Josh Stark, a senior figure at the Ethereum Foundation, will leave the non-profit at the end of April after five years, the organization said Thursday. His exit comes as the foundation sharpens its focus on mainnet scaling and reiterates its priorities around privacy, security, and open-source development.
The move follows a series of leadership changes and coincides with a strategic roadmap that centers on three themes through 2026: scaling the Ethereum network, improving user experience, and hardening the protocol’s base layer. Market participants are watching how this new leadership configuration will execute those plans, given their direct impact on Ethereum’s technical and economic profile.
Role in major Ethereum upgrades
Stark played a central role in several of Ethereum’s most significant technical milestones.
He was involved in:
- The Merge, which shifted Ethereum from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake
- Subsequent network upgrades including Dencun, Fusaka, and Pectra
- The Trillion Dollar Security initiative, where he served as co-chair, focusing on user experience and safety
- The foundation’s board, where he was a co-steward after a governance restructuring in 2023
In March, Stark co-authored a detailed blog post with colleagues Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma, outlining Ethereum’s evolving scaling strategy and its reliance on the Layer 2 ecosystem. He had previously published an analysis on Ethereum’s long-term monetary properties and chain resilience, particularly in comparison to Bitcoin during a period of heightened market attention.
Career at the Ethereum Foundation and earlier roles
Stark joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2019 on the special projects team. He later moved into senior management, working closely with president Aya Miyaguchi and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. He also collaborated with co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Bastian Aue through a phase of internal leadership turnover.
Before joining the foundation, Stark:
- Founded ETHGlobal, the organization behind prominent Ethereum hackathons
- Co-founded venture studio L4
- Served as head of operations and legal at Ledger Labs
These roles placed him at the intersection of protocol development, ecosystem building, and early-stage project incubation within the Ethereum community.
Leadership turnover at a key moment
Stark’s resignation is part of a broader wave of departures from the Ethereum Foundation.
- In February, Tomasz K. Stańczak stepped down after serving less than a year as co-executive director. His short tenure was associated with efforts to streamline operations and strengthen ties with larger institutions.
- On Wednesday, Trent Van Epps announced he would leave the foundation to concentrate on the Protocol Guild, an independent initiative that supports Ethereum core developers.
Taken together, these exits indicate a period of realignment inside the foundation as it responds to external pressures, regulatory scrutiny, and mounting competition from other smart contract networks.
Scaling success reshapes Ethereum’s economics
The foundation’s pivot toward aggressive scaling has already transformed Ethereum’s cost structure and usage dynamics.
The Dencun upgrade, activated in March 2024, introduced “blobs,” a new data format that drastically reduced the cost for Layer 2 rollups to post data to the main chain. As a result:
- Many Layer 2 transaction fees have fallen to fractions of a cent, with some projected costs below $0.001
- Average gas fees for common on-chain actions, such as token swaps, dropped to around $0.05 by early 2026
These changes have made Ethereum’s ecosystem more competitive for applications and users, particularly in comparison with lower-fee alternative networks.
However, the same shift has also had immediate consequences for Ethereum’s monetary design. With rollups paying far less to use mainnet blockspace, total transaction fees — and therefore the amount of ETH burned under EIP-1559 — have collapsed. In the months after Dencun, fee-derived network revenue fell by as much as 99%.
This steep decline in the burn rate pushed Ethereum back into net inflation. Since mid-April 2024, the total ETH supply has been in its longest sustained growth phase since the Merge, with more than 112,000 ETH added. For capital allocators and traders, this creates a clear trade-off: aggressive scaling and cheaper transactions have, at least temporarily, weakened the deflationary narrative that emerged after EIP-1559 and the transition to proof-of-stake.
Next upgrade and what traders are watching
Looking ahead, the next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, is scheduled for the first half of 2026. The release is expected to:
- Raise the gas limit beyond 100 million
- Further optimize data handling for rollups
- Expand the network’s effective capacity to process transactions
These changes aim to deepen Ethereum’s role as a high-throughput base layer for a growing Layer 2 ecosystem.
Traders will be watching:
- How the new leadership team executes the scaling roadmap
- Whether fee markets and burn dynamics stabilize or remain weak
- The impact of higher capacity on demand for blockspace and long-term ETH issuance
- How Ethereum’s narrative as both a settlement layer and a potential store of value evolves under the new economic regime
Stark’s departure, set against this backdrop of technical progress and monetary recalibration, underscores a pivotal transition period for the organization behind the world’s second-largest digital asset.
Curious how Ethereum’s evolution affects everyday traders? Learn the basics in our guide on what Ethereum is and how it works.
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