Zak Cole Calls Ethereum Foundation ‘Out of Touch’ as Eight Exit

The Ethereum Foundation, nonprofit steward of the world’s second-largest blockchain, is facing its loudest internal revolt in years. Eight senior contributors have left in 2026, five in May alone, and longtime core developer Zak Cole used a podcast appearance this past week to call the organization “completely out of touch.”

Cole’s charge lands during a stretch when the EF has accelerated ETH treasury sales, lost all three of its Protocol Cluster research leads, and watched a parallel funding body Cole himself launched in 2025 pull in millions of dollars from donors who say they got tired of waiting on the original.

What Cole Told the Unchained Listeners

Long before founding the parallel body, the developer built his reputation as a protocol engineer and co-founded Code4rena, Slingshot, and 0xbow. On podcast host Laura Shin’s Unchained this past week, he made a case that has been circulating in private Telegram threads for months. The Ethereum Foundation’s official scope statement describes a coordinating role; in his telling, the EF has become a content-publishing arm for Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s preoccupations rather than a coordinator of an ecosystem now securing trillions of dollars in assets.

He went further. The foundation’s recent communications, including a much-mocked release of AI-generated art he described as “crazy DeviantArt-looking,” do not, in his words, “inspire confidence for institutional investment.” He named the defense as a tell. “This is what they released to prove they have their fingers on the pulse,” he said on the podcast.

The bear market makes the criticism land harder. ETH has spent most of 2026 trading well below its 2024 highs, and the developer acknowledged that “a lot of it is just people’s angst over price action right now.” The gap he kept returning to was structural. Ethereum is no longer the experimental rollout it was in 2015. “It’s a mature and robust ecosystem,” he told Shin, with “billions, trillions of dollars on the line.”

The underlying gripe, in his framing, is that recent leadership changes have not produced visible course correction. Co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak, brought in early 2025 partly to answer this exact complaint, announced in February that he would step down at the end of that month. His replacement, Bastian Aue, took over as interim co-executive director alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang.

Five May Departures, Eight in 2026

The exits did not stop with Stańczak. Five senior researchers and contributors confirmed departures or new affiliations in May alone, bringing the year’s running tally to eight since January. The combined effect is a hollowing-out of the team that did the unglamorous coordination work between client teams, researchers, and core devs.

The departures are not uniform. Some went to well-funded competitors. Tim Beiko, the long-running coordinator of Ethereum’s hard forks, departed in May. Researcher Dankrad Feist left full-time in October 2025 for Tempo, the new Layer 1 backed by Stripe and Paradigm, while keeping an EF advisor role in parallel. Others moved to projects they had advised; several have not yet announced their next steps.

A Treasury Counting Down to 2027

The drift concerns dovetail with what on-chain analysts are flagging about the foundation’s balance sheet. The Ethereum Foundation sold 10,000 ETH to mining firm BitMine on May 1 at an average price of $2,292, part of two over-the-counter sales totaling roughly $33.51 million in recent weeks. A separate 5,000 ETH transfer worth about $10.38 million had moved a month earlier.

Arkham’s on-chain modeling, published in late April, projects the foundation’s remaining reserves could be exhausted by 2027 at the current burn rate. The EF holds roughly 0.16% of all ETH in circulation, a small fraction by the standards of central foundations on other large chains, where 10% to 50% holdings are routine. That structural humility cuts two ways. It limits accusations of centralized supply control. It also limits how long the EF can operate without external funding or fresh sales.

Buterin acknowledged the pressure on May 25, posting that the foundation will reduce ETH sales and shrink the organization. The same week, on-chain trackers caught the EF unstaking 21,270 ETH, which the foundation has not yet publicly explained on its official treasury and roadmap blog. That gap between stated intention and visible action is part of what the developer says erodes institutional confidence.

Cole’s Parallel Foundation Is Already Raising

The Unchained appearance was not just diagnosis. The developer launched the Ethereum Community Foundation in mid-2025, announced at the Ethereum Community Conference in France, with a remit narrower and stricter than its older sibling’s. The ECF funds only projects that meet criteria the EF will not adopt as policy, set out plainly on the Ethereum Community Foundation’s published funding criteria.

• Immutable: contracts deployed without upgrade paths or admin keys, so adoption cannot be reversed by a foundation decision
• Tokenless: no project-specific token that competes with ETH for monetary attention
• ETH-burning: adoption patterns that route transaction throughput into EIP-1559 base-fee burns, aligning growth with holder value

The ECF president has told reporters the body has raised millions of dollars in ETH from individual donors he has not yet named. Some early grant decisions are due in the coming weeks.

The structure reads closer to a strategic balance sheet than a traditional grants program of the kind the EF runs on its standing ecosystem grants page. Every funded integration is supposed to feed back into ETH burn, the deflationary mechanism baked into the network since the London upgrade of August 2021.

Whether the ECF moves the needle depends on whether the EF contracts further. Researcher Dankrad Feist, who left full-time the prior autumn, called on May 21 for an entirely new organization funded with at least $1 billion in ETH. If that call attracts institutional cornerstones, the EF’s gravitational center weakens further.

Buterin’s CROPS Defense and the Mouthpiece Question

Buterin broke his public silence on May 25, posting a detailed defense of the EF’s direction and a new framework he calls CROPS: censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security. His argument was that the foundation should optimize for those properties rather than for raw speed, where rival Layer 1s like Solana and Tempo will happily spend their cycles.

Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity.

That came from his May 25 post. He paired the CROPS thesis with two concessions: the foundation will get smaller, and his own influence on the board will, as he put it, decrease over time as the board expands. “This is only my own view,” he wrote of the post. “The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers.” On the podcast, the developer was unpersuaded. He argued the foundation “essentially acts as a mouthpiece for Vitalik” and that the recent reshuffle was “influenced by community pressure but lacked genuine control transfer.” Stańczak, on this telling, “never actually had the chance to implement the type of change that he wanted to see” before being on his way out.

Where the Institutional Bid Sits Now

Institutional flows are what the developer keeps coming back to, and the picture from the allocator side is not flattering. Spot ETH ETF inflows have lagged BTC equivalents through most of 2026. Ether treasury companies, the corporate ETH-on-balance-sheet plays that briefly drove a Q4 2025 rally, have come under pressure as ETH’s drift has widened gaps between net asset value and share price.

Rival ecosystems have moved on the institutional brief while the foundation has been answering email about its own restructuring. Solana’s enterprise partnerships have expanded, Stripe and Paradigm’s Tempo recruited Feist and others, and new chains pitching neutrality have begun reaching the same allocator desks the EF used to dominate. His argument is that the foundation’s recent communications, including the AI-art rollout, have made those allocator conversations harder rather than easier.

The CROPS framework is a values pitch. It is not, by itself, a sales pitch. Whether institutional capital reads the foundation’s narrower, slower posture as discipline or as drift depends on what the next two quarters of treasury management, communication, and hiring look like.

If the EF’s promised contraction shows up in real treasury restraint and visible delivery from the new co-executive team, the parallel structure now raising ETH from donors stays a side bet. If May’s exit pace becomes a Q3 trend and the announced sales slowdown does not, the side bet becomes the main book.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrency markets, including Ether (ETH), carry substantial risk of loss including total loss of principal. Readers should consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decision. Figures and quotations cited are accurate as of publication on May 29, 2026.