Foundation cuts and departures aren’t a crisis, Joe Lubin says

Ethereum Foundation budget cuts, staff departures and leadership changes have fueled weeks of criticism from parts of the blockchain’s community, but Joe Lubin, who was involved in its creation and is now CEO of software developer Consensys, said the moves are a necessary evolution, not a crisis.

Lubin, who has no role at the foundation, told CoinDesk that the organization’s role should be narrower, more focused on stewarding the network’s core technology and values, while other organizations take responsibility for adoption, institutional engagement and ecosystem growth.

“It is important that the Ethereum Foundation be credibly neutral above reproach,” Lubin said in an interview. “The opportunity for conflicts of interest between the business side and the builders is just not a credibly neutral way to run your decentralized protocol ecosystem.”

The comments come after weeks of debate over the foundation’s direction. Critics have questioned whether the organization, often known by its initials, has moved quickly enough to address competitive threats and improve Ethereum’s market position, while others have raised concerns about staff departures and restructuring.

Lubin said many of those concerns stem from a misunderstanding of what the foundation is supposed to do for the blockchain, which handles about 2 million transactions a day, according to Etherscan data.

“What’s happening at the EF is cleaning that up,” he said, referring to efforts to separate protocol stewardship from commercialization and business development.

According to Lubin, Ethereum’s future will be shaped by multiple organizations rather than a single dominant institution.

“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,” he said.

That model differs from other blockchains, where protocol development and commercial strategy are often housed under the same umbrella. Lubin said Ethereum’s decentralized nature requires a more distributed institutional structure.

The Ethereum co-founder also pushed back on a broader narrative that Ethereum itself has entered a period of decline. “Ethereum is not on the decline, not at all,” he said.

Still, Ethereum and the rest of the crypto industry are facing a new rival competing for funding and investment. Artificial intelligence has displaced crypto as the dominant technology narrative in recent years, said.

“We were the cool kids, the edgy bringers of the new excitement in the economy and society. We are not front and center right now in terms of capital inflows, investments,” he said.

But he argued that Ethereum’s years-long focus on scaling infrastructure is beginning to position the network for a new wave of adoption.

Among the trends he highlighted were autonomous AI agents conducting transactions onchain and growing institutional use of Ethereum-based infrastructure.

“A next major wave is agentic commerce, where the hybrid human-machine economy starts to make use of our rails,” Lubin said.

For Lubin, those emerging use cases are precisely why the Ethereum Foundation is narrowing its focus. As new organizations take responsibility for adoption and commercialization, he argued, the foundation’s job is to remain focused on the protocol itself, and ensure it can support the next generation of activity built on top

Read more: Why the Ethereum Foundation is suddenly again at the center of crypto’s culture war