The Ethereum Foundation’s budget cuts, staff departures and leadership changes fueled weeks of criticism from parts of the blockchain community, but Joe Lubin, who helped found it and is now CEO of software developer Consensys, said the moves were a necessary development, not a crisis.
Lubin, who has no role in the foundation, told CoinDesk that the organization the role should be narrower, more focused on managing the network’s technology and core values, while other organizations take responsibility for adoption, institutional commitment, and ecosystem growth.
“It is important that the Ethereum Foundation is credible, neutral and above reproach,” Lubin said in an interview. “The possibility of conflicts of interest between companies and manufacturers is simply not a credible and neutral way to manage your decentralized protocol ecosystem.”
These comments come after weeks of debate over the direction of the foundation. Critics question whether the organization, often known by its initials, has acted quickly enough to address competitive threats and improve Ethereum’s market position, while others have raised concerns about staff departures and restructuring.
Lubin said many of these concerns stem from a misunderstanding of what the foundation is supposed to do for the blockchain, which processes about 2 million transactions per day, according to data from Etherscan.
“What’s happening at FE is cleaning this up,” he said, referring to efforts to separate protocol management from marketing 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 be clear that there will be a handful of major nodes that will be stewards of the Ethereum ecosystem and leader in different niches or different specialties of the Ethereum ecosystem,” he said.
This model differs from other blockchains, where protocol development and business strategy are often under the same roof. Lubin said the decentralized nature of Ethereum requires a more distributed institutional structure.
The Ethereum co-founder also pushed back against a broader narrative that Ethereum itself has entered a period of decline. “Ethereum is not in decline, not at all,” he said.
Yet Ethereum and the rest of the crypto industry face a new rival competing for funding and investments. Artificial intelligence has replaced cryptography as the dominant technology discourse in recent years, said.
“We were the cool kids, the bearers of new enthusiasm in the economy and society. We are not at the forefront right now in terms of capital inflows and investments,” he said.
But he argued that Ethereum’s years-long focus on scaling infrastructure is starting 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 major wave is agent commerce, where the hybrid human-machine economy begins to use our rails,” Lubin said.
For Lubin, these emerging use cases are precisely why the Ethereum Foundation is narrowing its scope. As new organizations take responsibility for adoption and commercialization, he argued, the foundation’s job is to stay focused on the protocol itself and ensure it can support the next generation of activities built on it.
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