Is Ethereum Over? Inside the Manifesto, the Exodus, and a 1,000-Year Vision
The real story behind May 2026 and why I think most of crypto Twitter is reading it backwards.
If you’ve opened crypto Twitter in the past two weeks, you’ve seen the same obituary written ten different ways. Ethereum is dead. The Ethereum Foundation is unraveling. ETH is no longer an investment thesis. People who built their entire careers on this network are walking out the door.
Last Wednesday, David Hoffman, co-founder of Bankless, the man who once said 99% of his net worth was in ETH, announced that he had sold his entire ETH position. The same week, two more Ethereum Foundation researchers, Carl Beek and Julian Ma, resigned. They were preceded over the last few months by Tim Beiko, Barnabé Monnot, Trent Van Epps, Alex Stokes, Josh Stark, and former co-Executive Director Tomasz Stańczak. Eight heavyweights in five months. Five of them in May alone. And by all accounts, more departures are on the way.
Everyone is asking the same question: what is happening to Ethereum? Is ETH really over?
I want to answer that question seriously. I want to put the EF Manifesto, the 38-page document the Foundation published in March, on the table and read it line by line. I want to talk about whether these resignations are the real story, or just the visible tip of something larger. I want to talk about why Etherealize is the piece that completes the picture EF refuses to paint, what Dankrad’s tweet last week actually proposed, and why I think Hoffman selling his ETH is not a trade. It’s a betrayal of the cause.
And at the end of all of this, I want to come back to the only question that matters: is Ethereum finished, or is this, counterintuitively the moment Ethereum finally starts behaving like the thousand-year piece of infrastructure it claims to be?
I’ll save you the suspense. My answer is the second one. But let me show you why.
What Actually Happened
March 13, 2026. The Ethereum Foundation board publishes a 38-page document that has come to be known as the “EF Manifesto.” It is, in essence, the Foundation’s formal answer to the question “what are we, and what are we not?” Vitalik and the board lay out EF’s mission, what it will and won’t do, what it prioritizes, on a thousand-year horizon. The same day, Danny Ryan, yes, the Beacon Chain architect, the former EF researcher, posts this on Twitter: “You go deep, we’ll go broad. At Etherealize we’ll focus on restructuring institutional finance from the inside.” Hold onto that line. We’ll come back to it.
February 2026. Tomasz Stańczak had already announced he was stepping down as co-Executive Director. His parting line is worth reading carefully: “The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for the EF, and for me.” No bitterness. No sniping. A mature handoff.
March through May. Tim Beiko, Trent Van Epps, Alex Stokes, Josh Stark, and Barnabé Monnot announce their departures one by one. In May, Carl Beek and Julian Ma join the list.
May 21, 2026. Two large things happen on the same day. First, Dankrad publishes a long thesis on Twitter. I’m quoting directly: “The way to save Ethereum: the community needs to set up an organization that is economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to Ethereum. The EF currently owns less than 0.1% of all ETH. No staking or transaction-fee revenue flows to it. If we want Ethereum to win again: fund it credibly, start with at least $1 billion. That is entirely reasonable for a $250 billion ecosystem. Find a leader who is talented and wants to fight. Make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that binds the organization. Fund it permanently: a meaningful share of staking yield should flow to it.”
The second event the same day: David Hoffman announces he has sold all of his ETH.
If you can hold those scattered pieces in your head at once, you start to see the real story of the last few months. Now let me make the arguments.
Argument 1: The Manifesto Is Not “Shrinking.” It’s “Focusing.”
I read the EF Manifesto cover to cover. It is not a corporate update. The tone is manifesto. The content is philosophical. It ends with Dante: “and so we came out again to see the stars.” It speaks openly in thousand-year horizons.
There are a handful of concepts in it that you need to understand, because they explain almost everything else.
The CROPS principles. Censorship resistance. Open source. Privacy. Security. EF is saying explicitly: these four are the spine of Ethereum, and no roadmap priority is allowed to overrule them.
The Walkaway Test. If EF and today’s core developers vanished tomorrow, would Ethereum still function? The manifesto’s stated goal is to pass that test. To make Ethereum dependent on no one.
Subtraction as Success. This is the most striking line in the document. EF formally states that its own success is measured by its relative influence over Ethereum decreasing over time. As long as Ethereum thrives, EF is supposed to become smaller.
The Only-EF Rule. EF will focus exclusively on the work that no one else can or will do, core protocol upgrades, multi-client development, public-good security research, crisis coordination. Everything else, once mature enough, is handed off to the community.
And then there is what may be the most important section: the list of what EF is not. I’ll quote it directly, because the resignation wave is hiding in plain sight inside this list:
“We are not a company. We don’t build consumer applications. We are not a kingmaker. We don’t endorse specific brands or companies. We are not an accreditation body. We don’t certify projects. We are not a product studio. We are not a marketing agency. We don’t ride hype cycles, we don’t promote short-term price action. We are not a boss. We don’t force hard forks. We are not a casino. We don’t encourage leveraged gambling. We are not opportunists.”
Now ask yourself this: if you’re an EF researcher whose passion is MEV market design, application UX, institutional outreach, DeFi adoption, basically anything the manifesto explicitly excludes, do you stay? The answer is obvious. The manifesto is not firing these people. It is showing them a door, politely: what you want to do is good and important. It just isn’t going to happen under this roof. Outside, by all means.
This is the part of the manifesto people are misreading the hardest. They think it’s a downsizing plan. They think it’s surrender. It isn’t. It is a focusing document. Vitalik and the board are saying: we will protect the parts of Ethereum that are the heart of it, neutrality, censorship resistance, security, open source, and we will hand everything else to the ecosystem. That isn’t shrinking. That’s hardening the core.
Look at what Vitalik has been writing for the last two years. The Silviculture Society essays. The d/acc essays. The privacy roadmap. The post-quantum work. This is not a man whose worldview ends at next quarter. He doesn’t manage Ethereum to Q3 price action. He manages it as intergenerational infrastructure. The manifesto is that philosophy finally put into writing.
Argument 2: The Departures Are Not Collapse. They Are Maturation.
Brace yourself, because this argument is unpopular. Crypto Twitter says EF is unraveling, the ship is sinking. I’m going to argue the opposite.
Did you read Tomasz Stańczak’s resignation note carefully? I did, and I’d ask you to read it again. He says: “The roadmap is clearer. Goals are set. EF leaders are more confident making decisions on their own. EF has become a healthy organization that can balance long-term goals with the need for change. EF is unique, never boring, run by extraordinarily resilient and intelligent people.”
These are not the words of an angry exit. These are the words of someone saying: I did my job. I’m handing the flag over. I’m going back to building hands-on.
Leaving and disintegrating are not the same thing. Think about an army. The best commanders rise to a certain point and are then redeployed to other fronts. Is that a weakness or a strength? When Atatürk fought at Tripoli and at Gallipoli, did that fragment him or make him a better commander?
The moment the manifesto was published, a filter switched on. Inside EF there were really two visions cohabiting. One faction wanted to keep Ethereum as credibly neutral infrastructure, profit, marketing, narrative is not our job. The other wanted aggressive institutional adoption, marketing, an app-layer push, we should care about the ETH price. When the manifesto landed, the first camp officially won. For the second camp, EF was no longer the natural home. So they left. The interesting question is where they went. We’ll get there.
The most important detail in this whole story: nobody walked out swinging. Tomasz said “future is bright.” Danny Ryan said “you go deep, we’ll go broad.” Trent Van Epps, Tim Beiko, Alex Stokes, all of them made respectful, even grateful, exits. How exactly is that a collapse?
I’ll say something I might be wrong about, but I’ll say it anyway: I think Tomasz’s resignation may turn out to be the first sign of a better, parallel institution being born. Tomasz is a hands-on builder. He founded Nethermind in 2017. Whatever he goes on to build will, most likely, plug a hole somewhere else in the Ethereum stack. Danny Ryan, similarly, moved to Etherealize. The people leaving EF are not leaving Ethereum. They are redistributing themselves across Ethereum’s surface area. That diaspora is not a weakness. It is a strength.
William Mougayar made an observation this week that I think is exactly right: he called Ethereum a “holy trinity.” There is ETH the money. There is EF the organization. There is Ethereum the protocol and ecosystem. People keep mashing these three things together as if they’re one entity. That’s the original sin of this entire debate. EF is a research organization, it cannot be turned into a marketing agency without breaking it, so why are people trying? ETH is a monetary asset, price discovery is the market’s job, EF has no mandate to pump. The ecosystem is bigger and faster than EF, thousands of builders ship every day without checking what the Foundation thinks. Look at all three through a single lens and every speck of dust looks like Ethereum dying.
Argument 3: Etherealize and Dankrad - The Pieces That Fill EF’s Gaps
This is the part I find genuinely exciting, because the missing piece for Ethereum to win, the one I’ve been waiting on for years is finally taking shape.
The manifesto says clearly: we are not a marketing agency, we are not a kingmaker, institutional adoption is not our job. Fine. Beautiful. But the truth is this: an infrastructure can be neutral, but someone still has to sell it to the world. Bitcoin has Saylor. Solana has Mert. Who, exactly, is Ethereum’s capitalist face?
Enter Etherealize. Danny Ryan left EF and co-founded Etherealize with Vivek Raman. Their mission is unambiguous: move institutional finance onto Ethereum, bring Wall Street to Ethereum, position ETH as an institutional asset. Remember Danny’s tweet: “You go deep, we’ll go broad.” In plain English: EF, you go deeper on the technology. We’ll go wider into the world.
This is a beautiful division of labor. Everything the manifesto says EF won’t do, institutional outreach, marketing, narrative-building, the case for ETH-as-asset, Etherealize and structures like it can do. These structures can run on capitalist logic, can be profit-motivated, can openly want ETH to go up. The ethical handcuffs EF wears do not bind them.
Which brings us back to Dankrad’s thesis. He is proposing something genuinely radical: a meaningful share of ETH staking yield should flow to an organization that is accountable to Ethereum, run by people who want ETH to win, with a fighting leader and at least $1 billion in starting capital. He is openly saying the thing EF will never do must be done elsewhere, a capitalist, accountable, ready-to-fight institution.
Is this hard? Yes. Impossible? No. $1 billion is small relative to a $250 billion ecosystem. Dankrad himself notes that the consensus to build it could take a while, but he expects it will eventually happen. If it does, the economic flank of Ethereum suddenly has a real warrior.
Now picture the full architecture. EF protects the technical core. Etherealize and similar bodies fight the institutional war. Dankrad’s proposed foundation, if it materializes, fights the economic war on behalf of ETH holders. Thousands of builders work the application layer. This is a vastly more durable Ethereum. Not a single point of failure. Multiple wings, multi-fronted, resilient. That is the architecture the manifesto was implicitly designing for.
My honest read: the day the March manifesto was published, Ethereum entered a new phase. In the previous phase, everything depended on EF. Every bad thing was EF’s fault, every good thing was EF’s credit. That is unhealthy centralization. Now the center is decomposing. And as it decomposes, Ethereum gets stronger. I might be wrong, but that’s the picture I see.
The Hoffman Question: Risk, Counterargument, and a Betrayal of the Cause
Now we get to the hard part. Because everything I just laid out is positive, but this week, something happened that hurt a lot of long-term ETH investors. David Hoffman, co-founder of Bankless, sold all his ETH.
I’m not going to be polite about this. Let me say what I think.
David Hoffman used to describe himself, publicly, as “99% of my net worth in ETH.” For years, Bankless was built on a thesis: ETH is ultrasound money. ETH is the settlement asset. ETH is Money 2.0. Bankless sold this thesis to hundreds of thousands of listeners. Bankless earned its revenue from the ETH ecosystem. Bankless even launched its own token. Ethereum was Bankless’s reason for being.
So my question is simple: when the thing that gave you your existence goes through a hard time, do you cash out?
I have been in crypto since 2017. I have lived through the 2018 bear market, the Terra collapse, the FTX scandal, the trade-war crash, the October 10th wipeout. In every one of those cycles, I sold things. But I never, not once, fully exited the asset that taught me, fed me, built me, just because “the narrative was out of fashion.” Because I felt I owed that asset something.
What Hoffman did, in my view, is exactly that. Bankless exists because of Ethereum. Hoffman’s voice was elevated by Ethereum. His financial freedom was built by Ethereum. And in Ethereum’s hardest moment, he stepped out, saying he was rotating into a different narrative. That is not a professional move. I think it is a betrayal of the cause.
Am I being harsh? Maybe. But think about it: when the war turns, does the soldier drop his rifle and run? When the patient gets worse, does the doctor walk out of the hospital? When the class gets unruly, does the teacher throw the chalk? When the building shakes, does the engineer abandon it?
I am not making a personal attack. With his own money, Hoffman can do whatever he likes. But if your brand is “Bankless,” if your career was built on top of ETH, then “I sold my ETH” undermines the foundation of your work. That is not freedom. That is owing nothing to anyone and not being there when it counts. I think it’s a low move.
Contrast it with Vitalik. What is Vitalik doing? He’s writing. He’s coding. He’s drawing the roadmap. Privacy. Scaling. Post-quantum. Does he care about the price? I don’t think he even notices. His concern is elsewhere. Tomasz stepped down but said he’d return to hands-on core dev work. Danny Ryan stepped down but founded Etherealize. Dankrad left EF but is producing concrete proposals for Ethereum every week. They are still fighting. They just changed fronts.
Hoffman didn’t change fronts. He withdrew from the front entirely.
Bankless listeners should pay attention. Hoffman’s statement formally cancels the thesis Bankless has been selling for years. That is not a small thing. I think Bankless’s future, after this move, is genuinely uncertain. Hoffman’s former partner Ryan Sean Adams has said he remains bullish on ETH, and I respect that. But Hoffman’s exit damaged the Bankless brand more than any bear market ever did.
Let me be clear: this is not a personal vendetta. It is a critique of a position. Causes are tested in hard times. Hoffman failed his test. That is all.
Conclusion
Let me bring this together.
In May 2026, three things are happening around Ethereum simultaneously. EF published a manifesto that put Ethereum’s thousand-year vision into writing. EF lost a series of heavy researchers, but those departures look less like collapse and more like an ecosystem moving into its diaspora phase. And someone who ate from this cause for years, Hoffman, walked away from it at the worst possible moment.
Look at those three events and conclude “Ethereum is over,” and I think you’ve put the wrong lens on your camera. Here is why.
The manifesto hardens Ethereum’s core. CROPS, censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security, is no longer negotiable. The Walkaway Test becomes a real engineering goal. The Foundation is willing to shrink itself, because Ethereum’s growth now requires the Foundation to shrink.
The departures are arranging themselves into a defensive perimeter around Ethereum’s core. Etherealize on the institutional flank. A possible Dankrad-style capitalist foundation on the economic flank, if and when it materializes. Builders across the application flank. EF holding the technical heart. That is a multi-layered defense.
Hoffman’s exit, in my view, is not a sign of the cause’s weakness. It is the cause testing its people. Those who don’t believe leave at the hard moments. Those who believe keep digging. I’m one of the diggers, and when I look around, I see Vitalik, Justin Drake, Dankrad, Tomasz, Danny Ryan. None of them broke apart when things got hard. They redistributed across a wider front.
My honest view: ETH’s future is bright. We may have more pain in the short term, we are not in the middle of a bull cycle, the macro is occasionally hostile. But the technology is solid, the organization is being disciplined, the ecosystem is widening, and the satellite structures around it (Etherealize, and whatever Dankrad’s proposal eventually becomes) are taking shape. Looking at temporary turbulence and screaming downward at a technology with a thousand-year vision is not, to me, a serious posture.
I might be wrong, this isn’t investment advice, and I don’t pretend to know more than the next person. But I’m still here, still on the side of the builders, still convinced this is the side that wins long term.
So I’ll leave you with the two questions I keep turning over: Is the EF Manifesto a shrinking of Ethereum or a focusing of it? And is David Hoffman selling his ETH walking away from a cause, or simply a rational trade?
I’ve told you where I land. I’d rather you disagree with me than agree silently. Either way, I’ll be on the other side of this cycle, still here.