Recent budget cuts, staff departures, and restructuring at the Ethereum Foundation have sparked ongoing discussions within the community. In an interview with CoinDesk, Consensys CEO and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin stated that these changes are not a crisis, but rather a sign that the foundation is re-shrinking its responsibilities.
Foundation returns to agreement maintenance
Lubin stated that the Ethereum Foundation's responsibilities should focus more on core network technology and value preservation, rather than undertaking tasks such as commercialization, ecosystem expansion, or institutional partnerships. He believes that placing business development and underlying infrastructure construction within the same organization could easily lead to conflicts of interest and undermine external trust in its neutrality.
In his view, the foundation needs to maintain a “credible and neutral” position, focusing on the agreement itself, while leaving adoption, institutional access, and ecosystem growth to other organizations.
The controversy centers on the adjustment of direction
Over the past few weeks, the debate surrounding the direction of the foundation has intensified. Some critics argue that Ethereum has not acted quickly enough to address competitive pressures and improve market performance, while others express concerns about staff turnover and organizational restructuring.
Lubin believes that some of these criticisms stem from misunderstandings about the foundation's role. According to Etherscan data, Ethereum currently handles approximately 2 million transactions per day. He stated that the current adjustments focus on further separating protocol maintenance from business development.
AI-powered proxy transactions are highly anticipated.
Lubin predicts that Ethereum will not be dominated by a single institution in the future, but will instead form multiple core nodes with different functions, each responsible for advancing different areas. He also refuted the claim that "Ethereum has entered a downturn," stating that the industry has only temporarily lost funding and attention to the AI narrative.
He believes that Ethereum's continuous efforts to scale its infrastructure over the past few years are preparing for a new wave of adoption. Potential directions include autonomous AI agents executing transactions on-chain and continued institutional adoption of Ethereum-based infrastructure. According to him, the Foundation's scaling back of responsibilities is precisely to focus resources on building protocol-layer capabilities.
