GuShiio.com Surface skills and grand narratives can no longer support the true future of Ethereum.
In March 2025, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) announced a major leadership change: Executive Directors Aya Miyaguchi He left his daily management responsibilities and became chairman of the foundation. and Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak was appointed as the new co-executive director and a former EF researcher Danny Ryan His return also welcomed a wave of cheers from the community.
Combined with the ETH coin price, which has always been closely watched by the market, and the foundation, which has been at the forefront of market discussions recently, this personnel adjustment is more like a game about the future direction of Ethereum. From fierce debates in the community to personnel changes in the leadership, there is also the impetus and expectation of market forces behind this story of power transition.
To become chairman, is it actually an overt promotion?
After seven years as executive director, the controversial Aya Miyaguchi was promoted to chairman of the EF Foundation. This may seem to be an upgrade, but from the perspective of real power distribution, this change uses“Rising openly and falling secretly”It may be more appropriate to describe it as the executive director position who does practical work is assigned to Wang and Stanczak, two people who are closer to the technology community. Aya’s new foundation chairman is positioned more like an image representative (or mascot) of the foundation, which may be more in line with Aya’s own behavior.
In 2018, when Aya Miyaguchi took over the baton of EF’s executive director, she set her sights on building a more non-profit and sustainable future for Ethereum. With a more idealistic vision, Aya defines Ethereum as the concept of an infinite garden and encourages developers to innovate freely in an open, permission-free ecosystem. At the same time, the Devcon conference promoted by Aya has become a grand event in the global Ethereum community every year.
(Related reading:From high school teacher to president of the Ethereum Foundation, Aya and her Infinite Garden）
However, an overly idealistic vision and style of conduct can support the foundation’s future, but may not meet the expectations of the community. Until last year, the community became increasingly dissatisfied with her leadership style. Some people thought that she was too conservative in resource allocation. Faced with successive innovations in Solana, Ethereum’s response was obviously slow. Aya, who was an executive director at that time, focused more on cultural promotion rather than technological breakthroughs and market operations. In addition, the news that EF continued to sell ETH was interspersed with poor prices, which made many developers and investors feel that EF gradually felt that some of its moral character was not worthy of its place. The debate in the community intensified, and even extreme remarks and life threats were made against her. Vitalik had to come forward and appeal to the community to calm down.
Now, Aya, who has been transferred as chairman, will focus on strategic guidance and external cooperation, which also marks the end of her years of powerful execution.
Hsiao-Wei Wang: Early core researcher, connecting community and technology
One of the new executive directors, Hsiao-Wei Wang, is born in Chinese Wang Xiaowei.
Unlike Aya, Hsiao-Wei Wang’s story begins at the intersection of code and community. In 2017, she joined EF as a core researcher. With the technical heritage of her master’s degree in network engineering from Taiwan Jiao Tong University, she quickly became the backbone of Ethereum’s core development. Her expertise focuses on sharding and beacon chains, and plays a key role in The Merge in 2022.
In 2018, she organized and participated in the event Ethereum Sharding Workshop in TaipeiAttract global developers. This event made the Asia-Pacific Ethereum community stand out and established her reputation for emphasizing both technology and communication. She travels around Asia all year round, hosting developer gatherings to dismantle and connect complex technical principles into community perceptions. She recalled: It was the first time we really brought a global R & D team to the local area, and the atmosphere was great.& rdquo;
Dr. Dong, founder of Celer Network, spoke highly of Hsiao-Wei Wang, saying that between 2018 and 2019, Wang and Ken, the current head of the Uniswap Foundation, were responsible for the Grant of the Ethereum Foundation. They were very active and effective. Wang is relatively aware of the capabilities of Asian builders and has fought for the right to speak for many Asian/Chinese builders, which is very pragmatic.
Today, as an executive director, Wang shoulders the dual responsibilities of R & D insights and community building. Her arrival is seen as a signal that Ethereum has regained its technology and grassroots spirit.
Tomasz Stanczak: Ethereum infrastructure architect
If Wang is the bridge between technology and community, Tomasz Stanczak is more like the architect of Ethereum’s infrastructure. He is the founder of Nethermind, an execution client that is now an integral part of the Ethereum network.
In 2017, Nethermind was just a small project in Poland. Stanczak and several friends were typing code in a small apartment in Warsaw, trying to build an efficient Ethereum client.
A few years later, he developed Nethermind into the backbone technical force of the Ethereum network, supporting the stable operation of the network. His vision is not limited to client development, but also delves into areas such as MEV and PBS (proposer-builder separation). As an early member of Flashbots, he contributed important ideas to the decentralization and security of Ethereum, such as optimizing the block proposal mechanism to reduce the centralization risk for miners.
At the 2024 Devcon SEA, Stanczak stood center stage and shared his thoughts on the cross-application of Ethereum and AI. Today, he has become a co-executive director of EF, responsible for ecological growth and the protection of core values. His engineering background and strategic vision have given the community new expectations for the technological future of Ethereum.
Danny Ryan announces his return to ecology, what everyone expects
After the personnel changes were announced, the community’s reaction poured in like a flood. On Twitter, some people praised Wang and Stanczak’s technical background and believed it was a signal that Ethereum would return to its technical standard; others questioned on Reddit whether simply replacing people could solve deep-seated problems. God V has also publicly supported the transition, calling it part of advance planning.
At the same time, Danny Ryan, a former EF researcher who is very well-known in the Ethereum community, also expressed positive affirmation of this personnel change and announced that he will return to the Ethereum ecosystem as Ethereize Joint Venture, the institutional marketing and product department of the Ethereum ecosystem. The community also said that the return of Danny Ryan may lead Ethereum to a more mature development path.
What’s interesting is that in January this year,Informal community votingDanny Ryan was selected as the best candidate to serve as the sole leader of EF.
Is it still inevitable to be too centralized?“”
The leadership change of EF did not happen out of thin air, but was the inevitable result of community dissatisfaction, market competition and technological bottlenecks.
In 2024, Ethereum will face internal and external problems: Solana’s Meme Paradise built with low cost and high efficiency attracts huge amounts of market capital and attention, while Ethereum’s high Gas fees and congestion problems have not been solved, and the ETH coin price is in the next level. The performance is even more mediocre. The deeper contradiction lies in the governance model. EF’s decision-making power has long been concentrated in a few people, and this structure seems clumsy in the current market’s high-speed iterative needs.
Discussions in the community were extremely heated, pointing the finger at EF, which was believed to be too passive under Aya’s leadership and failed to respond quickly to competitive pressure. Some people even directly attacked Aya, saying that her overly idealistic ideas did not match the market demand at that time, and that there were endless comments such as why not eat meat paste and ruined the golden age of Ethereum.
However, this position change does not seem to really solve the problem of EF’s high-level centralization. After all, Vitalik said that as early as a year ago, Aya had taken the initiative to transfer the chairmanship, and Vitalik had also explicitly mentioned it when arguing with the community. The decision-making power on changes to EF’s top management still belongs to it.
Therefore, this personnel change may seem to be a response to community issues, but it may still be an execution of centralized decision-making in essence.
The market only looks at the real results, Ethereum needs to find a balance
Obviously, regarding the inauguration of Wang and Stanczak, the community not only expected the new leadership to bring substantial changes, but also worried that this was just a superficial effort under centralization. Expectations and doubts were intertwined, forming a complex atmosphere in the early stages of the change. Perhaps the community is just a novelty for the new officials to take office. Transparent fund allocation and specific reform measures are the answers that the community really wants to see. In the coming months, every decision made by the new leadership will be reviewed in greater detail.
Faced with Ethereum that needs change, different perspectives will inevitably lead to different ideas. The foundation’s top executives want to build a more ideal ecology and future, but their dreams always need bread to support, and the encryption market is no longer the market that the Ethereum family claims. If EF just blindly sells coins and talks about building vast land while ignoring the true feelings of the community, it will undoubtedly only deepen the market’s doubts about Ethereum’s so-called decentralization.
Standing at the moment, we cannot predict the outcome. But one thing is certain: superficial skills and grand narratives can no longer support the true future of Ethereum. Instead of letting the community and Holders swing back and forth between forced construction and helpless abuse, it is better to let Ethereum executives such as EF seek a true balance between decentralized development and centralized decision-making.
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