It’s been a rough year for the Ethereum Foundation, the grantmaking nonprofit that helps support Ethereum, the best-known blockchain behind Bitcoin. As Ethereum loses market capitalization and mindshare to competitors, its foundation has been plagued by scandal. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and main figure, has laid out a new plan to right the ship.

“We are actually currently undergoing major changes to the EC’s management structure, which have been underway for almost a year,” Buterin said in an X post. “Some of this has already been done on and published, and some is still in progress.”

In his X post outlining the changes, Buterin listed a number of goals, including improving the “technical expertise of EC management” and improving “two-way communication and ties between EC management and the ecosystem actors” it supports.

According to Buterin, the changes will not be designed to centralize, corporatize or politicize the fund. The organization will not suddenly”[s]aggressively lobbying regulators and powerful political figures,” he said, and neither would “[b]become an arena for vested interests […] or even more a ‘protagonist’ in Ethereum.”

The shake-up comes as Ethereum’s reputation among developers has deteriorated in recent months. Members of the broader crypto community are flocking to fast and cheap competitors like Solana, which have been quicker to accommodate the recent memecoin craze.

Some say Ethereum has lagged because it lacks an organizing vision — something the foundation, while not “in charge” of Ethereum, could have helped remedy.

Over the past 12 months, the foundation has been mired in controversy. It has endured accusations of being ineffective but also too powerful. Conflict-of-interest scandals haven’t helped either: Payments from private companies to foundation employees have recently sparked widespread backlash and forced the organization to update its policies.

Some have blamed Aya Miyaguchi, the foundation’s executive director since 2018, for the foundation’s problems. In the midst of a pressure campaign for Miyaguchi’s removal, Buterin has stepped in as the Ethereum Foundation’s sole decision-maker. “The person who decides the new EC leadership team is me,” he stated on X. “One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to give the EC a ‘proper board’, but until that happens, it’s me.”

However, Miyaguchi has not been kicked out of the foundation. Buterin lambasted some of her critics on X, accusing them of using her as a “scapegoat.” In several tweets, Buterin singled out certain particularly inflammatory comments on social media — including death threats and explicit calls for more bullying of Miyaguchi — calling them “pure evil.”

“If you ‘keep the pressure on,’ then you are creating an environment that is actively toxic to top talent,” Buterin wrote. “Some of Ethereum’s top developers have messaged me recently expressing their distaste for the social media environment that people like you create. YOU MAKE MY JOB HARDER.”