Josh Stark, an influential part of the Ethereum Foundation, is stepping down from his role after five years, according to an announcement on Thursday.
“Working for Ethereum at the Ethereum Foundation has been a great honour. I’m proud to have worked with great people inside and outside of the EF, and proud of what our community has accomplished together,” Stark said in an X post.
Stark joined the EF in 2019 to work with the special projects team and was later promoted to a leadership role where he worked alongside EF President Aya Miyaguchi and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. He also worked with co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Bastian Aue, among other ranking executives.
The move comes amid an ongoing transformation of the EF and Ethereum (ETH) roadmap. In addition to a major shakeup of the organization’s leadership last year, the EF has redoubled its focus on scaling the Ethereum mainnet and supporting core cypherpunk values, including Censorship resistance, Open source, Privacy, and Security (or CROPs).
Notably, Tomasz K. Stańczak stepped down as co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation at the end of February, after less than a year in the role.
Stark’s history with EF
Stark, who will stay on until the end of April, was perhaps best known for his communications role and was among the better-known public faces of the organization. He also played a stewardship role for major efforts, including Ethereum’s switch to proof-of-stake, called The Merge, and the Dencun, Fusaka, and Pectra upgrades.
While Stark’s official title seemed to be flexible, he was named an EF board “co-steward” during the top-level organizational changes last year. More recently, he was listed as a co-chair of the EF’s Trillion Dollar Security initiative.
Last month, Stark co-wrote a strategic EF blog post with Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma outlining Ethereum’s updated scaling ambitions and relationship to the Layer 2 ecosystem. He also previously wrote an influential essay on ETH’s “hardness.”
“I’ve made no plans for the future, other than taking a long break to reset and spending time with my family & friends,” Stark said.
Stark also founded ETHGlobal, a leading organizer of Ethereum-focused hackathons, and L4, an early-stage venture studio. He previously served as head of operations and legal at Ledger Labs.
On Wednesday, Trent Van Epps also announced that he had left the EF, where he worked on protocol development as well as funding and grants efforts to work full-time on the Protocol Guild, the independent funding organization he founded for Ethereum core developers.
© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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