Budget cuts, employee departures, and management changes at the Ethereum Foundation have sparked intense debate within the community in recent weeks. However, Joe Lubin, who was involved in the establishment of Ethereum and CEO of the software company Consensys, evaluated these developments as a necessary transformation of the corporate structure, not a crisis.
The role of the foundation is being redefined
Speaking to CoinDesk, Lubin said that the Ethereum Foundation should focus on a narrower and clearer area. Accordingly, the foundation’s primary duty should be to protect the core technology and basic principles of the network. Adoption, corporate relations and growth of the ecosystem must be undertaken by different organizations.
Mini dictionary: Consensys is a blockchain company that develops software products that run on the Ethereum infrastructure. It is known for widely used tools such as MetaMask and stands out as one of the most visible private sector actors in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Joe Lubin stated that it is critical for the Ethereum Foundation to remain reliably impartial, and that running commercial objectives and protocol development under the same roof could increase the risk of conflicts of interest.
Lubin’s statements come after ongoing criticism of the foundation’s direction. In the discussions, some argued that the institution did not act quickly enough against competitive pressure, while others focused on the restructuring process and the names that left the team.
Multi-actor structure instead of a single center
According to Lubin, some of this criticism stems from false expectations about exactly what role the foundation should play for Ethereum. He stated that while approximately 2 million transactions occur on the network per day, according to Etherscan data, the future of Ethereum will be shaped not by a single dominant institution, but by multiple structures specializing in different fields.
This approach differs from other blockchain projects, where protocol development and commercial strategy are often combined under the same structure. Lubin stated that Ethereum’s decentralized structure requires a more dispersed and shared institutional framework.
Objection to regression claims
Opposing the rumors that Ethereum has entered a period of decline, Lubin argued that the network has not weakened. However, he acknowledged that the crypto industry has entered into more intense competition with artificial intelligence in terms of investment and capital flows in recent years.
Lubin said that for a while, the most striking narrative of the technology world was crypto, but today the sector is not at the center of focus in terms of capital inflows and investments.
Despite this, Lubin noted that Ethereum’s long-standing investments in scaling infrastructure are paving the way for a new wave of adoption. Among the topics he highlighted were autonomous artificial intelligence agents that operate on-chain and the increase in corporate use of Ethereum-based infrastructure.
According to Lubin, these new use cases also explain why the Ethereum Foundation is focusing on a more limited task. While adoption and commercialization spread across different institutions, the foundation’s priority will be to preserve the protocol itself and keep the structure intact that can support the next generation of activities to be built on it.
