After the power changes, where will the Ethereum Foundation go?

Author:Shenchao TechFlow

In March 2025, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) announced a major change in leadership: Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi stepped down his daily management responsibilities and became the foundation’s chairman. and ****Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak **** He was appointed as the new co-executive director, and former EF researcher Danny Ryan **** The return also welcomed a cheer from the community.

Combining the ETH coin price that has always been closely watched by the market and the foundation that has been at the forefront of market discussions recently, this personnel adjustment is more like a game about the future direction of Ethereum. From fierce debates in the community to personnel changes in leadership, this story of alternating power is also driven and expected by market forces.

From the executive director to the chairman, is it actually an open rise

and a secret decline?

After serving as executive director for seven years, the controversial Aya Miyaguchi was promoted to chairman of the EF Foundation. This seems to be an upgrade, but from the perspective of real power distribution, this change may be more appropriate to describe it as " open and secretly lower" . The position of executive director who does practical things is assigned to two people who are closer to the technology community and connect Wang and Stanczak. Aya's new foundation chair is positioned more like a representative of the foundation's image (or mascot), which may be more in line with Aya's own behavior pattern.

In 2018, when Aya Miyaguchi took over the baton of EF's executive director, she turned her attention to building a more "non-profit, sustainable" future for Ethereum. With a more ideal vision, Aya defines Ethereum as the concept of “infinite garden”, encouraging developers to innovate freely in an open, permissionless ecosystem. At the same time, the Devcon Conference promoted by Aya has become a grand event for the global Ethereum community every year.

However, an overly idealized vision and style of conduct can support the foundation's future, but it may not meet the expectations of the community. Until last year, the community became increasingly dissatisfied with her leadership style. Some people thought she was too conservative in the allocation of resources. Faced with the continuous innovation of Solana, Ethereum's response was obviously a bit slow. At that time, Aya, as executive director, focused more on cultural promotion rather than technological breakthroughs and market operations. In addition, the news that EF continued to sell ETH was permeated with poor performance prices, which made many developers and investors feel that EF was gradually "unworthy". The debate in the community has intensified, and even extreme remarks and life threats have emerged against her personally, and Vitalik has to come forward to call on the community to calm down.

Now, Aya, who has been transferred to the chairman, will focus on strategic guidance and external cooperation, which also announces the end of her real power execution years.

Hsiao-Wei Wang: Early Core Researcher, Connecting Community and

Technology

Hsiao-Wei Wang, one of the new executive directors, has a Chinese name named Wang Xiaowei.

Unlike Aya, Hsiao-Wei Wang’s story begins at the intersection of code and community. In 2017, she joined EF as a core researcher. With her technical background as a master's degree in network engineering from Taiwan Jiaotong University, she quickly became the backbone of Ethereum's core development. Her expertise focuses on sharding and beacon chains, playing a key role in 2022’s The Merge.

In 2018, she organized and participated in the Ethereum Sharding Workshop in Taipei to attract global developers. This event made the Asia-Pacific Ethereum community stand out and also established her reputation for both technology and communication. She travels around Asia all year round, hosting developer gatherings, disassembling complex technical principles and connecting them to the community's cognition. "That was the first time we really brought our global R&D team locally, and the atmosphere was amazing," she recalled .

Dr. Dong, founder of Celer Network, gave Hsiao-Wei Wang a high praise, saying that from 2018 to 2019, Wang was in charge of the Grant of the Ethereum Foundation with Ken, the current head of Uniswap Foundation. He was very active and effective. Wang knew the abilities of Asian builders and had once won the right to speak for many Asian/Chinese builders, which was very pragmatic.

Now, as executive director, Wang shoulders the dual responsibility of R&D insight and community building, and her arrival is seen as a signal for Ethereum to regain technology and grassroots spirit.

Tomasz Stanczak: Ethereum Infrastructure Architect

If Wang is a bridge between technology and community, Tomasz Stanczak is more like an architect of Ethereum infrastructure. He is the founder of Nethermind , an execution client that is now an integral part of the Ethereum network.

In 2017, Nethermind was just a small project in Poland. Stanczak and several friends typed code in a small apartment in Warsaw, trying to create an efficient Ethereum client.

A few years later, he developed Nethermind into the backbone of the Ethereum network and supported the stable operation of the network. His vision is not limited to client development, but also goes deep into areas such as MEV and PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation). As an early member of Flashbots, he contributed important ideas to the decentralization and security of Ethereum, such as optimizing the block proposal mechanism to reduce the centralized risk of miners.

At Devcon SEA in 2024, Stanczak stood in the middle of the stage and shared his imagination about the cross-appliance of Ethereum and AI. Today, he becomes EF co-executive Director, responsible for the protection of ecological growth and core values. His engineering background and strategic vision have given the community new expectations for the technological future of Ethereum.

Danny Ryan announces return to the ecology, everyone hopes to return

After the personnel changes were announced, the community's reactions surged like a tide. On Twitter, some people appreciated Wang and Stanczak's technical background, believing that this is a signal that Ethereum returns to the technology-based level; some people questioned on Reddit whether a substitution can solve the deep-seated problem. V God also publicly supports this transition, calling it “part of the advance plan.”

At the same time, Danny Ryan, a former EF researcher who is extremely well-known in the Ethereum community, also expressed positive affirmation of the personnel change and announced that he would return to the Ethereum ecosystem as Etherealize Lianchuang, an Etherealize ecosystem. The community also said that Danny Ryan's return may guide Ethereum to a more mature development path.

Interestingly, in an informal community vote for Ether in January this year , Danny Ryan was selected as the best candidate to serve as the only EF leader.

Still inevitably "over-centralization"?

EF This leadership change did not come out of thin air, but was an inevitable result of the interweaving of community dissatisfaction, market competition and technical bottlenecks.

In 2024, Ethereum faces internal and external troubles: Solana's "Meme Paradise" created by low-cost and high efficiency has attracted huge amounts of market capital and attention, while Ethereum's high gas fees and congestion problems have not been solved for a long time, and the ETH currency price has performed even more mediocrely in comparison. The deeper contradiction lies in the governance model. EF's decision-making power has been concentrated in a few people for a long time, and this structure seems clumsy in the current demand for rapid iteration of the market.

The discussion in the community was extremely fierce, pointing the finger at EF, believing that it was too passive under Aya and failed to respond quickly to competitive pressures. Some people even directly attacked Aya, saying that her overly idealistic ideas did not match the market demand at that time, and that remarks such as "why not eat meat minced meat" and "destroyed the golden age of Ethereum".

However, this position change does not seem to really solve the problem of "centralization" of EF's senior management. After all, Vitalik said that Aya had taken the initiative to make the transfer of chairman a year ago, and Vitalik had clearly mentioned in a debate with the community that the decision on changes in EF 's senior management still belongs to him.

Therefore, this personnel change seems to be a response to community issues, but perhaps it is inevitable that it will be the execution of a centralized decision-making in essence.

The market only looks at the real results, Ethereum needs to find a

balance

Obviously, for Wang and Stanczak's inauguration, the community is expecting substantial changes in the new leadership, and worrying that this is just a superficial effort under centralization. Expectations and doubts intertwined, forming a complex atmosphere in the early stages of change. Perhaps the community is just a temporary freshness for the new official to take office. Transparent fund allocation and specific reform measures are the answers the community really longs to see. Every step of decision-making at the new leadership will be magnified in the coming months.

Faced with Ethereum that needs change, different perspectives will inevitably lead to different ideas. The senior executives of the foundation want to build a more ideal ecosystem and future, but their dreams always need bread to support them, and the crypto market is no longer the market that Ethereum says. If EF just sells coins and talks about broad-based builds, and ignores the real feelings of the community, it will undoubtedly deepen the market's doubts about Ethereum's so-called "decentralization".

Standing at the moment, we cannot predict the ending. But one thing is certain: superficial kung fu and grand narratives can no longer support the real future of Ethereum. Instead of letting the community and Holders swing back and forth between forced construction and helpless abuse, it is better to let Ethereum senior management such as EF seek a real balance between decentralized development and centralized decision-making.