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Ahmed Barakat
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Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned as co-executive director and board member of the Ethereum Foundation on June 18, effective immediately, the second co-ED departure in roughly four months and the latest news signal that EF leadership is structurally unsettled heading into a critical upgrade cycle.
The exit lands the same day former EF contributor Trent Van Epps published a detailed warning that Ethereum’s core development ecosystem faces a slow-burning funding crisis within three to nine months, with an estimated $30 million annual gap that has no replacement mechanism in place.
Wang thanked Bastian Aue for guiding the transition during her prior sabbatical. Aue, who served as interim co-ED after Tomasz Stańczak stepped down in February, is now effectively the sole executive director of the Foundation. No successor structure has been announced.
ETH was trading near $1,690 at the time of publication, down roughly 3.3% on the day, broadly in line with market-wide pressure rather than any Wang-specific repricing. The structural story here is not the price tick. It is whether the EF can stabilize its leadership and funding architecture before both gaps compound.
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Ethereum Core Dev Funding: What the $30M Gap Actually Means
Van Epps, who spent five years at the Ethereum Foundation from May 2021 to April 2026, focusing on core development coordination and Protocol Guild funding, is not an outside commentator raising theoretical concerns.
He was embedded in the mechanism he is now warning about, which makes the three-to-nine-month window he names worth taking seriously.
The $30 million annual figure Van Epps cites covers client teams, researchers, and coordination groups responsible for shipping protocol upgrades and maintaining network reliability. That baseline is currently under pressure from two converging sources.
First, the Client Incentive Program expired in April 2026 with no replacement announced. The CIP launched in 2021 to provide validator-based rewards to teams maintaining key Ethereum execution and consensus clients, Geth, Erigon, Lighthouse, and others, with payouts that unlocked over time contingent on continued network contribution.
Its expiration removes one of the few recurring, structured funding streams outside direct EF grants.
Second, the EF leadership is running a deliberate treasury drawdown policy, targeting a reduction in annual spending from 15% of its treasury to a 5% baseline by 2030.
That is a defensible long-term posture for an institution managing billions in ETH, but the transition creates a near-term gap that no alternative mechanism has yet filled.
EF Q1 2026 grants covered Geth, Erigon, Lighthouse, validator security tooling, cryptography research, and core infrastructure. Funding continues, but Van Epps’s argument is that episodic grants do not substitute for the structural continuity the CIP provided.
If a replacement for the Client Incentive Program is not announced within the next few months, the most exposed teams are those maintaining execution and consensus clients on a thinner runway, precisely the engineers whose continued output is required for the Glamsterdam upgrade roadmap to stay on schedule.
Van Epps also flags quantum-security research and Layer 1 scaling work as long-horizon projects that erode first when funding visibility shortens.
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Two Co-EDs Out in Four Months: What the Ethereum Leadership Exits News Signal
Wang and Stańczak were named co-executive directors in March 2025 as part of a governance reset following Aya Miyaguchi’s move to a president role.
Both are now gone within fifteen months. Broader reporting places the total number of EF departures in 2026 at approximately 19, with at least eight senior figures exiting in the past five months, including figures tied to the Protocol Cluster transition, such as Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, and Alex Stokes.
Treating each exit as an individual decision misses the pattern. A foundation managing a multi-billion-dollar ETH treasury, overseeing core developer funding for the world’s largest smart contract platform, and navigating a major upgrade cycle does not shed two co-EDs in four months without structural tension of some kind, whether over mandate, resource allocation, or governance direction.
Vitalik Buterin publicly responded to Wang’s departure, calling her a steadfast contributor for a decade and crediting her with organizing Ethereum research, consensus work, and community building in Taipei. That is a genuine acknowledgment.
It does not resolve the question of what the EF’s executive structure looks like going forward, particularly as Bastian Aue holds the ED role without a co-lead, and no succession timeline has been made public.
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