Ethereum Foundation named Bastian Aue interim co-director as Tomasz Stańczak stepped down

The Ethereum Foundation’s board announced on February 13, 2026, that Tomasz Stańczak would leave his post as co-executive director and that Bastian Aue had been appointed interim co-executive director. Hsiao-Wei Wang remained in the other co-executive-director role.

The two official accounts describe a short transition with slightly different effective-date language. The board said Aue’s interim appointment was effective immediately. Stańczak said he would step down at the end of February 2026 and that Aue would take over alongside Wang. Read together, the records establish the leadership decision on February 13 while allowing for a handover through month-end.

A shorter tenure than the original plan

The change mattered because Stańczak and Wang had entered the roles on March 17, 2025, as part of a deliberate overhaul of the foundation’s management. When the foundation explained that structure on April 28, 2025, it assigned co-executive directors responsibility for strategy and operational execution, while its board retained oversight and vision. That same explanation said the board and Stańczak had agreed on an expected two-year term.

His February 2026 departure therefore arrived well before that expected term had run its course. That is a verified chronology, not evidence of a dispute or failure. Neither the board’s announcement nor Stańczak’s account attributed the decision to an internal conflict. Contemporaneous coverage described a leadership shake-up, but the primary documents support the narrower formulation: Stańczak decided to step down, Aue received the interim appointment, and Wang stayed in place.

The distinction is important in an ecosystem where personnel changes can quickly attract governance speculation. The Ethereum Foundation funds and coordinates substantial work, but a change in its executive team is not a protocol upgrade, an on-chain vote or a transfer of control over Ethereum’s network.

What each side said about continuity

The board credited Stańczak with improving outreach to businesses and other ecosystem groups, adding urgency to internal work, making teams more efficient and expanding enterprise community development. Those are the board’s contemporaneous assessments; the announcement did not provide independent performance measurements for them.

Stańczak supplied a broader account of his own tenure. He listed goals that he said had either been completed or were improving, including faster decision-making, greater engagement with institutions and founders, treasury policies, clearer relationships between Ethereum’s base layer and layer-two networks, and more transparency around budgets and structure. He also said a proposed merged long-term protocol roadmap was planned. These statements document his priorities and his view of progress as of February 13; they do not establish that every objective was complete or that the proposed roadmap was final.

For continuity, the board described Aue as already part of executive decision-making, with prior focus on grants, enterprise and operations. That background made the appointment an internal succession rather than the arrival of an outside leader. Stańczak said he intended to continue working with Ethereum founders and frontier-technology projects, so the announcement was an exit from the foundation’s co-executive role, not a declared exit from the Ethereum ecosystem.

What the record did not establish

The February 13 documents did not change Ethereum’s consensus rules, set a network-upgrade date or document a market impact. Coinburn therefore does not attach an ether price move to the announcement. Crypto trades continuously across many venues, and a causal market claim would require a named instrument, venue, measurement window and evidence separating the announcement from other market news.

The durable event-day conclusion is organizational: the foundation replaced one half of a leadership pairing created in 2025, preserved Wang’s role and chose an experienced internal executive as interim co-director. Whether the handover altered protocol priorities, grantmaking or institutional strategy was a question for subsequent primary records, not a fact established on February 13, 2026.