- Tomasz Stańczak, a co-director of the Ethereum Foundation, will resign at the end of this month.
- He will be replaced by Bastian Aue, a member of the Foundation’s leadership team, while Hsiao-Wei Wang remains as the other director.
- Stańczak is departing to focus on hands-on product building, particularly in Artificial Intelligence.
- The change comes after a year of significant operational shifts under Stańczak’s leadership.
Tomasz Stańczak is stepping down as a co-director of the Ethereum Foundation at the end of this month, the organization announced on Friday. His departure comes less than a year after his appointment alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang, who will remain in her role.
He will be replaced by Bastian Aue, a current member of the Foundation’s leadership team. Consequently, the leadership duo will now consist of Aue and Wang overseeing the organization’s future direction.
Stańczak’s resignation follows his and Wang’s appointment in March 2025, which itself was a replacement for the foundation’s previous embattled leader, Aya Miyaguchi. However, Miyaguchi remains on the four-person board alongside Ethereum figurehead Vitalik Buterin.
In a blog post explaining his departure, Stańczak said he would continue focusing on Ethereum as a “hands-on product builder” with an emphasis on artificial intelligence. “I know now that agentic systems and AI-assisted discovery are reshaping the world,” he wrote, linking his new focus to early Ethereum innovation.
He also suggested his shrinking operational role at the Foundation partly prompted his decision to leave. “While my ability to execute independently at the EF diminishes over time, my time at the organization in 2026 would feel more and more like just staying around to pass the baton,” he stated.
Buterin publicly applauded Stańczak’s work on Friday for dramatically increasing the foundation’s efficiency and responsiveness. “In his year at the EF, Tomasz helped to greatly increase the efficiency of many parts of the foundation, and turn the EF into an organization that is much more responsive to the world outside,” Buterin wrote on X.
Meanwhile, the incoming co-director, Bastian Aue, outlined his approach in a separate post. He emphasized that his decisions would be “guided by a principled insistence on the properties of what we’re building,” aiming to ensure cypherpunk, permissionless infrastructure remains the core focus.
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