The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a significant restructuring, marking the culmination of a months-long strategic reorganization aimed at enhancing its operational efficiency and deepening its focus on critical development areas. This pivotal moment, driven by the implementation of the EF’s Mandate and its updated Treasury Management Policy, signifies a deliberate shift towards a more agile and mission-aligned operational framework. The process has resulted in a refined organizational structure, a recalibrated set of activities, and a more concentrated team dedicated to advancing the Ethereum protocol and its ecosystem.
This comprehensive overhaul, however, has also led to a reduction in the Foundation’s workforce. Approximately 20% of the EF’s staff, totaling 54 individuals, will be departing. The Foundation has emphasized its commitment to supporting these departing colleagues, many of whom are expected to continue their contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem in new capacities. This announcement provides an overview of the new organizational structure and details the support mechanisms in place for those leaving the EF.
A New Architectural Blueprint for Ethereum’s Future
The reorganized Ethereum Foundation now operates under a cluster-based model, strategically designed to address distinct yet interconnected domains of work essential for the protocol’s growth and sustainability. This new structure comprises seven key clusters:
- Protocol Layer: This cluster bears the foundational responsibility for the Ethereum protocol’s ongoing development, security, and scaling. Its mandate is to ensure Ethereum fulfills its core promise of censorship resistance, capture resistance, open source principles, privacy, and security.
- Access Layer: Focused on making Ethereum’s core properties – particularly self-sovereignty – practically accessible, legible, and survivable for individuals and the agents acting on their behalf. This involves ensuring seamless and secure interactions with the chain, including reading state, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting.
- User Layer: This cluster is dedicated to ensuring the EF’s work remains grounded in the needs and experiences of Ethereum’s users and organizations. It aims to inform decisions at the Protocol and Access Layer by understanding critical capabilities, significant failure modes, and acceptable trade-offs for real-world adoption.
- Community Layer: Responsible for shaping the EF’s external presence and engagement, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its objective is to clearly articulate the EF’s values and differentiate them from less principled or commercially driven crypto initiatives. It also cultivates vital relationships with allied fields such as free and open-source software, privacy advocacy, and public-interest technology.
- Institutional Layer: This cluster focuses on the EF’s engagement with established institutions that influence how end-users interact with Ethereum. This includes financial institutions, enterprises across various sectors, government bodies, and academic organizations, with the goal of showcasing the benefits of Ethereum integration and cryptographic technologies.
- Operations Cluster: This group manages the essential internal functions that ensure the smooth and efficient running of the Foundation.
- Management and Support Cluster: This encompasses the leadership team and dedicated staff who provide direct support for management activities, ensuring strategic direction and oversight.
Each of these clusters is designed with a tailored approach, specific accountability metrics, and an internal structure optimized for its unique domain of work. The EF plans to release more detailed information on each cluster’s specific objectives and operational plans in the coming weeks.
Deep Dive into the Core Clusters:
Protocol Layer: Fortifying Ethereum’s Foundation
The Protocol Layer cluster inherits the EF’s historical commitment to advancing Ethereum’s foundational promise of scaling self-sovereignty. Its primary objective is to continuously harden and scale the Ethereum protocol itself, ensuring it upholds its core tenets: censorship and capture resistance, open-source principles, privacy, and security as non-negotiable guarantees. This cluster is not focused on short-term marketability or transforming Ethereum into another intermediated financial rail. Instead, its work is geared towards making Ethereum more resilient to corruption and capture, and more reliable when counterparties falter, platforms censor, governments overreach, or intermediaries extract undue value.
Key areas of focus for the Protocol Layer include safely shipping network upgrades, reducing unnecessary complexity within the protocol, minimizing trusted dependencies, defending the transaction pipeline against detrimental practices like toxic MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) and privileged order flow, and accelerating long-horizon research. This research encompasses advancements in post-quantum security, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs), and Layer 1 (L1) privacy solutions. The ultimate goal is to translate these innovations into protocol changes that preserve and enhance self-sovereignty at scale. This commitment reflects a deep understanding of the technical challenges and philosophical underpinnings of a truly decentralized network.
Access Layer: Bridging Theory and Practice for Self-Sovereignty
The Access Layer cluster is where the theoretical promise of Ethereum’s "CROPS" properties (likely referring to Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, and Security, though the acronym is not explicitly defined in the original text) meets the practical needs of individuals. This cluster’s mission is to ensure that self-sovereignty is not just an abstract concept but a tangible reality for users across essential actions such as reading the chain, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. These functionalities must be robust and user-friendly, not only for individuals but increasingly for the sophisticated agents that may act on their behalf.
Crucially, users and their agents must be able to access current state, historical data, and related information without relying on opaque intermediaries. The cluster aims to facilitate private and censorship-resistant transactions, where outcomes are either guaranteed or fail cost-free if conditions are not met. As more functionality shifts to automated agents, maintaining user control becomes paramount. This involves enabling users to grant bounded authority, revoke it at will, and retain custody of their intents rather than exposing them to potential exploitation by intermediaries. Interfaces, from the silicon level to the frontend, must be verifiable, understandable, and recoverable, catering to users of all technical backgrounds and engagement frequencies.
The guiding principle for the Access Layer is the "zero option": for every path that involves an intermediary, a credible, intermediary-free alternative must exist and remain accessible. Tactically, this involves identifying opportunities to enhance CROPS properties within existing infrastructure and acknowledging the necessity of credible alternatives when economic incentives naturally lead to aggregation, identification, and control. This proactive approach ensures that decentralized alternatives remain viable and accessible.
User Layer: Grounding Development in Real-World Needs
The User Layer cluster serves as the vital link between the EF’s technical endeavors and the actual needs of individuals and organizations that have a vested interest in the self-sovereign use of Ethereum. This cluster’s work is instrumental in ensuring that decisions made at the Protocol and Access Layer are informed by the realities of current and potential users, their genuine constraints, and measurable impacts on self-sovereignty.
The scope of the User Layer includes in-depth analysis of user segments, the development of detailed user personas, the creation of comprehensive educational materials, rigorous use-case research, and thorough impact evaluations. The EF’s intention is not to become a product development studio, but rather to ensure that its strategic direction is shaped by a deep understanding of user requirements and the practical implications of self-sovereignty. This user-centric approach is critical for the long-term adoption and utility of the Ethereum network.
Community Layer: Articulating Values and Building Bridges
The Community cluster is responsible for how the EF presents itself to the world, fostering meaningful connections both within and beyond the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Its core mission is to make the EF’s foundational principles clear and distinct, differentiating them from zero-sum financial crypto initiatives, compromised corporate crypto projects, and the often passive, grant-managing segments of the non-profit sector that can be susceptible to geopolitical manipulation. The EF is firmly committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining independence from such entanglements.
Furthermore, this cluster actively cultivates relationships with entities outside the immediate cryptocurrency space. The principles of self-sovereignty resonate strongly with advocates for free and open-source software, secure and local-first hardware and software solutions, privacy and cryptography research, civil liberties, the decentralized web, and public-interest technology. The Community cluster endeavors to create a fertile ground for collaboration between Ethereum and these allied fields, ensuring these interactions are natural, unforced, and of high quality. This outward-looking approach is crucial for establishing Ethereum as a technology with broad societal relevance.
Institutional Layer: Navigating the Landscape of Intermediated Paths
The Institutional Layer cluster spearheads the EF’s engagement with the various institutions that currently shape intermediated paths for end-users to interact with Ethereum. This encompasses a wide array of entities, including financial institutions involved in consumer payments, insurance, and other services; non-financial enterprises in manufacturing, social media, publishing, and diverse industries; government agencies exploring applications of blockchain technology; and academic and non-profit groups.
The overarching goal of this cluster is to foster the creation of compelling use cases that demonstrate the effective integration of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies. These integrations aim to maximize CROPS properties and the guarantees they offer to both institutions and users. This includes ensuring fair and correct execution of transactions, enabling data portability and practical exit strategies, protecting the privacy of all actors, proving data authenticity, and enhancing the ability to detect or prevent misbehavior. The EF believes that many enterprises, governments, and nonprofits will recognize that aligning their incentives with user empowerment through strengthened self-sovereignty can be mutually beneficial, and that Ethereum and cryptographic technologies can be instrumental in achieving this. Beyond direct engagement, the Institutional Layer will work to establish and disseminate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials to facilitate institutional adoption.
Moreover, this cluster collaborates upstream with academics and allied advocacy organizations globally. This engagement is vital for ensuring a correct understanding of Ethereum’s current capabilities and future potential. It also plays a crucial role in monitoring and responding to policy and regulatory developments that could impact Ethereum’s commitment to self-sovereign use and its core principles of censorship resistance, open source development, privacy, and security.
A Difficult Transition: Supporting Departing Colleagues
The significant reorganization has necessitated difficult personnel decisions, resulting in the departure of 54 colleagues. The EF has characterized these decisions as necessary to ensure the organization is appropriately resourced and structured to execute critical tasks without undue disruption from short-term market fluctuations.
To support those transitioning out of the EF, a comprehensive package has been offered. This includes severance pay, calculated as the higher of one month’s salary per year of service at the EF or the locally mandated amount in their jurisdiction, consistent with previous departures. In addition to severance, departing staff will receive transition support, including assistance in finding new roles within the Ethereum ecosystem and a small transition grant to cover expenses such as career coaching.
The EF has expressed profound gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by each departing individual to the Ethereum project. The organization looks forward to continued collaboration with those who will find new avenues to contribute within the broader ecosystem. This support mechanism reflects a commitment to ensuring a dignified and constructive transition for affected employees.
Looking Ahead: A Focused Future for the EF
The Ethereum Foundation emerges from this reorganization as a more streamlined and focused entity. The deliberate restructuring and workforce adjustments are intended to sharpen its strategic direction and enhance its capacity to address the evolving challenges and opportunities within the decentralized technology landscape.
In the coming weeks and months, the EF plans to provide further details on how its workstreams are adapting and how members of the ecosystem can best engage with the newly configured organization. This commitment to transparency and continued communication underscores the EF’s dedication to its mission and its role in the ongoing development of Ethereum. The foundational principles of decentralization, user empowerment, and robust protocol development remain at the forefront of the EF’s strategic vision. The organization’s ability to adapt and refine its internal structure is a testament to its long-term commitment to fostering a resilient and powerful decentralized future.
