On January 18, 2025, Vitalik Buterin announced significant changes to the Ethereum Foundation's leadership aimed at enhancing technical expertise and improving communication with developers in the Ethereum ecosystem.

These leadership changes come in the wake of a challenging 2024 for the Ethereum community, which was marked by scrutiny over the Foundation's spending practices and personnel decisions.

Buterin made it clear that the Ethereum Foundation will refrain from engaging in political lobbying and will not assume a central role in the ecosystem's development.

In May 2024, the Ethereum Foundation implemented a conflict of interest policy following controversies surrounding paid advisory roles taken by researchers at the EigenLayer Foundation.

Notably, Justin Drake, a well-known Ethereum researcher, accepted a paid advisory position at EigenLayer in May 2024, but he later resigned and apologized to the community in November 2024, vowing to avoid such roles in the future.

The Dencun upgrade, released in March 2024, significantly reduced transaction fees for Ethereum's layer-2 networks, with fees plummeting by as much as 99%.

This drastic reduction in fees spurred rapid growth in Ethereum's layer-2 networks, which expanded to a total of 55 rollups as reported by L2Beat.

The overall overhaul aims to bolster decentralized application developers while promoting key principles such as decentralization, censorship resistance, and privacy.

However, the rise of layer-2 networks raised concerns among market participants, as the Ethereum base layer experienced a staggering 99% decline in network revenues during the summer of 2024, although it rebounded by the end of the year.