Joe Lubin Defends Ethereum Foundation Restructuring as Evolution, Not Crisis

Joe Lubin, a co‑founder of Ethereum and now CEO of ConsenSys, pushed back on growing criticism over layoffs, budget cuts and leadership changes at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), calling the moves an evolutionary step rather than a crisis. Speaking to CoinDesk, Lubin — who has no formal role at the foundation — argued the EF should tighten its remit to core protocol stewardship and the defense of Ethereum’s technical values, leaving commercialization, adoption and institutional outreach to other organizations. “It is important that the Ethereum Foundation be credibly neutral, above reproach,” he said, warning that mixing business interests with protocol builders invites conflicts of interest. The comments come after weeks of debate about the foundation’s direction. Critics have questioned whether the EF is moving fast enough to counter competitive threats and bolster Ethereum’s market position, while others have expressed concern about recent staff departures and restructuring. Lubin said much of the pushback reflects a misunderstanding of what the foundation is meant to do for the network — which processes roughly 2 million transactions a day, according to Etherscan. “What’s happening at the EF is cleaning that up,” he said, describing a deliberate separation of protocol stewardship from commercialization and business development. Rather than one dominant institution driving both development and go‑to‑market strategy, Lubin foresees a landscape of multiple major organizations — “a handful of major nodes” — each stewarding different niches within the broader Ethereum ecosystem. That decentralized institutional model, he argued, is more consistent with Ethereum’s ethos than the single‑umbrella structures seen at some other blockchains, where protocol development and commercial strategy are often housed together. Lubin also rejected the idea that Ethereum is in decline. “Ethereum is not on the decline, not at all,” he said. Still, he acknowledged a shift in investor attention: artificial intelligence has recently displaced crypto as the dominant narrative for capital inflows. Even so, Lubin believes Ethereum’s years of work on scaling and infrastructure position it well for future waves of adoption. He pointed to emerging use cases such as autonomous AI agents transacting on‑chain and broader institutional adoption of Ethereum tooling. “A next major wave is agentic commerce, where the hybrid human‑machine economy starts to make use of our rails,” he said — a development he sees as precisely the reason the EF should remain focused on ensuring the protocol can support that next generation of activity while other groups drive adoption and commercialization.