Ethereum Foundation co-director resigns to focus on AI

Tomasz Stańczak, a co-director of the Ethereum Foundation, will resign at the end of the month, he said on Friday.

He will be replaced by Bastian Aue, a member of the Foundation’s leadership team. Hsiao-Wei Wang will remain as the Foundation’s other executive director.

Stańczak’s resignation comes less than a year after he and Wang were appointed as co-executive directors, replacing the organisation’s longtime, embattled leader, Aya Miyaguchi. Miyaguchi remained as a member of the Foundation’s four-person board alongside Ethereum co-founder and figurehead Vitalik Buterin.

In a blog post explaining his departure, Stańczak said he would continue working on Ethereum as a “hands-on product builder” with a focus on artificial intelligence.

“I know now that agentic systems and AI-assisted discovery are reshaping the world,” he wrote. “I am well aware of the impermanence or even uselessness of some of the agentic ideas, but it is the playful experimentation that defined much of the early Ethereum innovation.”

Stańczak also suggested his departure was prompted in part by his shrinking role at the Foundation.

“The leaders at the EF grew more confident about making decisions by themselves and owning more,” he wrote.

“While my ability to execute independently at the EF diminishes over time, my time at the organization in 2026 would feel more and more like just staying around to pass the baton.”

Stańczak said the Foundation would soon publish several major proposals, including the details of a “lean” Ethereum and proposed roadmaps for the blockchain’s ongoing development and for “DeFi coordination.”

Stańczak and Wang were appointed to replace Miyaguchi in March 2025, after Miyaguchi had become a target for Ethereum investors frustrated with the cryptocurrency’s middling performance in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection in the US.

Among other things, critics had assailed the Foundation for not taking a more muscular approach to Ethereum development.

Miyaguchi and Buterin, concerned the Foundation would become the de facto leader of an ecosystem that was meant to be decentralised, portrayed the Foundation’s role as that of coordinating Ethereum’s disparate developers, rather than leading its development.

Under Stańczak and Wang, the Foundation laid off 19 employees, turned its focus from layer 2 blockchains to scaling Ethereum itself, began promoting the blockchain in a series of videos released on social media, and pushed the pace of Ethereum upgrades.

They also launched initiatives focused on privacy, the threat of quantum computers, and artificial intelligence.

“The ecosystem called out,” Stańczak told DL News in an exclusive interview last year.

“You’re operating too disorganised, you need to operate a bit more centralised and way more accelerated to be there for this critical period.”

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can contact him at aleks@dlnews.com.