A Foundation Under Strain

The proposal lands during one of the most turbulent stretches in the Ethereum Foundation's history. At least eight prominent researchers and leaders have left the organization in 2026. Tomasz Stańczak resigned as co-executive director in February. Josh Stark, who had spent seven years helping shepherd major upgrades including The Merge, Dencun, Pectra, and Fusaka, also departed. Tim Beiko and Barnabé Monnot stepped down as Protocol Cluster leads. Carl Beek and Julian Ma confirmed their exits as recently as May 19. Alex Stokes stepped away on an indefinite sabbatical, among others.

Under new co-executives Bastian Aue and Hsiao-Wei Wang, the Foundation has adopted what it calls a "Lean Ethereum" approach, cutting 19 staff positions and repositioning itself as a network steward rather than a central driver.

Ethereum's next scheduled upgrade, Glamsterdam, has been pushed to Q3 2026, raising questions about whether institutional churn is affecting execution timelines.

Bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams offered support for Feist's broader critique, writing that the Ethereum Foundation is "constitutionally unsuited" to serve as an ETH advocate. "We should talk about ETH price far more than we do," Adams added, describing ETH as "the single most underrated part of Ethereum, maybe the most underrated asset in all of crypto." Journalist Laura Shin offered a sharper historical framing, arguing that "Ethereum's original sin was not considering tokenomics with every move it made."

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Emerging Market Implications

For users and developers in emerging markets, the governance debate carries real practical stakes. India currently leads the 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index for the sixth consecutive year. A significant share of that activity is driven by high-volume, low-value transfers, predominantly on Ethereum Layer 2 networks, where lower fees have made DeFi and stablecoin applications accessible to users priced out of Ethereum's mainnet. More than 16,000 new developers joined the Ethereum ecosystem globally in 2025, with a significant South Asian cohort among them, underscoring the depth of regional engagement and the absence of any well-resourced advocacy body representing those contributors.

Nigeria processes an estimated $48.2 million per day in peer-to-peer stablecoin transactions. Across sub-Saharan Africa, stablecoin volumes grew more than 180% year over year, driven primarily by remittances and savings in dollar-denominated assets in high-inflation environments, built on Ethereum-compatible infrastructure. Nigerian developers account for 4% of all global Web3 contributors.

Critics warn, however, that an advocacy organization built around price accountability and institutional positioning could shift resources and attention away from the public goods funding that has sustained infrastructure useful to lower-income users. Ethereum's value proposition in Lagos or Chennai is mainly practical: cheap, permissionless transfers. An organization tasked with pushing ETH's price could optimize for a different set of priorities. At the same time, the absence of any well-funded Ethereum advocacy body means policy conversations in New Delhi, Abuja, and Nairobi are currently shaped by Bitcoin advocates, centralized exchange lobbyists, and state-friendly CBDC proponents.

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What Comes Next

ETH was trading near $2,140 on May 21, against a market cap of roughly $253 billion, with spot ETH ETFs recording $80 million in outflows on May 18.

Feist, who helped design EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), the mechanism underpinning the current L2 scaling era, left the Ethereum Foundation earlier this year to join crypto payments startup Tempo.

His proposal has no formal backing yet, no named funders, and no timeline. Whether the Ethereum community can organize around a structure this novel, and this commercially explicit, remains an open question.