Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist wants a new institution funded with at least $1 billion in ETH and sustained by staking revenue. He posted the proposal days after the EF confirmed its eighth senior departure of the year.
Dankrad Feist wants Ethereum to spin up a parallel institution. The former Foundation researcher, now at competing layer-one Tempo, posted to X on Thursday a proposal for a new advocacy organisation funded with at least $1 billion in ETH and sustained permanently by staking and fee revenue. Its mandate would be unambiguous — defend ETH's competitive position and its price.
The proposal landed days after the Ethereum Foundation confirmed its eighth senior departure of the year, with five exits in May alone. Co-executive director Tomasz Stanczak left after roughly eleven months in the job. Protocol coordinators Tim Beiko and Barnabe Monnot stepped back at the same time the EF published a May 11 blog post naming their replacements — Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn and Fredrik. Researcher Alex Stokes took a sabbatical. Carl Beek and Julian Ma quit shortly after.
Feist's argument is structural rather than personal. The Foundation now controls less than 0.1 per cent of circulating ETH and receives nothing from the staking and fee revenues the network produces. A pool of capital that small, without a recurring income stream, cannot sustain serious institutional advocacy — and certainly cannot underwrite the kind of marketing and lobbying that competing layer-ones now do as a matter of routine. Solana has the foundation it has because Solana raises and spends serious money.
The four conditions Feist set are deliberately picky. A minimum of $1 billion in ETH at the outset. A revenue stream from staking. A board "who want ETH to go up". A leader "who is competent and wants to fight". Each reads as a critique of the current Foundation, which has spent the past year repositioning itself under the "Lean Ethereum" banner as a steward of the protocol rather than a commercial advocate for the asset. Nineteen employees were laid off as part of that pivot.
The timing of Feist's intervention is awkward for the EF. ETH dropped below $2,200 in the first quarter as layer-twos absorbed transaction fees that previously flowed to mainnet. The price action gives the brain-drain story a sharper edge — it is harder to dismiss departing researchers as opportunists when the underlying asset is also losing ground against the competition.
Feist's own credibility cuts both ways. He spent years inside the Foundation working on data availability sampling and KZG commitments before leaving for Tempo, a layer-one backed by Stripe. That move means his proposal can be read as a competitor poaching the brand. It also means he has direct knowledge of how the Foundation actually allocates resources, and his criticism — that ETH's economic alignment problem is governance, not technology — comes with receipts.
The community reaction has been sharp. Some of the EF's defenders argue that creating a price-focused organisation would compromise the credibly neutral positioning Vitalik Buterin has championed for years. Others, including several researchers who have left over the past two years, have publicly agreed with the framing. None of the major staking providers or institutional ETH holders have committed funding to the proposal, which exists at the moment as a thread on X rather than a formal initiative.
The EF has not responded publicly. Its May 11 announcement framed the departures as a planned restructuring and named the new Protocol Cluster leads without addressing the broader question of whether the Foundation's mandate still fits the network's economic reality. Co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang remains in post; her counterpart's seat is empty.
What Feist has done is force a conversation the Foundation has spent eighteen months trying to avoid. If the EF holds less than 0.1 per cent of ETH and collects no recurring revenue from a network with a market capitalisation north of $250 billion, then the institution that nominally represents Ethereum to regulators and to investors has less financial standing than half the corporate treasuries that buy ETH on the open market. That is a problem regardless of whether Feist's solution is the right one.
There is also a quieter version of the argument that does not require any new institution at all. The EF could simply begin staking a meaningful share of its remaining ETH, route the resulting yield into structured grants, and align its operating budget with the network's economic cycle. That would not deliver the $1 billion treasury Feist wants, but it would close the optical gap between what the Foundation says about price and what its balance sheet does about it.
The proposal sits at zero dollars committed.
