One of the biggest protocol leadership changes in recent years has been announced by the Ethereum Foundation, which will change the course of Ethereum's primary development initiatives. The Foundation announced on May 11 that Alex Stokes will take a vacation and that longtime protocol leaders Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko are leaving their positions.

Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik will now be in charge of directing Ethereum's upcoming phase, which will be centered on long-term protocol resilience, user experience, scaling, and execution-layer stability. Following a very successful year that saw significant improvements, scalability innovations, and a new strategic vision for Ethereum's future, the shift takes place.

• Ethereum Foundation Hands Protocol Leadership to a New Team
• Fusaka, PeerDAS, & the Scaling Push Changed Ethereum’s Priorities
• Glamsterdam, Hegotà, & the Next Ethereum Development Phase
• Barnabé Monnot’s Departure Signals a More Product-Focused Ethereum Era

Ethereum Foundation Hands Protocol Leadership to a New Team

The Ethereum Foundation's Protocol cluster, which is in charge of investigating, organizing, and creating Ethereum's fundamental protocol updates, has undergone a leadership transition that signifies the next stage of development. Barnabé Monnot's words and the Foundation's update suggest that the change comes after the Protocol structure was successfully relaunched in June 2025.

Ethereum advanced during one of its most technically ambitious years under the departing leadership of Tim Beiko, Alex Stokes, and Barnabé Monnot. The Fusaka upgrade, which brought PeerDAS to Ethereum's infrastructure and significantly increased data availability for rollups, was noted by the Foundation. Higher gas limitations were also permitted by the update, which helped Ethereum boost throughput without compromising network stability.

In the Ethereum protocol setting, Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik, the upcoming leadership trio, are no strangers. They were acknowledged by the Foundation for their significant efforts in initiating the protocol track, scaling work around PeerDAS, and organizing recent infrastructure enhancements related to execution-layer development and gas limit increases.

According to Barnabé, the handover is a transfer of responsibility to a team that is already heavily involved in Ethereum's scaling, UX, and "Hardness" goals, all of which are driven by the company's dynamic Strawmap roadmap.

Fusaka, PeerDAS, & the Scaling Push Changed Ethereum’s Priorities

The degree to which Ethereum's protocol changed during 2025 and the first part of 2026 is strongly related to the change in leadership. The first framework, centered on "Scale L1," "Scale Blobs," and "Improve UX," had already accomplished many of its immediate objectives, according to the Foundation's February priorities report.

The most obvious turning point was the renovation at Fusaka. Ethereum's implementation of PeerDAS allowed for a theoretical eightfold increase in blob capacity for Layer 2 networks while drastically lowering validator bandwidth requirements. Concurrently, the network gradually raised its gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, which is Ethereum's biggest increase in execution capacity since 2021.

Ethereum's roadmap was altered by these improvements. The Foundation realigned development along more comprehensive long-term tracks rather than concentrating solely on short-term throughput improvements:

• Scale
• Improve UX
• Harden the L1

Deeper coordination between execution-layer scaling, consensus modifications, data availability, interoperability, and user abstraction is reflected in the new structure. These areas are no longer being handled by Ethereum as separate engineering issues. These days, they are interrelated protocol design pillars.

Excited to announce this evolution of Protocol, the @ethereumfndn teams stewarding, researching and developing the Ethereum protocol.

After our re-launch of Protocol in June last year, @TimBeiko, @ralexstokes and I are now passing the torch to our talented colleagues… https://t.co/NtzqXelHlV

— barnabe.eth (@barnabemonnot) May 11, 2026

Glamsterdam, Hegotà, & the Next Ethereum Development Phase

The launch of live Glamsterdam events is one of the new leadership team's top priorities. The Foundation wants these development networks to enhance upgrade coordination prior to mainnet deployment and stabilize execution-layer changes earlier in the development cycle.

Glamsterdam is anticipated to incorporate more blob scaling settings, repricing work, and execution-layer enhancements such as ePBS (EIP-7732). In the meantime, another significant project related to protocol coordination and upcoming execution-layer improvement is EIP-8037.

Beyond Glamsterdam, Hegotà, the next significant stage of protocol evolution, is already on Ethereum's agenda. Hegotà places a strong emphasis on account abstraction, scalability, quick finality, and speedier confirmations, according to the Strawmap roadmap debates. Long-term goals like zkEVM integration, enormous Layer 2 throughput expansion, native privacy systems, and post-quantum security preparation are also outlined in the broader roadmap.

Additionally, native account abstraction is becoming more and more important in the Foundation's protocol priorities. Ethereum developers are currently investigating more permanent account abstraction solutions that eliminate dependency on relayers and bundlers, following the introduction of temporary smart-contract capabilities for EOAs with the Pectra upgrade by EIP-7702.

Barnabé Monnot’s Departure Signals a More Product-Focused Ethereum Era

Barnabé Monnot declared his departure from the Ethereum Foundation after almost six years in tandem with the organization's statement. Several of Ethereum's most significant turning points, such as early EIP-1559 development, the Merge, MEV market research, staking design, interoperability projects, and finality enhancements, were closed by his departure.

Barnabé discussed how Ethereum's "Improve UX" priority caused him to focus on more pressing, user-focused issues in his remarks. Instead of concentrating solely on long-horizon protocol theory, he highlighted a growing interest in product-centric thinking and making Ethereum's special features more available to users in the present.

That viewpoint is in line with the current path of Ethereum's development. The Foundation is gradually striking a balance between interoperability standards, practical usability, execution stability, and more seamless onboarding processes, in addition to foundational research.

The outgoing leadership has received much plaudits from the community for guiding Ethereum through one of its busiest protocol periods. But according to reports, at least one former protocol lead called the entire leadership turnover "funky," illustrating how profound the internal change seems following such a large development cycle.

The Ethereum Foundation seems committed to preserving continuity despite this. The roadmap that the new protocol leads is among the most comprehensive and technically ambitious in the network's history, and it is already integrated into Ethereum's core development pipeline.

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