The Ethereum Foundation, which backs the development of the Ethereum blockchain, has overhauled its leadership structure to separate the responsibilities of its management team and board of directors.

The board will act as the “security council to protect the heart and soul” of the foundation and set visions for Ethereum, while the new management will be focused on the strategic and operational execution of those visions, the Foundation said in an April 28 blog post.

It added in an April 28 X post that Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak were appointed as co-executive directors on March 2 to deliver on those visions — which are centered around championing censorship resistance, open-source innovation, privacy and security

Wang and Stańczak’s roles took effect on April 28 with the foundation setting a two-year term for Stańczak to address some of Ethereum’s biggest challenges. Stańczak’s new role will be balanced with his work as founder of Ethereum infrastructure firm Nethermind and a soon-to-be-announced Ethereum-focused venture capital firm.

Source: Ethereum Foundation

Bastian Aue and Josh Stark are also a part of the management team, with Aue to focus on organizational strategy, hiring and training, and Stark to primarily be tasked with project execution, communications and marketing.

The board consists of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation’s President Aya Miyaguchi, Swiss counsel Patrick Storchenegger, and Wang, who will bridge between the board and management team.

Related: ‘Vitalik: An Ethereum Story’ is less about crypto and more about being human

Buterin will continue providing technical and intellectual guidance on the Ethereum ecosystem, Miyaguchi will oversee the foundation’s vision while managing external relationships, and Storchenegger will keep handling legal and compliance matters.

The board was responsible for selecting Wang and Stańczak as executive directors — a decision they acknowledged was unconventional — and they also have the power to terminate those positions.

The Ethereum Foundation has adopted a more active role in the Ethereum ecosystem in recent months, following criticism from Synthetix founder Kain Warwick that the foundation “doesn’t care” about decentralized finance innovation.

Others in the Ethereum community previously attributed the foundation’s lack of engagement and leadership to Ether’s (ETH) poor price performance relative to Bitcoin (BTC) and Solana (SOL).

Ethereum Foundation’s main focus is scaling

The Foundation said its three main focus areas over the next 12 months would be to scale the Ethereum layer 1, scale blobs at the layer 2 level, and improve user experience.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist and protocol support Sophia Gold have already pitched proposals to to address Ethereum’s scaling woes at the base layer under Ethereum Improvement Proposals-9678 and 9698. 

Both EIPs look to raise the gas limit, which should theoretically raise Ethereum’s transaction throughput by the same magnitude.

Magazine: Ethereum is destroying the competition in the $16.1T TradFi tokenization race

Key takeaways:

BONK price is up 73% since April 22, hitting a five-month high of $0.00002167.

BONK’s open interest surged 290% to $43.2 million. 

Bonk (BONK), the second-largest Solana-based memecoin by market capitalization, is on track to continue the recovery it began on April 22. BONK has climbed approximately 73% from its April 22 low of around $0.00001247, bringing its price up to an intraday high of $0.00002167 on April 28.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows BONK trading at $0.00001923, up 3% over the 24 hours and 60% over the last seven days.

BONK/USD daily chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

BONK’s trading volume has jumped 98% over the last 24 hours to $478 million, and its market capitalization also jumped, briefly touching $1.7 billion on April 28, before retracing to the current level of $1.5 billion.

Let’s examine the factors that have fueled BONK’s price momentum over the last week.

Memecoins recover across the board

BONK’s rally over the last seven days mirrors the bullish price movements across the broader crypto market, including the memecoin sector. Most memecoins have posted double-digit gains over the last week. DOGE and Shiba Inu (SHIB), the leading memecoins, have jumped 3% and 5% over the last seven days. 

Official Trump (TRUMP), the memecoin associated with US President Donald Trump, has recorded 73% weekly gains, while Base’s Brett (BRETT) has rallied 83% over the same period. 

Performance of top-cap memecoins. Source: CoinMarketCap

This widespread rally has pushed the total memecoin market value to $55.51 billion, a 17.5% leap in the past week, as per CoinMarketCap data.

Memecoin market cap and volume. Source: CoinMarketCap

Over $7.96 billion in memecoin trading volume was recorded in the past seven days alone, representing an 85% weekly change. The resurgence is driven by investors once again embracing risk-on assets like memecoins.

Increasing open interest backs BONK’s rally

The surge in the price of Bonk over the last seven days comes after a significant jump in its open interest (OI). 

BONK’s total OI on all exchanges rose 290% from $11 million on April 22 to $43.2 million on April 26. Although this metric has since dropped to $28 million at the time of writing, it remains significantly higher than the OI seen since December 2024.

Rising open interest reflects growing trader participation in BONK futures, indicating heightened speculative activity.

BONK open interest across all exchanges. Source: CoinGlass

Data from CoinGlass shows increasing demand for leveraged long positions in BONK over the last few days, as indicated by the OI-weighted futures funding rate.

BONK average perpetual contracts 8-hour funding rate. Source: CoinGlass

Increasing funding rates usually suggest that futures traders are bullish, expecting future price increases, which may indicate a continuation of the uptrend.

BONK’s social dominance remains high, suggesting high social activity. Santiment data shows BONK’s social dominance spiking from 0.091% to 0.572% between April 20 and April 26, driven by BONK’s ecosystem buzz. 

BONK social dominance and volume. Source: Santiment

This surge in chatter on social media platforms reflects rising retail and institutional interest, amplifying FOMO and driving demand.

BONK breaks out of a multimonth downtrend

On April 13, BONK price broke out of a descending parallel channel, igniting strength that saw it flip the 50-day and 100-day exponential moving averages (EMAs) to support. 

The bulls will likely continue the rebound toward the significant resistance level at $0.00002410 (200-day SMA) in the short term. A daily candlestick close above this level, accompanied by high volume, could see BONK rise toward the Jan. 19 range high near $0.000040. This would represent a 104% increase from the current price.

BONK/USD daily chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

The sharp rise in the relative strength index and its position at 71 in the overbought region reinforces the buyers’ dominance in the market. 

However, the overbought conditions could facilitate profit-taking, occasioning a slight correction before BONK continues its uptrend. 

“$BONK’s descending trendline got cleared,” declared popular analyst World of Charts in an April 28 post on X, “expecting 2x in the coming days.”

Meanwhile, Crypto Joe spotted BONK breaking out of a bullish pennant in the 30-minute timeframe targeting $0.00002690.

Source: Crypto Joe

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

Wallet provider MetaMask is launching a crypto payments card that will allow users to spend self-custodied funds, offering crypto holders additional ways to use their tokens.

The new card is backed by Mastercard and is being developed in partnership with CompoSecure and Baanx, according to the company. The product uses smart contracts to execute the IRL (In Real Life) transactions, with a processing speed under five seconds. It operates on the Linea network, a layer-2 scaling solution on Ethereum.

The companies marketed the self-custodied crypto card as an alternative to the potential risks associated with centralized exchanges. In February, the second-largest crypto exchange by volume, Bybit, was hacked for $1.4 billion, an event that sparked widespread consternation in the crypto space.

With the launch of its card, MetaMask is entering a competitive segment of the cryptocurrency market. Major exchanges like Binance, Bybit, Coinbase, and Crypto.com already offer crypto debit cards, some of which feature “crypto-back” rewards that allow users to earn digital assets on their purchases.

MetaMask has struggled lately as interest in and participation in the Ethereum ecosystem have dried up. According to Dune Analytics, the wallet collected just $289,312 in fees for the week of April 14, much less than the $1.3 million in fees collected for the same period a year ago.

Related: Spar supermarket in Switzerland starts accepting Bitcoin payments

Stablecoin, BTC payments growing use cases for crypto

Payments have emerged as one of the fastest-growing use cases for cryptocurrencies in 2025, offering a way to bring real-world utility to digital assets.

Luxury brands like Dorsia have begun accepting various cryptocurrencies as payment, while messaging app Signal is reportedly exploring adopting Bitcoin for peer-to-peer transactions, and a bill in New York has been introduced to legalize the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for state payments.

Magazine: Bitcoin payments are being undermined by centralized stablecoins