Ethereum Foundation Loses Second Director in 4 Months as $30M Funding Hole Looms

Hsiao-Wei Wang is out. The Ethereum Foundation’s co-executive director and board member resigned on June 18, the second co-director to leave in just four months — and the timing couldn’t be worse for a foundation already staring down a potential $30 million funding shortfall.

Wang’s exit came after a sabbatical, and she didn’t come back. That leaves Bastian Aue as the sole executive director, a role he’d already been holding in interim capacity after Tomasz Stańczak stepped down back in February. No successor structure has been announced. No timeline disclosed. Aue’s running things alone, and the Foundation hasn’t said for how long or what comes next. Ethereum itself was trading around $1,690 on the day, down 3.3% — though that move looked more like broader market pressure than any direct reaction to Wang’s departure.

The $30 Million Gap Nobody Planned For

Trent Van Epps, who spent five years working with the Ethereum Foundation, put the funding situation bluntly. He warned of a crisis hitting Ethereum’s core development ecosystem, with a $30 million gap expected to bite over the next three to nine months. The teams affected aren’t peripheral — they’re the ones responsible for protocol upgrades, the kind of work that keeps Ethereum moving forward.

The root cause is pretty clear. The Client Incentive Program, which had been the main funding mechanism for execution and consensus clients, expired in April. No replacement came with it. Teams like Geth, Erigon, and Lighthouse — essential to keeping Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers running — are now without a structured funding source. That’s not a small operational hiccup. That’s a gap that could genuinely disrupt the Glamsterdam upgrade roadmap if it doesn’t get resolved fast.

And there’s a second pressure layered on top of that. The Foundation is actively drawing down its treasury spending, cutting annual outlays from 15% to a 5% baseline by 2030. Strategically, it probably makes sense for long-term sustainability. But right now, in the near term, it makes the funding hole worse. Episodic grants can’t really replace the steady, predictable flow that the Client Incentive Program used to provide. Critical work — quantum-security research, Layer 1 scaling — sits in that gap.

19 Departures and Counting

Wang and Stańczak aren’t outliers. Approximately 19 significant figures have left the Foundation in 2026 alone, several of them tied to key transition moments. Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, Alex Stokes — all gone. Both Wang and Stańczak had only been appointed co-executive directors in March 2025, which means both left within fifteen months of taking the job. That’s a pattern, not a coincidence.

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Vitalik Buterin acknowledged Wang’s contributions publicly, citing her work in research and community building. But acknowledgment doesn’t fill an org chart. The Foundation’s executive structure is murky right now, with no disclosed plan for what comes after Aue’s current stint.

The exits, especially during a major upgrade cycle, raise real questions about governance and resource allocation inside an organization sitting on a multi-billion-dollar ETH treasury. It’s kind of a strange situation — significant assets on paper, meaningful funding pressure in practice.

Without the Client Incentive Program, the development teams carrying Ethereum’s upgrade work don’t have a stable floor. Relying on grants case by case introduces uncertainty that’s hard to plan around. Protocol teams need to know funding is there six months from now, not just this quarter.

Van Epps’s warning carries weight precisely because he was inside the Foundation for five years. He’s not guessing. The $30 million figure and the three-to-nine-month window he put on it suggest the situation is already urgent, not theoretical.

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What the Foundation does next — whether it replaces the Client Incentive Program with something comparable, finds another mechanism, or leans harder on grant funding — will shape whether the Glamsterdam upgrade stays on track. No details on any replacement program have come out yet. No succession plan for leadership. No clarity on how Aue’s role evolves.

Ethereum’s network kept running at $1,690. But the organization behind it is navigating a leadership vacuum and a funding crunch at the same time, with roughly 19 senior departures behind it and no public roadmap for fixing either problem.