Another Two Ethereum Foundation Researchers Announce Departures

• Julian Ma and Carl Beek both resigned from the Ethereum Foundation on Monday.
• Beek built the Beacon Chain, and Ma created FOCIL and the 13-second Fast Confirmation Rule.
• The Foundation has lost Stańczak, Stark Monnot, Beiko Van Epps, and Szilágyi in recent months.

Julian Ma and Carl Beek announced their departures from the Ethereum Foundation on Monday, within hours of each other. Both researchers posted farewell messages on X that were warm in tone but clear in their finality. 

Combined with a string of senior exits that stretches back nearly a year, the two announcements have intensified a conversation inside the Ethereum community about whether the Foundation is losing too much of the talent that built it.

Beek’s Seven Years

Carl Beek spent seven years at the Foundation. His most visible contribution was his work on the Beacon Chain, the foundational infrastructure that made Ethereum’s transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake possible in 2020. That upgrade, known as the Merge, remains one of the most technically complex transitions any major blockchain has ever executed.

His last day is May 29. He announced the birth of his first child last month. “To every researcher, core dev, EFer, and community member: thank you,” Beek wrote. “The strength of Ethereum is, and always will be, the people behind it.”

Ma’s Four Years

Julian Ma joined four years ago as a mechanism design researcher and spent his final year shifting into product and growth strategy. Two pieces of work stand out from his time there.

The first is FOCIL, formally EIP-7805, a protocol designed to protect Ethereum from censorship by preventing block proposer roles from being commercially traded. In a market where everything trends toward financialization, Ma described his job as making sure that a particular thing did not get bought and sold.

The second is the Fast Confirmation Rule, which Ma led from design to deployment. It cut the time required to bridge assets between Ethereum’s mainnet and its Layer 2 networks down to 13 seconds from what had previously been measured in minutes.

He said he is leaving to explore ideas built on top of crypto’s financial infrastructure, wanting to go deeper into product work than a research role allows.

The List Keeps Growing

In the past several months, the Foundation has also lost Tomasz Stańczak, who resigned as co-executive director in February after less than a year. Josh Stark left in March after seven years. Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko departed from the Protocol team. Trent Van Epps, the architect of Protocol Guild, moved on. 

Alex Stokes announced a sabbatical earlier this month. And last June, Péter Szilágyi left after nearly a decade, taking with him the institutional knowledge behind Geth, the execution client that powers the majority of Ethereum nodes worldwide.

What Is Driving It

The Foundation restructured in 2025 following sustained community criticism about its execution and strategic direction during a period when Ethereum was losing narrative ground to faster-moving competitors. The restructuring was welcomed at the time.

More recently, the organization generated internal friction after publishing a mandate built around CROPs values and reportedly requiring staff to sign a loyalty pledge connected to it. A reference within the mandate to the Milady online community drew sharp criticism from parts of the Ethereum ecosystem, creating a culture clash that played out publicly.

Vitalik Buterin has stepped into a more active communication role, particularly around Ethereum’s renewed focus on base layer scaling and its shift away from the rollup-centric roadmap that had defined earlier thinking.

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