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Ethereum Foundation co-executive director and board member Hsiao-Wei Wang announced on Thursday that she is leaving her role effective immediately, following a period of sabbatical.
Wang said the time away helped her reflect on her priorities and led her to conclude this is the right moment to step back.
“Serving as EF co-executive director let me see the bigger picture of how the Ethereum community collaborates. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, not only at the EF, but across the builders, researchers, educators, node operators, validators, users, and many other contributors who have helped build, maintain, secure, and use the infrastructure and applications on top of it,” she shared on X.
Wang said she still considers herself part of Ethereum as she figures out her next steps and spends more time at home.
“Ethereum has always been bigger than any one role, any one organization, or any one moment. Its strength comes from those who keep building permissionless infrastructure across the ecosystem to unlock freedoms that didn’t exist before,” she stated.
Wang’s exit is the second co-executive director departure in roughly four months, following Tomasz Stanczak’s resignation in February.
A leadership carousel that keeps spinning
Wang was elevated to co-executive director on March 17, 2025, as part of a broader restructuring that moved longtime executive director Aya Miyaguchi into a newly created president role. The idea was a dual-leadership model: Wang and Stanczak would share the top operational seat.
Stanczak announced his resignation on February 13, 2026, saying he wanted to focus on artificial intelligence. His departure was effective at the end of that month, and Bastian Aue stepped in as his replacement. That left Wang and Aue as the co-executive director pairing.
The Ethereum Foundation is a Swiss-based nonprofit that funds research, supports developers, and coordinates protocol upgrades. It doesn’t issue tokens and doesn’t run a business in the traditional sense.
What Wang actually built
Wang worked on the Beacon Chain, the proof-of-stake consensus layer that launched in December 2020 and ran in parallel with Ethereum’s original proof-of-work chain. She was instrumental in The Merge, completed in 2022, which switched Ethereum’s entire consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake and cut Ethereum’s energy consumption by roughly 99%.
Wang also contributed to Shapella, which enabled staked ETH withdrawals for the first time, and Dencun, which introduced proto-danksharding to reduce transaction costs on layer-2 networks.
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