TLDR
- Josh Stark will leave the Ethereum Foundation at the end of April after five years.
- Stark joined EF in 2019 on special projects and later moved into senior leadership.
- He worked on The Merge and later upgrades including Dencun, Fusaka, and Pectra.
- EF has renewed its focus on mainnet scaling and privacy, security, and open source values.
- Tomasz K. Stańczak and Trent Van Epps also left EF during recent leadership changes.
Josh Stark will leave the Ethereum Foundation at the end of April after five years with the non-profit group. He announced the decision on X on Thursday and said the job had been “a great honour” to him. Stark became one of the foundation’s best-known public figures during a period of major technical and organizational change.
His departure comes as EF continues a broad leadership reset and updates its roadmap priorities for Ethereum. The foundation has been reshaping its leadership while refining how it approaches scaling and security.
Five years at the Ethereum Foundation
Stark joined EF in 2019 and began work with the special projects team on internal initiatives. He later moved into senior leadership as his role expanded across operations, strategy, and public communication efforts. Over time, he worked closely with Aya Miyaguchi and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on foundation matters.
He also served on the management team with co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Bastian Aue. During last year’s leadership changes, EF named him a board “co-steward” as responsibilities shifted across the organization. More recently, the foundation listed him as co-chair of the Trillion Dollar Security initiative for Ethereum. That shift placed him among the executives speaking for EF during a transition period.
Stark said he has not set plans for his next move after leaving the foundation in April. “I’ve made no plans for the future,” he wrote in his public post on Thursday. He added that he wants a long break and time with family and friends after years of work.
Role in major Ethereum upgrades
Stark was closely linked with several of Ethereum’s biggest milestones during his time at EF leadership. He helped steward The Merge, which moved the network from proof of work to proof of stake.
He also supported later upgrades such as Dencun, Fusaka, and Pectra across later development cycles. These upgrades drew strong attention because they touched Ethereum’s consensus model, fees, and network capacity.
Those projects kept him at the center of technical messaging and ecosystem coordination for the foundation. He became a familiar voice for developers, founders, researchers, and users who followed Ethereum’s roadmap. His work often combined planning, communication, and support for cross-team execution during major releases.
Last month, Stark co-wrote a strategy post with Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma for the foundation. The post set out Ethereum’s current scaling path and its link with Layer 2 networks. Stark also wrote an essay on ETH’s “hardness” and founded ETHGlobal and the venture studio L4.
Leadership changes continue at EF
Stark’s exit follows other recent changes inside the foundation’s leadership structure and operating model. Tomasz K. Stańczak left the co-executive director role at the end of February this year. He had held that position for less than a year after the prior reshuffle.
On Wednesday, Trent Van Epps also said he had left the foundation after years of protocol work. Van Epps had worked on protocol development, grants, and funding efforts across the Ethereum ecosystem. He said he would focus full time on Protocol Guild, which he co-founded for core developers.
EF has also renewed its focus on scaling the Ethereum mainnet and improving its core base layer. It tied that work to cypherpunk values, including censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
Stark’s departure adds another change as the organization adjusts its structure and near-term goals. That process has included changes in staffing, leadership titles, and public strategy updates.
