Josh Stark, one of the most visible leaders at the Ethereum Foundation, said he will leave the organization after five years and finish his work at the end of April.
In a post on X, Stark said he had decided in early March to step away and “pass the torch,” adding that he plans to take a long break and spend time with family and friends.
His departure adds to a period of change inside the Ethereum Foundation. Over the past few months, the group has reset parts of its leadership structure, pushed a stronger message around mainnet scaling and cypherpunk values, and rolled out new security and treasury measures as Ethereum’s roadmap moves forward.
Stark confirms departure
Stark announced the move on Thursday and described his time at the foundation as a major part of his career.
He noted that working for Ethereum had been a “great honour” and thanked other leaders and colleagues he worked with during his time at the non-profit. He also said he had no set next step beyond taking time away from work.
The Ethereum Foundation has not framed the move as part of a dispute or sudden break. Stark said he made the decision in early March and will stay through the end of April, which points to a planned handover rather than an abrupt exit.
His statement focused on gratitude, the progress of the Ethereum ecosystem, and the effort he said it takes to solve hard problems.
A public face of the foundation
Stark held a management role at the Ethereum Foundation and had responsibility for project execution, communications, marketing, and co-steward duties under the foundation’s management structure set out last year.
That position made him one of the better-known public figures inside the organization, especially during periods when the foundation tried to explain roadmap choices and broader strategy to the community.
His recent work shows how broad that role had become. In March, Stark co-authored an Ethereum Foundation blog post on how Ethereum’s base layer and layer-2 networks should work together as one system.
The piece said Ethereum should scale as a cohesive platform. He argued that the base layer should remain a resilient hub for settlement, liquidity, and decentralized finance while layer-2 networks extend those core features to more users.
Stark also held a leading role in Ethereum’s security work. The foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative, announced in 2025, named him and protocol security lead Fredrik Svantes as the initial co-chairs.
That program aims to raise Ethereum’s security standard to a level where both individuals and institutions can trust far larger amounts of value onchain.
Moreover, outside the foundation, Stark has also been known as a co-founder of ETHGlobal and L4. His personal site and public speaker biography describe him as a management team member at the Ethereum Foundation.
He previously helped build ETHGlobal, which became a major entry point for Ethereum developers through hackathons and ecosystem events.
Exit comes during wider EF changes
Stark’s departure arrives as the Ethereum Foundation continues a broader leadership reset. In February, the foundation said Tomasz K. Stańczak would step down from the co-executive director role and Bastian Aue would become interim co-executive director.
Around the same time, Tomasz said Hsiao-Wei Wang would remain in place and that Aue was taking on an expanded leadership role.
In addition, that same February update also gave a clear view of where the foundation wanted to focus in 2026. Tomasz wrote that the organization remained centered on cypherpunk values while putting more effort into security, censorship resistance, scaling, and closer work across Ethereum’s layer-1 and layer-2 ecosystem.
He also singled out Stark for helping drive fast operational changes and leading major communication shifts in 2025.
Those priorities later appeared in more formal roadmap writing. In its February protocol update, the foundation said its work for 2026 would center on scale, user experience, and hardening the base layer.
In the March L1 and L2 strategy post that Stark co-wrote, the foundation also repeated that Ethereum’s base layer should scale without giving up CROPS values, meaning censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
Foundation activity continues
Even as leadership changes continue, the Ethereum Foundation has kept rolling out new programs and treasury steps.
On April 14, it launched a $1 million audit subsidy program that can cover up to 30 percent of audit costs for selected Ethereum projects and uses Areta’s marketplace to connect builders with more than 20 security firms.
The program fits with the foundation’s recent push to make security work easier to access for teams building on mainnet.
Furthermore, the foundation has also moved on treasury management this year. In February, it said it had started staking about 70,000 ETH from its treasury, with rewards flowing back to the organization.
On April 9, the foundation also said it would convert 5,000 ETH into stablecoins through CoW Swap to help fund research and development, grants, and related work.