Trent Van Epps said his departure from the Ethereum Foundation reflects a broader shift inside the ecosystem: the Foundation is intentionally reducing its central role and pushing authority and legitimacy outward. In his view, Ethereum is not facing an existential threat. The harder issue is building new institutions that can keep critical public infrastructure funded over time.
Foundation moves away from the center
The Ethereum Foundation has long been seen as a key non-profit behind research, development, and ecosystem support. Recent leadership changes and staff cuts have brought renewed attention to how Ethereum will be governed from here. Van Epps said the direction is not toward a more powerful Foundation, but toward a model where multiple independent organizations coordinate the network’s development together.
Core protocol work needs about $30 million a year
Van Epps estimated that Ethereum core protocol development requires roughly $30 million annually. At the same time, the Foundation’s treasury is gradually declining, shifting attention from the technical work itself to the question of who will keep paying for it. He pointed to Protocol Guild as one example of long-term support, noting that it has distributed about $40 million over the last four years to Ethereum core developers. Even so, he said that model alone cannot meet the ecosystem’s wider financing needs.
Ethereum keeps its edge, but coordination remains difficult
Van Epps argued that Ethereum still leads in DeFi, stablecoin settlement, and EVM adoption, and that these network effects are not easy for rivals to reproduce. His caution is aimed at coordination. Shared infrastructure benefits many companies, yet some of them do not contribute to its maintenance or development costs, creating a free-rider problem.
He expects Ethereum governance to become more distributed over the next decade, with the Foundation taking on a narrower role while new organizations focus on research, commercialization, and ecosystem growth. Van Epps also called for stronger advocacy around ETH and a clearer framework linking token usage to growth in Ethereum’s on-chain economy. For him, long-term success is measured by broad adoption, with billions of users eventually reaching Ethereum and its layer-2 ecosystem.