Key Highlights

  • Dankrad Feist proposed a new ETH-aligned organization requiring at least $1 billion in funding, governed by a board explicitly accountable to ETH holders and sustained by a permanent staking revenue stream.

  • Feist noted the Ethereum Foundation currently holds less than 0.1% of all ETH and earns nothing from staking or transaction fees, leaving its incentives structurally disconnected from the network's economic performance.

  • The proposal arrived days after at least eight senior Ethereum Foundation members departed in 2026, with Feist himself joining Tempo, Stripe's stablecoin blockchain, after leaving the organization.

Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist published a detailed proposal on May 21, 2026, calling for the creation of a new ETH-aligned organization separate from the Ethereum Foundation, with a minimum of $1 billion in funding. As covered across multiple publications, the organization would be governed by a board with explicit accountability to ETH holders and funded partly through a permanent staking revenue stream, rather than relying on foundation grants or discretionary spending.

Feist framed the $1 billion figure as proportionate, describing it as "very reasonable for an ecosystem with a $250 billion market cap," in line with Ethereum's market capitalization of roughly $257 billion at the time of writing. He pointed to a structural flaw in the Foundation's current model: it holds less than 0.1% of all ETH and earns nothing from staking or transaction fees, meaning its financial incentives are disconnected from the health of the network it is meant to protect. A permanent stakeholder revenue stream built into the new organization would address that misalignment directly.

The proposal arrived in the middle of an accelerating wave of departures from the Ethereum Foundation. At least eight senior members left in 2026, five of them in May alone. Feist was among those who departed, subsequently joining Tempo, a stablecoin blockchain being developed within Stripe's infrastructure. His departure, combined with exits from protocol researchers who built foundational infrastructure, including the Beacon Chain and key Layer 2 bridging mechanisms, has raised questions about whether the Foundation retains sufficient technical depth to lead Ethereum's next development phase.

Community responses have ranged from support for a more economically aligned structure to skepticism about whether any single well-funded organization could avoid reproducing the centralization problems attributed to the Foundation itself. The debate reflects a deeper unresolved tension in Ethereum's governance model: whether decentralized decision-making is a durable strength against capture, or a structural liability that prevents effective coordination when the network faces competitive pressure from rival layer-1 blockchains.