Headline: Joe Lubin says Ethereum Foundation cuts are an evolution — not a crisis
Joe Lubin, an Ethereum co-founder and now CEO of ConsenSys, pushed back on mounting criticism of recent budget cuts, staff departures and leadership changes at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), telling CoinDesk the moves represent a necessary organizational evolution rather than a sign the network is faltering.
Weeks of debate have centered on whether the EF — long a steward of Ethereum’s core development — has moved too slowly to counter competitive threats or has mishandled restructuring. Some community members have voiced concern about high-profile exits and what they see as a loss of momentum. Lubin, who has no formal role at the foundation, argued much of the anxiety stems from a misunderstanding of what the EF should do.
“It's important that the Ethereum Foundation be credibly neutral above reproach,” Lubin said. He called for a narrower EF focused on protocol stewardship — protecting the core technology and values — while letting other organizations lead commercialization, adoption and institutional engagement. That separation, he said, reduces conflicts of interest between business objectives and the builders who maintain the protocol.
The argument is for a distributed institutional model: rather than a single body combining protocol and commercial strategy (the approach some other blockchains take), Ethereum’s decentralized nature will be served by multiple major organizations, each stewarding different niches of the ecosystem. “I think it'll be clear that there'll be a handful of major nodes that are stewards of the Ethereum ecosystem and leading in different niches or different specialties in the Ethereum ecosystem,” Lubin said.
He also rejected a broader narrative of decline for Ethereum. The chain — which processes roughly 2 million transactions a day, per Etherscan — remains fundamentally strong, he said, but faces a new funding and attention environment. Artificial intelligence has overtaken crypto as the tech narrative drawing the most capital and excitement, Lubin noted: “We were the cool kids… We are not front and center right now in terms of capital inflows, investments.”
Still, Lubin argued that Ethereum’s long focus on scaling and infrastructure is positioning the network for fresh waves of adoption. He highlighted emerging use cases such as autonomous AI agents carrying out on-chain transactions and growing institutional usage of Ethereum-based infrastructure. “A next major wave is agentic commerce, where the hybrid human-machine economy starts to make use of our rails,” he said.
For Lubin, that prospect is precisely why the foundation should tighten its remit: keep the protocol robust and neutral so it can support whatever new activity and actors emerge across the Ethereum ecosystem, while other organizations take on commercialization and growth duties.
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