Leadership Change at Ethereum Foundation’s Technical Division

The Protocol team at EF has changed leadership, with key developers departing.

The Protocol team at the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has undergone a leadership change. Leading developers Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko are leaving the organization, while Alex Stokes is taking a sabbatical.

The new co-leaders of the division are:

• Will Corcoran — research coordinator (zkVM, post-quantum consensus);
• Kev Wedderburn — head of the zkEVM team;
• Fredrik — head of protocol security.

According to Corcoran, the team will focus on preparing the Glamsterdam and Hegota updates. Developers plan to increase the gas limit to 200 million and implement a proposer-builder separation mechanism. In later upgrades, the priority will be network resilience against censorship.

The reorganization occurs amid a series of departures from EF. Last month, Josh Stark left the foundation, and in February, co-executive director Tomasz Stanczak departed. Some specialists have moved to external projects, including the Tempo network.

Monnot, who worked at EF for over six years, explained his departure as a desire to focus on the product side of Ethereum and improve user experience.

The Protocol division is responsible for the design, security, and scaling of the network’s base layer. The team also coordinates AllCoreDevs developer meetings and cryptography research.

Back in March, Gnosis and Zisk, with EF’s support, created a framework to unify the fragmented ecosystem of second-layer networks.

In April, Gnosis co-founder Friederike Ernst announced that not only L2 solutions might join the project.