Ethereum Foundation Implements Budget Cuts and Restructuring as Joe Lubin Calls for Narrower Focus on Core Protocol

Joe Lubin said the Ethereum Foundation's recent budget cuts, staff departures and restructuring are a necessary evolution, not a crisis. The Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO told CoinDesk on June 7, 2026 that the foundation should narrow its role to stewarding the network's core technology and values.

Lubin, who has no role at the foundation, said it is important that the Ethereum Foundation be credibly neutral above reproach.

He stated that the opportunity for conflicts of interest between the business side and the builders is not a credibly neutral way to run a decentralized protocol ecosystem. Lubin said many concerns about the foundation stem from a misunderstanding of what the organization is supposed to do.

He described the current changes as cleaning up the separation of protocol stewardship from commercialization and business development.

Ethereum handles about 2 million transactions a day, according to Etherscan data. Lubin said the foundation's narrower focus will allow other organizations to handle adoption, institutional engagement and ecosystem growth. "I think it'll be clear that there'll be a handful of major nodes that are stewards of the Ethereum ecosystem and leading in different niches or different specialties in the Ethereum ecosystem," Lubin said.

Lubin rejected the idea that Ethereum is on the decline. "Ethereum is not on the decline, not at all," he said. He noted that artificial intelligence has displaced crypto as the dominant technology narrative in recent years.

"We were the cool kids, the edgy bringers of the new excitement in the economy and society. We are not front and center right now in terms of capital inflows, investments," he said. Lubin said a next major wave is agentic commerce, where the hybrid human-machine economy starts to make use of Ethereum's rails.