Ethereum Foundation’s New Leadership Structure Causes Confusion

Christine Kim, former Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital, has shared her concerns about the new leadership structure at the Ethereum Foundation (EF).

She pointed out that key people are now handling too many roles and said the new organizational chart is confusing.

Is The EF Leadership Being Overambitious?

In a July 11 X post, Kim noted that Tim Beiko, Barnabé Monnot, and Alex Stokes are in charge of several things at once. She explained how the three are leading all research and development teams, managing their own, and working on L1 and L2 scaling and user experience improvements for the next 12 months.

Sharing the Ethereum Foundation’s organizational chart, the researcher questioned the purpose of the highlighted sections on it and wondered if Beiko was responsible for both protocol coordination and supervising multiple projects.

“What are the highlights for?” wrote Kim. “Does Tim lead protocol coordination and oversee pas, pandaops, geth, and steel?”

Additional concerns raised included the reasoning behind the color coding, which grouped related functions and teams under different hues, including purple, light blue, light green, and orange.

The former CoinDesk reporter was curious about the exact rationale for the groupings, which she felt was unclear. For example, she asked why consensus was in the same category as account abstraction but not with stateless consensus or peer-to-peer networking, and why testing was next to PandaOps instead of security.

In response, Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot explained that the bolded names on the org chart were team leads, with color groupings referring to “whom each team is reporting to.” Nonetheless, he admitted that the chart might contain too much information, suggesting that the current version was somewhat hard to interpret and could benefit from simplification or removal.

Community Reactions

The restructuring comes at a time when the EF has been facing ongoing criticism about its management and overall strategy. Community members had warned that if the organization failed to solve major technical problems, Ethereum could lose its strong position in the market.

The non-profit responded by making changes, starting in early March, when it appointed Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak as co-Executive Directors. This was followed by the most recent reorganization, which included staff layoffs and renaming the Protocol Research and Development department to just “Protocol.”

Reaction to the revamp has been mixed. Some people responded positively, with Wang saying she hopes the new setup will help teams stay focused and move key projects forward. On the other hand, Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, pointed out a possible conflict between growing the network and improving user experience while dismissing staff.

The job cuts follow Ethereum’s recent Pectra upgrade, which has also raised concerns about potential security vulnerabilities. Specifically, EIP-7702 was exploited in phishing attacks that affected over 10,000 addresses. There have also been reports of malicious contracts targeting vulnerable MetaMask users.