Ethereum Foundation appoints three Protocol co-leads

The Ethereum Foundation announced Monday that Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn and Fredrik will serve as co-leads of its Protocol cluster. The foundation said Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko plan to depart and Alex Stokes will take a sabbatical; no exact dates were provided.

The new co-leads will manage the Protocol group’s work on base-protocol design, research and development, Layer 2 data-blob scaling and user experience. The foundation noted all three have experience collaborating across teams and clusters inside the organization.

Fredrik will continue to lead Protocol security research, including the Trillion Dollar Security project. Wedderburn remains head of the zkEVM team. Corcoran has contributed to zkEVM and has recently focused on post-quantum security and other research and development efforts.

Corcoran wrote on X that the cluster will continue work on the next upgrades and coordination efforts. The foundation's announcement said the co-leads will carry forward the Protocol roadmap and cross-cluster coordination.

Glamsterdam is the next planned scaling upgrade and is expected to raise the gas limit floor to 200 million and introduce Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS). A later upgrade named Hegotá is scheduled to begin prototype work on FOCIL, a feature intended to strengthen censorship resistance.

Monnot, who spent more than six years at the foundation, wrote on X that recent Protocol priorities shifted his focus to nearer-term, product-facing questions and that he has been interested in making Ethereum features more available to users today. The announcement did not state Monnot’s or Beiko’s final departure dates or the length of Stokes’ sabbatical.

The leadership change follows a broader reorganization the foundation began last year to concentrate research and support mainnet scaling. The foundation has increased investment in scaling work and expanded research on quantum security, privacy and application ecosystem support. Protocol oversees coordination of AllCoreDevs meetings and teams such as Cryptography, Prototyping, Security, zkEVM and P2P.

Several other senior staff have left the foundation in recent months. The announcement noted departures including Josh Stark and Tomasz K. Stańczak earlier this year, and some former developers have joined outside projects. The foundation has also faced scrutiny this year over reports that employees were asked to sign a workplace loyalty pledge; the recent announcement did not address that issue.

Operationally, the Protocol cluster will continue work to roll out Glamsterdam with elevated gas limits and ePBS and to conduct research and prototyping for Hegotá and FOCIL. The foundation's post emphasized ongoing attention to scaling, security and user-experience priorities and to coordination across teams.