The Ethereum Foundation’s budget cuts, staff departures and leadership changes have fueled weeks of criticism from parts of the blockchain community, but Joe Lubin, who was involved in its creation and is now CEO of software developer Consensys, said the measures are a necessary evolution, not a crisis.
Lubin, who plays no role in the foundation, told CoinDesk that the organization The role should be more limited and more focused. in managing the technology and core values of the network, while other organizations take responsibility for adoption, institutional commitment, and ecosystem growth.
“It is important that the Ethereum Foundation be credibly neutral and beyond reproach,” Lubin said in an interview. “The potential for conflicts of interest to arise between the business side and the builders is simply not a credibly neutral way to run your decentralized protocol ecosystem.”
The comments come after weeks of debate over the direction of the foundation. Critics have questioned whether the organization, often known by its initials, has moved quickly enough to address competitive threats and improve Ethereum’s market position, while others have raised concerns about staff departures and restructurings.
Lubin said many of those concerns arise from a misunderstanding of what the foundation is supposed to do for the blockchain, which handles about 2 million transactions a day, according to Etherscan data.
“What’s happening at the EF is cleaning that up,” he said, referring to efforts to separate protocol management from commercialization and business development.
According to Lubin, the future of Ethereum will be shaped by multiple organizations rather than a single dominant institution.
“I think it will become clear that there will be a handful of important nodes that will be stewards of the Ethereum ecosystem and leaders in different niches or different specialties in the Ethereum ecosystem,” he said.
That model differs from other blockchains, where protocol development and trading strategy often fall under the same umbrella. Lubin said that the decentralized nature of Ethereum requires a more distributed institutional structure.
The Ethereum co-founder also rejected a broader narrative that Ethereum itself has entered a period of decline. “Ethereum is not in decline, at all,” he said.
Still, Ethereum and the rest of the cryptocurrency industry face a new rival competing for funding and investment. Artificial intelligence has displaced cryptocurrencies as the dominant technological narrative in recent years, he said.
“We were the cool kids, the nervous bearers of new enthusiasm in the economy and society. We are not in the spotlight right now in terms of capital inflows and investments,” he said.
But he argued that Ethereum’s years-long focus on scaling infrastructure is beginning to position the network for a new wave of adoption.
Among the trends he highlighted were autonomous AI agents conducting on-chain transactions and the growing institutional use of Ethereum-based infrastructure.
“The next big wave is agent trading, where the hybrid man-machine economy begins to ride our rails,” Lubin said.
For Lubin, those emerging use cases are precisely why the Ethereum Foundation is narrowing its focus. As new organizations take on responsibility for adoption and commercialization, he argued, the foundation’s job is to remain focused on the protocol itself and ensure it can support the next generation of activities built on top of it.
Read more: Why the Ethereum Foundation is suddenly back at the center of the cryptocurrency culture war
