Ethereum Foundation names three new co-leads to major Protocol cluster

The Ethereum Foundation is reorganizing its Protocol team as prominent developers Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko plan to depart the organization and Alex Stokes is going on sabbatical.

According to an announcement on Monday, Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik will serve as the new cluster co-leads. 

Fredrik leads Protocol security research efforts, including the recently formed Trillion Dollar Security project. Meanwhile, Wedderburn leads the zkEVM team, which Corcoran has contributed to alongside his attention on post-quantum security and other R&D efforts.

The EF’s notes that all three researchers have contributed to cross-team and cross-cluster efforts. 

"There's a new chapter starting for the Protocol cluster. We're welcoming new leads and coordinators, and continuing our work toward Glamsterdam, Hegotà, and the Strawmap," Corcoran wrote on X. 

The Ethereum Foundation has been going through a period of transformation, following serious reorganization efforts last year that aimed to put Ethereum on a more competitive footing. 

In addition to major investments in scaling the Ethereum mainnet, the foundation has also doubled down on research areas like quantum security, privacy, and supporting an Ethereum-based app ecosystem. 

That said, the foundation has also drawn scrutiny from the wider Ethereum community, particularly earlier this year after rumors circulated that employees were being asked to sign a controversial loyalty pledge. 

Several prominent figures at the Ethereum Foundation have departed, including Josh Stark last month and Tomasz K. Stańczak in February, less than a year after being named co-executive director of the reorganized foundation. Other notable EF developers have been poached by projects including Tempo.

"Over this past year, our Protocol priorities, particularly our 'Improve UX' work, shifted my attention to nearer-term questions," Monnot, who spent more than six years at the EF, said on X. "Throughout, I've been excited to take on a more product-centric view. Making Ethereum's unique features more available to users today is on my mind; so is participating in the plurality of ways that Ethereum gets built."

The EF's Protocol team, formerly Protocol R&D, is the core group at the Ethereum Foundation responsible for designing, researching, developing, and coordinating Ethereum's base protocol, scaling L2 data blobs, and improving UX. It is the umbrella organization that also oversees areas like AllCoreDevs meetings, Cryptography, Prototyping, Security, zkEVM, P2P, and other sections, according to the EF’s org chart. 

Protocol is currently working on rolling out Ethereum's next major scaling upgrade, called Glamsterdam. The blog notes Glamsterdam will look to increase the Ethereum gas limit floor to 200 million and introduce Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS). 

The team is also forecasting R&D attention on the later Hegotá upgrade, which will begin to roll out FOCIL prototypes, a bid to bulk up Ethereum’s censorship-resistance.