Dankrad Feist Proposes $1 Billion Ethereum Advocacy Organization as EF Exodus Fuels Identity Crisis

Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist proposed Thursday creating a new independent organization funded with at least $1 billion in ETH and permanently sustained through staking and fee revenue, with a mandate explicitly tied to supporting ETH’s competitive position and price.

“The way to save Ethereum: The community needs to create an organization that’s economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it,” Feist wrote on X. He outlined four requirements: a minimum of $1 billion in ETH funding, a revenue stream from staking fees, a board “who want ETH to go up,” and a leader “who is competent and wants to fight.” He noted the Ethereum Foundation currently holds less than 0.1% of all ETH and has no direct flow of staking or fee revenue.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The proposal lands during the deepest talent drain in the foundation’s history with the exit of nine senior staff in 2026. Five of them in May alone, including Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, Carl Beek, Julian Ma, and Trent Van Epps.

The departures have stripped the Protocol cluster, the team responsible for base-layer research, of contributors across every layer it covers. ETH has fallen roughly 57% from near $5,000 last summer to around $2,100, a decline that has sharpened the debate over whether the EF’s research-first, price-agnostic mandate is sustainable.

Community reaction was immediate and deeply polarized, with Ryan Adams, co-founder of Bankless, strongly endorsing the concept and pointing to FundStrat and BitMine (BMNR) as the best-positioned existing candidates to lead such an effort. BookofEth echoed the sentiment, arguing the real fighters for Ethereum, including Robinhood, Sony, Base, Aave, and BlackRock, are already economically aligned and don’t need a new charter.

FigoETH pushed back hard, arguing Ethereum is “a global decentralized movement coordinated by social consensus, not a single org,” and that Feist’s proposal was better suited to centralized chains like Tempo.

Ethereum consensus researcher potuz warned that if the new organization controlled governance, the fork schedule, and shipping pace, it would effectively turn Ethereum into “another corporate chain” and destroy its value.

Curve founder Michael Egorov questioned the “main objective of such an organization” and wanted a defined metric. The Ethereum Community Foundation said it had predicted this exact need and has been building an ETH-aligned alternative all year.

The CROPS mandate the EF published in March explicitly positions the foundation as a temporary steward focused on censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. It says nothing about price. Whether the community’s frustration leads to a new institution or dissipates into the usual cycle of X threads and governance fatigue will depend on whether anyone puts capital behind Feist’s vision and answers Egorov’s question.