This is part of an article series on Ethereum institutions and their political economy. Find the first entry here: Ethereum Commoditizes Institutional Capabilities. The image references the concept of ecological succession, the process of how species compositions change in an ecological community over time.

I worked at the Ethereum Foundation from May 2021 until April 2026. During those 5 years, I focused on coordinating core development, funding via Protocol Guild, and researching Ethereum’s political economy.

This article will provide a personal perspective on the EF, alongside some of the urgent challenges the ecosystem needs to face. These include the difficulties of distributing legitimacy as well as the impending protocol funding crisis. I argue that these threads point towards a necessary reset of the social, political, and economic contracts between Ethereum stakeholders. Only then will we be able to unlock an effective institutional succession.

Over the last 7 years, the Ethereum Foundation management and Board have developed an organizational and ecosystem philosophy which it calls "Subtraction". If the concept is new to you, here are the earliest and latest incarnations:

• EF Spring Update, 2019: "Following a philosophy of subtraction means resisting the natural tendency of organizations to grow and accumulate value within themselves, and ensure instead that this value is created outside the Foundation in the broader Ethereum ecosystem."

• EF Mandate, March 2026: "Our goal is to reduce the Foundation's relative influence over time. This is not retreat or sabotage. Subtraction is rather a process of ensuring Ethereum's maturity... robust enough to outgrow and outlast us."

In my view, the policy has been most successful in broadly communicating that the EF is not interested in being the sole center of power, but less successful in specifying the contours of what it won't or can't do. As a consequence, the ecosystem has struggled to bootstrap the initiatives to structurally address these gaps. While I respect the aspiration to avoid the accrual and abuse of power, it seems that legitimacy has a stubborn tendency towards power-law pooling. Meaning, there is still only one organization with the magnitude and blend of legitimate aspects as the EF has. We can see the tension between the policy and the sum of meaningful vectors which the org still retains:

• the Ethereum Foundation name and brand trust, accumulated over more than a decade of protocol stewardship and consistent, non-extractive behavior

• Vitalik's continued affiliation with the org and Board, which carries unique weight in the eyes of builders, users, and institutions worldwide as inventor, co-founder, Chief Scientist

• being the neutral non-profit which received the ICO funds and the premine

• ownership of comms and media assets like ethereum.org, the @ethereum handle, intellectual property like logos and trademarks, events like Devcon and DevConnect

• historically, direct employment of roughly ~25% of active core protocol contributors, and many of its key researchers, who are employed solely for the good of the protocol and are not exposed to diverging interests

• historically, a treasury with a sole purpose of supporting the Ethereum ecosystem, which provided material support for many core teams

I provide this list simply to point out the inherent challenges around distributing legitimacy. Even as the stated policy of the org, and with the follow-through of its staff: there is an institutional inertia, narrowness of purpose, and a set of artifacts which always act against it being fully realized.

Legitimacy is downstream of repeated competency, which is itself downstream of resources. The treasury was the ultimate unlock of a good portion of the EF's legitimacy, and it is the vector changing fastest.

The most practical and unavoidable funding outcomes of Subtraction have begun to take effect over the past 12 months:

• A finite and increasingly constrained treasury: The EF has exhausted much of its ETH treasury to bootstrap the ecosystem the last 10 years, even coming close to completely running out in the early days. This was critical funding in an important period. To better manage outflows of the remaining funding, they announced a treasury plan in June 2025 to reduce spend, ensuring the org stays solvent in the medium term. The plan describes a glide path from 15% annual spend to a 5% endowment-level baseline by 2030. The next EF transparency report, promised to be released this year, may give more information. The ongoing execution of this plan will continue to have ripple effects throughout the ecosystem.

• The expiration of the Client Incentive Program: the CIP, a major 4-year effort to fund client teams via staking, expired in April 2026. No replacement appears to be forthcoming.

From recent conversations across all core development, there is a risk we will enter a slow-burning funding crisis within the next 3-9 months. While it may appear as a one-time episodic gap, I believe it is symptomatic of larger structural issues related to gathering and allocating funding. This risks damaging our institutional capacity: the hard-won ability to orchestrate industry-leading feature and maintenance delivery across +10 clients, research, coordination teams. This capacity to securely deliver complex features is only maintained by significant, consistent funding: roughly $30mm annually across a variety of increasingly constrained sources. When compared to the shared resources this funding produces today, and the long-term ambition of the project, this is quite a small cost.

Without continuous funding, we lose people with critical context built up over years, fall behind on looming challenges like quantum computing or scaling, and ultimately risk mainnet's reputation for reliability. We cannot assume contributors will still be available when funding conditions improve, let alone account for the cost to morale for those who remain. I believe we are underweighting the risk of this underinvestment in continuity. When we register the resulting symptoms in 12-18 months, the damage will be much harder and more costly to reverse.

Finally, protocol changes are always more complex and take longer than expected, even when accounting for unknown unknowns. Whatever your perspective on the shape the protocol will take in 5 or 10 years (and the maintenance beyond), there is a risk it becomes an unfunded mandate. We should not accept this ambiguity.

For reasons both practical and philosophical, the EF will not be the prime steward for Ethereum's next 10 years. Vitalik’s recent post says it most explicitly:

“Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.”

There is no subtext to read into, so I will take him at his word. It is time for new institutions to bring Ethereum to the world. We have an enormous amount of work left to be done to scale the chain, harden its guarantees, and make it more accessible - let alone the crucial regular maintenance the network requires.

Who should we allocate institutional legitimacy to as this succession materializes? I believe the urgency of this transition calls for an earnest exploration of new social, political, and economic contracts between ecosystem stakeholders. These should consider:

1. recognition and active stewardship of each interdependent network resource: software (EVM/clients), network (Ethereum), and asset (ETH).

2. scalable, accountable, neutral funding mechanisms to ensure we keep the critical shared resources listed above thriving. Legitimacy is downstream of resources. Every funding mechanism proposed to date has tradeoffs, ranging from benign to disqualifying. I will be writing more on this design space, including in-protocol funding, in the near future.

3. the pursuit and celebration of broad adoption as a first-class citizen: we should aim to create the most robust network resources for the broadest set of public beneficiaries. The EF's Mandate explicitly subordinates adoption to CROPS principles, leaving this as an open gap. We should have an eagerness to engage with the complexity and nuance of our users, to meet them where they are, and bring their constituents into the orbit of our values in protocol form: self-sovereignty, self-determination, human flourishing.

Only by building on the work of the stewards who came before are we able to imagine the necessary new institutions. This process will require your voice, to ensure they are designed and held to the highest standard. The Ethereum project, and its potential as a World Computer, demands our collective ongoing commitment to excellence and ambition.

I hope we will rise to the challenge, reject the reflexive pessimism natural to this time in our industry, and remember to make no small plans.