The Ethereum Foundation is back in the crosshairs after eight contributors left since January 2026, sharpening doubts about the group that has long acted as Ethereum’s closest thing to a central steward. The criticism landed hardest around one name: Zak Cole, who said the foundation is “completely out of touch.”

That rebuke matters because Ethereum is still the base layer for decentralized finance, stablecoins, tokenized assets and a widening web of layer-2 chains. What happens inside the Switzerland-based nonprofit founded in 2014 can still ripple across an ecosystem that secures trillions of dollars in assets.

For years, the foundation has been the organizer behind the scene. It funded client teams, coordinated developers, backed research and helped shepherd technical upgrades and existential crises after Ethereum launched in 2015. But as the network grew into crypto’s financial backbone, the foundation tried to step back from being its de facto center of gravity.

That retreat has not quieted the complaints. Critics now describe the foundation as insular, slow-moving and disconnected from the blockchain industry, even as it remains embedded in a system that still depends on its credibility. Hudson Jameson, a longtime Ethereum figure, said the foundation began as the single organization around Ethereum and later tried to minimize itself to let other coordinating bodies rise, but there was still a need for a central coordinator.

Cole’s attack on Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast captured how personal the dispute has become. He mocked the foundation’s priorities and suggested its spending was aimed at a narrow circle, not the broader community that relies on Ethereum’s infrastructure every day. His remarks tapped into a wider frustration that the group is being asked to guide a sprawling ecosystem while acting smaller, quieter and less involved than it once did.

The unresolved question is whether the foundation can keep that balancing act going. Eight departures in just a few months have turned a long-running debate about structure into a fresh credibility test, and the next moves by the foundation will determine whether its push to stay less central can hold together or deepen the sense that no one is steering Ethereum as confidently as before.