Can the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation save ETH?

Author: Jaleel Jia Liu, BlockBeats

This is the largest personnel change in the foundation in the past five to six years, occurring during a period of low ETH prices.

After Aya Miyaguchi's promotion to chair of the Ethereum Foundation caused dissatisfaction among some community members, the Ethereum Foundation welcomed new appointments. On March 1, the Ethereum Foundation announced two new co-executive directors to replace Aya in her original position—Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak.

Compared to Aya, these two new executive directors have extremely strong technical backgrounds, and Rhythm BlockBeats will provide detailed information about them in this article.

Hsiao-Wei Wang

At a critical moment of significant leadership adjustment in the Ethereum Foundation, Hsiao-Wei Wang officially became one of the co-executive directors of the foundation with her profound technical background and outstanding community influence. This blockchain pioneer from Taiwan has focused on core research of Ethereum for seven years and has made significant contributions in the fields of sharding and Beacon Chain.

Hsiao-Wei Wang started as a backend engineer and was drawn into the world of blockchain in 2016 by chance, captivated by its decentralized ideals, and resolutely decided to dive in. At that time, Ethereum founder Vitalik was looking for contributors interested in Ethereum research, and Hsiao-Wei did not hesitate to apply, ultimately successfully joining the Ethereum team as one of the core developers.

From that moment on, she devoted herself wholeheartedly to Ethereum's technical research, with her most representative contribution being the development of sharding technology. Sharding technology is a key upgrade to solve Ethereum's scalability issues, significantly improving network throughput and making Ethereum more efficient and smooth in handling a large number of transactions.

In addition to sharding technology, she has also been deeply involved in the research and development of Casper, Beacon Chain, and Sharding P2P networks, ensuring the technical robustness of these core infrastructures. Moreover, she has long been responsible for reviewing the Ethereum protocol and developing proof of concept (PoC), laying a solid technical foundation for the advancement of Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2).

Despite her years of deep involvement in the technical field, Hsiao-Wei has not confined herself to the world of code but has actively engaged in community building. She frequently represents the Ethereum Foundation at various technical conferences and has organized many high-quality Ethereum technical exchange activities, especially in Taiwan, successfully bridging local developers with the global Ethereum ecosystem.

For example, at the 2018 Ethereum Sharding Workshop in Taipei, she served as an organizer and played a central role in the technical discussion session, exploring the future development direction of Ethereum with global developers. Her contributions not only enhanced the global influence of the Taiwan Ethereum community but also provided more developers with the opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge of Ethereum's cutting-edge technologies.

2018 Taipei Ethereum Sharding Workshop Hsiao-Wei Wang in the C position

If she had to describe herself in a few words, Hsiao-Wei chose "unexpectedly brave, sincere, and bear-like." This may sound a bit unusual, but it aptly reflects her personality: fearless in technical exploration, sincere in community communication, while also possessing a touch of adorable stubbornness and resilience. Whether breaking through technical bottlenecks in code or promoting collaboration in the community, she has demonstrated these qualities.

Now, as a co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Hsiao-Wei will not only continue to delve into technology but also seems poised to take on more management and coordination responsibilities.

Tomasz Stańczak

Next, let's look at another co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, Tomasz Stańczak. As the founder of Nethermind, he is not only one of the core developers of Ethereum but has also conducted in-depth research in key areas such as MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) and PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation). Today, he stands at a critical juncture in Ethereum's development, tasked with driving the continuous growth of the entire ecosystem.

Before entering the blockchain field, Tomasz was an engineer in financial markets with rich technical experience. In 2017, he officially joined the Ethereum development team as a core developer, was an early team member of FlashBots, and is also a board member of the Starknet Foundation.

He later founded Nethermind, one of the most important execution clients for Ethereum today. Nethermind initially started as an experimental project, but under Tomasz's leadership, it quickly grew into one of the most important infrastructures in the Ethereum ecosystem, ranking alongside Geth, Besu, and Erigon as one of the top five execution clients.

Tomasz has transformed Nethermind from a small team into a globally recognized blockchain development organization with strong execution capabilities. He has established a comprehensive talent training and recruitment system and has promoted deep collaboration in various fields such as Ethereum infrastructure, restaking (EigenLayer), and StarkNet, making it a key player in driving the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Compared to Geth's historical accumulation, Nethermind has attracted more and more developers and institutional users with its efficient code architecture, flexible customization, and strong enterprise-level support.

As a technological innovator, Tomasz's work has also sparked controversy. For instance, Nethermind, along with Besu, stopped storing Ethereum's historical data, a decision that drew public criticism from Geth core developer Péter Szilágyi, who deemed it irresponsible and potentially misleading to users.

This was also one of the triggers for Péter Szilágyi's departure from Ethereum, stating, "Since even core developers are maximizing their interests relative to other developers, why bother to make it better? I am deeply disappointed in everyone involved."

Currently, Tomasz is gradually stepping back from his role as CEO of Nethermind but will maintain a certain level of involvement. His new task at the foundation is to ensure that Ethereum continues to uphold its core values of open source, global permissionless collaboration, privacy, and security while scaling.

This will be one of the most important moments in Ethereum's history

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko stated in a post on March 2: "The past few months have been tumultuous. Although Ethereum still needs to make many changes to achieve victory, if handled properly, this could be one of the most important moments in Ethereum's history."

He particularly praised Tomasz Stańczak, calling him the only person who could join the Ethereum Foundation from the outside and immediately drive change. Tomasz built Nethermind from scratch, developing it into one of the most successful independent organizations in the Ethereum ecosystem, and has always been active globally, engaging deeply with developers, researchers, and users through concrete actions. His addition will bring stronger execution capabilities and technical implementation to the Ethereum Foundation.

At the same time, Hsiao-Wei Wang is also an indispensable part of Ethereum's development process. She is not only one of the few developers who have been deeply involved since the early transition from Ethereum to Eth2 but also created the first diagram illustrating how sharding works. She not only understands how Ethereum research evolves into standardized specifications and ultimately lands in production environments but also possesses a unique perspective as a long-term core member of the foundation. Her addition complements Tomasz perfectly in both technical and strategic aspects.

Tim Beiko also emphasized that Ethereum's culture is unique, with both top-down strategic decision-making and bottom-up technical driving. Now, with Aya Miyaguchi serving as chair of the foundation and establishing formal and informal advisory networks, the governance structure of the Ethereum Foundation is gradually improving. Although Aya remains a controversial figure, Ethereum must continue to attract new forces while adhering to OG values.

The ultimate impact of this personnel adjustment in the foundation may take time to fully manifest. But it is certain that this is a good start for reform, and Vitalik is also trying to listen to the community's opinions.