Ethereum Foundation President Aya Miyaguchi outlined her views on the organization’s new mandate, describing the change as a necessary reset after internal debates became increasingly tense and the Foundation faced pressure to do too many things at once.
His comments, published on X after Vitalik Buterin shared his own vision for the Foundation’s direction, come at a sensitive time for Ethereum’s leading nonprofit. The FE is evolving into a smaller, more focused structure as the broader ecosystem debates its governance role, technical priorities and a wave of high-profile departures.
The Ethereum Foundation enters a new era of power
Miyaguchi said the mandate came from the board, but she proposed it late last year. The trigger, she said, was not a simple dispute but a structural problem: EF had become the focal point of competing expectations.
“First, debates that were supposed to be technical began to become political and personal, and sometimes shaped by more discreet incentives,” she wrote. “Second, as EF grew, more and more versions of ‘what EF should be’ began to attack the core of the organization from all directions at once. I became convinced that trying to satisfy them all would leave us with nothing at all.”
This line is at the center of the Foundation’s dilemma. Ethereum has long relied on EF for research funding, coordination, and management, but its culture has also resisted the idea that an individual entity should become Ethereum’s command center. Miyaguchi has leaned heavily into this tension, arguing that EF’s reduced centrality is not a retreat from its responsibilities but evidence that Ethereum has matured beyond its first institution.
“We’ve said it many times: EF is one of many nodes on Ethereum,” she wrote. “I know this is hard for some to hear, because EF was the first band, and in the early years they were essential to making things happen. But it was never meant to stay that way.”
Miyaguchi tied this philosophy to her own history in crypto, noting that she has worked in the industry since 2012 and joined Kraken in 2013 shortly before the collapse of Mt. Gox, which she said she helped clean up. She says this experience shaped her understanding of the risks of growth and centralization. When she became executive director in 2018, her goal was to help Ethereum grow beyond EF.
The Foundation, she says, made deliberate choices to distribute power rather than maintain control. Miyaguchi highlighted EF’s role in incubating and releasing projects such as Uniswap and ENS, in supporting ETHGlobal and hackathons, and in “backer funding” through groups such as Gitcoin and Moloch. The guiding question, she said, has always been: “How can this stand without us?” »
According to Miyaguchi, this strategy left EF with less than 0.2% of all ETH and a now smaller role by design. The mandate, she said, is to preserve and accelerate the properties and goals that make Ethereum “uniquely competitive and worth building on,” centered on what she called CROPS and “inalienable user self-sovereignty and self-sovereign coordination.”
“We cannot do this alone, and we have no intention of doing so,” she wrote. “But defining that as the North Star of the mission and coordinating with the allies who share it is the responsibility we embrace.”
Miyaguchi also opposed the idea that a more accurate FE would mean fewer adoption worries. She said the opposite was true, arguing that everyday users and institutions both depended on Ethereum’s underlying value proposition. Adoption, including institutional adoption, is still part of EF’s work, she said, but only in ways that fit its mission.
These comments come as EF has seen a notable exodus of senior and high-profile contributors in 2026, including researchers and ecosystem figures such as Carl Beekhuizen, Julian Ma, Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, Trent Van Epps, Josh Stark, and former co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak. This turnover has intensified scrutiny aimed at determining whether the Foundation’s restructuring is a sign of healthy decentralization, internal tensions, or both.
Miyaguchi directly acknowledged the personal implications. “As EF becomes more focused and more opinionated, the team naturally becomes smaller and more focused. That’s part of the choice,” she wrote, adding that new leaders are already coming into the role and that management will provide more details on the new structure and strategy in the coming weeks.
Buterin’s May 24 message set the stage for Miyaguchi’s remarks. He described the FE as still in transition, stressed that he did not hold special power over the board and said another leader was executing much of the current transition. He also presented the future of the Foundation as simpler and more focused, with less emphasis on being the center of Ethereum and more on preserving the long-term properties of the network.
At press time, ETH was trading at $1,986.
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