Ethereum Foundation Names Three New Co-Leads to Major Protocol Cluster

The Ethereum Foundation announced Monday that Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik Svantes will serve as the new co-leads of its Protocol cluster, the core team responsible for designing, researching, and coordinating the Ethereum base layer.

The reshuffle reflects significant turnover at the top of Ethereum’s R&D apparatus. Prominent researcher Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko, who has long anchored Ethereum’s core-developer coordination, are both leaving the foundation. Alex Stokes, who led the cluster alongside them, is going on sabbatical. Under their coordination, the Protocol team shipped the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, which introduced PeerDAS for blob scaling and raised the mainnet gas limit on the path to 200 million.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

Corcoran is a research coordinator with cross-team visibility, having worked on zkVM proving, post-quantum consensus, and the Fast Confirmation Rule. Wedderburn leads the foundation’s zkEVM team. Svantes leads Protocol security research, including the Trillion Dollar Security project that focuses on hardening Ethereum for institutional-scale value.

The handover is already underway. EF said much of the transition was discussed at the recent Interop event in Svalbard, Norway, where developers also advanced groundwork for two upcoming upgrades: Glamsterdam, targeted for the first half of 2026, and Hegotá, planned for later in the year. EIP-8037 was finalized at the event, and FOCIL prototypes for censorship resistance are now functional.

The reorganization arrives during a turbulent stretch for the foundation, with co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak stepping down in February to return to active building, and longtime EF figure Josh Stark exiting last month.

Earlier this year, rumors that employees had been asked to sign a controversial loyalty pledge drew sharp criticism from the broader community. The Protocol cluster reshuffle is part of a broader push to put Ethereum on a more competitive footing as Solana, layer 2 ecosystems, and other chains compete for developers and capital.