Ethereum Foundation Leadership Update: Co-Director Tomasz Stańczak to Step Down

Tomasz Stańczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, will step down at the end of February 2026, concluding a one-year term that overlapped with one of the foundation’s most debated periods. Leadership will transition to Bastian Aue, alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang.

His mandate focused on operational reform, clearer treasury structure and stronger institutional positioning as Ethereum confronted competitive pressure from faster-moving networks.

Stańczak joined in March 2025 amid governance criticism, compensation disputes and conflict-of-interest fallout after senior researchers disclosed paid advisory roles tied to external protocols. The foundation also faced accusations of opaque ETH sales, used to fund operations, with critics questioning treasury transparency and centralized influence within a small decision circle. 

Why Stańczak is leaving Ethereum Foundation

The departure appears preplanned. Stańczak stated that core restructuring objectives set in early 2025 — faster decision cycles, clearer roadmaps, compensation policies and institutional engagement — are either completed or structurally embedded. Remaining through 2026, he suggested, would amount to stewardship rather than execution.

He is pivoting back to hands-on technical work. After leaving his CEO role at Nethermind to join the foundation, he now intends to focus on protocol development, AI-integrated governance and agentic systems interacting with Ethereum. The transition reflects his builder profile more than a career administrator and follows the foundation’s formal separation of operational management from board-level oversight in 2025.

Roadmap for 2026

In his note, Stańczak described Ethereum as a coordination layer for finance, tokenized assets and automated AI agents, citing rising stablecoin and real-world asset activity. Institutional preference for Ethereum (ETH), he argued, rests on decentralization, credible neutrality and uninterrupted uptime since launch.

As Stańczak steps down, the foundation is preparing a merged LEAN Ethereum and core development roadmap for 2026, alongside a defined post-quantum security track and expanded rollup coordination.