Ethereum Foundation President Aya Miyaguchi offered her view on the organization’s new mandate, framing the shift as a necessary reset after internal discussions became increasingly tense and the foundation faced pressure to do too many things at once.
Her comments, to publish On EF is moving towards a smaller, more focused structure as the wider ecosystem debates its management role, technical priorities and a wave of high-profile departures.
The Ethereum Foundation is entering a new era of power
Miyaguchi said the mandate came from the board, but she proposed it late last year. The reason for this, in her telling, was not a single conflict, but a structural problem: EF had become a focal point of competing expectations.
“First, discussions that were supposed to be technical began to become political and personal, sometimes shaped by quieter motivations,” she wrote. “Second, as EF grew, more and more versions of ‘what EF should be’ began to pull at the core of the organization from every direction at once. I became convinced that trying to please everyone would get us nowhere at all.”
This line goes to the center of the enterprise’s dilemma. Ethereum has long relied on EF to fund research, coordination, and oversight, but its culture has also resisted the idea that any single entity should become Ethereum’s command center. Miyaguchi leaned heavily into this tension, arguing that EF’s declining centralization is not an abdication of responsibility but evidence that Ethereum has matured beyond its initial foundation.
“We’ve said it many times: EF is one of many nodes in Ethereum,” she wrote. “I know this is hard to hear for some, because EF was the first group, and in the early years it was essential to making things happen. But it was never meant to stay that way.”
Miyaguchi linked this philosophy to her own history in the field of cryptocurrencies, noting that she has been working in this sector since 2012 and joined Kraken in 2013 shortly before its emergence. Mount Gox collapseWhich she said helped clean it up. She said this experience shaped her understanding of the risks of growth and centralization. When she became CEO in 2018, her goal was to help Ethereum grow beyond EF.
She said the institution made deliberate choices to distribute power rather than retain control. Miyaguchi pointed to EF’s role in incubating and launching projects like Uniswap and ENS, supporting ETHGlobal and its hackathons, and “funding angels” through groups like Gitcoin and Moloch. The guiding question, she said, was always: “How can this stand on its own, without us?”
This strategy, according to Miyaguchi, left EF with less than 0.2% of total ETH and a role that is now narrower by design. The mandate, she said, is to preserve and accelerate the characteristics and goals that make Ethereum “uniquely valuable, competitive, and worth building on,” with an emphasis on what she called “CROPS,” “inalienable user self-sovereignty and self-sovereign coordination.”
“We cannot do this alone, and we do not intend to do so,” she wrote. “But identifying this as the north star of the mission, and coordinating with allies who share it, is a responsibility we have.”
Miyaguchi also disputed the idea that more pronounced EF means less interest in adoption. The opposite is true, she said, arguing that everyday users and institutions rely on Ethereum’s core value proposition. Adoption, including institutional adoption, remains part of EF’s work, but only in ways that fit the mission, she said.
The comments come as seen by EF A Noticeable displacement of major shareholders and VIPs in 2026, including researchers and ecosystem figures such as Karl Beckhuizen, Julian Ma, Barnaby Munot, Tim Biko, Trent van Epps, Josh Stark, and former co-CEO Thomas Stanczak. This shift has intensified scrutiny over whether the institution’s restructuring is a sign of healthy decentralization, internal tension, or both.
Miyaguchi acknowledged the effects on employees firsthand. “As EF becomes more focused and more opinionated, the team naturally becomes smaller and more focused. This is part of the choice,” she wrote, adding that the new leaders are already getting on board and that management will provide more details about the new structure and strategy in the coming weeks.
Buterin’s engagement on May 24 He set the stage for Miyaguchi’s statements. He described the front as still in transition, emphasized that he had no special authority over the board, and said much of the current transition was being carried out by another leader. He also framed the organization’s future as leaner and more focused, with less focus on being an Ethereum hub and more on maintaining the network’s properties over the long term.
At press time, ETH was trading at $1,986.
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