Ethereum Leadership Seeks to Reverse Rock-bottom Sentiment with New Roadmap

If you’re paying attention to crypto social media, it’s hard not to see an Ethereum in crisis. Criticism of the Ethereum Foundation’s leadership, and even co-founder and chief scientist Vitalik Buterin himself, runs rampant.

After growing pressure born out of ETH’s underperformance against other cryptocurrencies and the broader market, Ethereum is shifting its strategy.

Specifically, the result has been a change in leadership at the Ethereum Foundation, which has two new co-executive directors, a council of community members to advise the EF, a new Ethereum marketing arm, and a new, simpler roadmap refocused on scaling the Layer 1.

Renewed focus on scaling the Ethereum mainnet comes as activity on the L1 declines while more and more transactions take place on Layer 2 networks like Base and Arbitrum.

Simplified Roadmap

In an April 13 X post, the new EF co-executive director Tomasz K. Stańczak pointed to a “simplified roadmap” with just three goals: Scale blobs, scale the Layer 1, and improve the user experience.

That’s not to say it is ignoring the Layer 2 ecosystem. Blobs are used by them, after all, and a big part of the user experience the EF is focused on is interconnectivity between Layer 2s.

But, long term, the Foundation believes that blobs are a way of bringing more revenue to the Ethereum main chain while keeping Layer 2 transactions fast and cheap.

The forthcoming Pectra update will increase the number of blobs per block from three to six. Introduced in March 2024’s Dencun update, blobs are a data storage solution which only holds data for 18 days, giving Layer 2s the ability to post data to the Ethereum Layer 1 very cheaply.

Too cheaply for Ethereum’s own good, some say, noting that while it helped Layer 2s scale significantly, it took a massive chunk of revenue away from the base layer.

While the user experience part of the roadmap includes Layer 2 interoperability, it also focuses on the Ethereum application layer, where DApps and smart contracts live.

The Ethereum Foundation did not respond to The Defiant’s request for comment.

Leadership Change

Much of the Ethereum community’s criticism was aimed at EF leadership, with many ETH holders calling for Ethereum researcher Danny Ryan to take charge. Aya Miyaguchi was executive director of the Foundation until March 1, when the EF announced that Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak would take over after Miyaguchi transitioned to president of the Foundation later that month. She had been the target of particularly vitriolic attacks on social media.

That leadership change had been coming for a while, as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced in an angry Jan. 21 X post that “the person deciding the new EF leadership team is me. One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to give the EF a ‘proper board,’ but until that happens, it's me.”

He had been reacting to an X post about “keeping the pressure” on Miyaguchi — something the poster said would lead to her resignation and ETH reaching a new all-time high “in two weeks.”

Buterin responded, “If you ‘keep the pressure on,’ then you are creating an environment that is actively toxic to top talent… YOU ARE MAKING MY JOB HARDER.”

Core developer Eric Conner had a different take when he announced he was walking away from Ethereum after 11 years.

“After a few years of losing to competitors who want to rip our throats out and now reading the EF has an ‘anti-winning and competition mentality,’ I had countless DMs from people asking why they should stick around,” he said in an X post on Jan. 21. “Honestly, I no longer have an answer for why they should. Leaders matter, culture matters, community matters, and we can't just shrug this off anymore.”

As for the treatment of Miyaguchi and others on social media, Conner said it was “beyond exhausting to hear stuff like ‘stop being mean’ used as an excuse to ignore the mandate coming from the community. We are here to change the world, not create a safe space.”

ETH Underperformance

ETH’s underperformance has several causes, starting with the growth of Layer 1 competitors like Solana, Cardano and Avalanche. Solana, in particular, has taken market share, although the popping of the memecoin bubble appears to have slowed its momentum.

Then there are the Layer 2s doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing: Taking transactions off Ethereum’s mainnet and making them far faster and cheaper. This means less revenue for Ethereum as rollups batch many transactions on the Layer 2 into a single one on the Layer 1.

“Make no mistake, $ETH as an investment is completely dead,” said Lekker Capital CIO Quinn Thompson in a March X post. “A $225 billion market cap network that is seeing declines in transaction activity, user growth and fees/revenues. There is no investment case here. As a network with utility? Yes. As an investment? Absolutely not.”

That led Castle Island venture general partner Nic Carter to respond that “the #1 cause of this is greedy ETH L2s siphoning value from the L1 and the social consensus that excess token creation was A-OK. ETH was buried in an avalanche of its own tokens. Died by its own hand.”

According to IntoTheBlock, Ethereum’s total fees collected were down almost 60% in the first quarter of 2025. At $208 million, that’s the lowest it’s been since 2020.

BitInfoCharts puts the Ethereum average transaction fee at $0.31 on April 18, down from $4.07 a year earlier. Of course, lowering transaction fees was an outright goal of the Foundation.

At the same time, ETH inflation is up, with the burn rate at its lowest level since the implementation of EIP-1559 in August 2021. Ethereum base (but not priority) transaction fees have been burned since then as a way to counteract inflation from staking rewards. But with transactions down, Ethereum’s annualized inflation rate is now 0.75%, according to Michael Nadeau, founder of The DeFi Report.

Doubts about the Ethereum Foundation’s leadership have been growing for some time, particularly as the price of ETH continued to underperform.

The ETH/BTC ratio languishes at a five-year low, whereas the SOL/ETH chart continues to hit all-time highs.

Real World Assets and Stablecoins

While the new roadmap is a simple, three-item list, there’s more to it than that, Stańczak said in his post. He listed 10 other items that are “secondary” — not because they aren’t as important, but because they should come about as a result of getting the big three right.

First, always mint assets on the Layer 1.

Next came winning real-world assets and winning stablecoins. Real-world assets are likely to stay on Ethereum’s base layer due to security considerations. Security is also a factor in stablecoins staying on Ethereum, while also benefiting from Ethereum’s established base of developers and the robust Layer 2 network.

Communications improvement and clarity of expectations could or at least should be a fallout of the present community unrest. The same applies to goal-driven research and development inside the Ethereum Foundation.

Greatly increased security expectations are already part of the broader roadmap, with Layer 2 security and quantum computing resistance among the topics.

Another area of concern is privacy, something Buterin has had much to say about recently. Earlier this month, he unveiled a nine-point roadmap for improving privacy on Ethereum, containing ways to “practically improve the state of privacy experienced by Ethereum’s users in a way that is very light on Ethereum consensus changes.”

This includes privacy pools, wallets with shielded balances and other techniques, including incorporating trusted execution environment (TEE) security module technology into existing wallets, and then replacing TEE with cryptographically stronger private information retrieval (PIR) when it becomes available.

Stańczak also included some aspirational goals in his list, notably human-to-human privacy, but also autonomous machines using Ethereum and “AI/agentic protocol and foundation long term, which will be so cool that it will attract the greatest thinkers over [a] long time.”

Long-term Perspective on Scaling

Ethereum is taking the long view on scaling, according to a Fidelity Digital Assets post on the upcoming Pectra update.

Ethereum’s vision of eventually reaching 128 blobs per slot — it’s currently three and will rise to six with Pectra — each paying $1 to $10 “is the bullish outcome for all Ethereum investors and users,” author Max Wadington said. This would take about 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) or about 8.6 billion per day, a number Ethereum nodes are several years away from being able to manage, he added.

“This scenario could generate anywhere between $330 million and $3.3 billion in annual fees from blob space, while still offering low-fee transactions for users and maintaining current L2 margins,” Wadington said.

That vision, he added, “has remained consistent for several years despite recent negativity surrounding the network. These growing concerns may instead be related to natural growing pains.”

Sense of Urgency

On March 17, the day Wang and Stańczak took over the Ethereum Foundation, Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner of Dragonfly Capital, said in an X post that after meeting with several Foundation leaders he is “more optimistic” about Ethereum’s future.

“There's a real urgency and an understanding that things need to change,” Qureshi said. “It's not 2020 anymore, and they get it—they want Ethereum to matter. Ethereum leadership have been getting a lot of criticism, and it’s important that you all know this—it's working. They're listening. They’re thinking hard about how to adapt.”