The Ethereum Foundation (EF) today announced a significant reorganization, marking the culmination of a months-long process aimed at aligning its structure, activities, and personnel with its long-term strategic objectives. This restructuring, driven by the implementation of the EF’s Mandate and its Treasury Management Policy, has resulted in a more focused operational framework, albeit with a reduction in staff. Approximately 20% of the EF’s workforce, totaling 54 individuals, will be departing, with many expected to continue contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem in new capacities.
This strategic pivot signifies a commitment to enhancing the Foundation’s ability to execute critical, long-horizon tasks essential for the continued development and decentralization of the Ethereum protocol. The changes are designed to ensure the EF is robustly resourced and strategically positioned to navigate the evolving landscape of blockchain technology, independent of short-term market fluctuations.
A New Structural Framework for Enhanced Focus
The reorganized Ethereum Foundation now operates under a structure comprising seven distinct clusters, each dedicated to specific domains of work critical for Ethereum’s advancement. These include five core functional clusters: the Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer. Complementing these are two operational clusters: one focused on general operations and another encompassing management and direct support teams.
This cluster-based model acknowledges that different areas of Ethereum development and adoption require tailored approaches, distinct accountability metrics, and unique internal structures. While detailed operational plans for each cluster will be released in the coming weeks, the foundational intent is to foster specialization and drive impactful execution.
The Protocol Layer: Safeguarding Ethereum’s Foundational Promise
The Protocol Layer cluster inherits the EF’s historical responsibility for ensuring Ethereum fulfills its core promise of scaling self-sovereignty. Its primary objective is to fortify and advance the Ethereum protocol itself, upholding its fundamental properties of censorship and capture resistance, open-source ethos, privacy, and security. This cluster is dedicated to ensuring that Ethereum’s evolution prioritizes these non-negotiable guarantees, rather than succumbing to pressures for increased marketability or short-term financial gains that could compromise its decentralized nature.
Key initiatives within this cluster will involve safely implementing protocol upgrades (hard forks), reducing unnecessary complexity, minimizing reliance on trusted intermediaries, and actively defending the transaction pipeline against detrimental practices like toxic MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) and privileged order flow. Furthermore, the Protocol Layer will accelerate the integration of long-horizon research, such as post-quantum cryptography, zkEVM (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) advancements, and Layer 1 privacy solutions, translating cutting-edge discoveries into tangible protocol enhancements that preserve and amplify self-sovereignty at scale. The strategic imperative is to make Ethereum more resilient to corruption and capture, and more reliable when counterparties falter, platforms censor, governments overreach, or intermediaries exploit.
The Access Layer: Democratizing Self-Sovereignty in Practice
The Access Layer cluster is tasked with ensuring that individuals can practically exercise the core properties of self-sovereignty – censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security (CROPS) – when interacting with Ethereum. This involves making these properties accessible, comprehensible, and survivable across fundamental user actions: reading chain data, transacting, proving identity, delegating responsibilities, and exiting network participation.
This cluster will focus on supporting users and, increasingly, the agents acting on their behalf. These agents must be able to access current state, historical data, and related information without relying on unverified intermediaries. Users should be able to transact privately and without fear of censorship, with transaction outcomes that are either guaranteed or fail without cost if conditions are not met. As more functions are delegated to agents, the imperative is to maintain user control through bounded authority grants and revocable permissions, ensuring users retain custody of their intents rather than exposing them to intermediaries. Interfaces, from the hardware level to front-end applications, must be verifiable, intuitive, and recoverable, catering to users of all technical proficiencies and engagement frequencies.
A 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 means identifying opportunities to strengthen CROPS properties within existing infrastructure and acknowledging the necessity of credible alternatives where economic incentives tend to favor aggregation, identification, and centralized control.
The User Layer: Grounding Development in Real-World Needs
The User Layer cluster serves to anchor the EF’s work in the tangible needs and interests of individuals and organizations that rely on self-sovereign Ethereum. Its function is to ensure that the EF possesses a deep understanding of the capabilities that matter most to these users, the most critical failure modes they face, and the acceptable trade-offs for necessary compromises.
This cluster’s responsibilities encompass user segmentation, persona development, creation of educational materials, use-case research, and impact evaluation. Crucially, the EF does not aim to become a product development studio. Instead, the User Layer ensures that decisions made by the Protocol and Access Layer clusters are informed by the realities of current and potential users, practical constraints, and quantifiable measures of self-sovereignty.
The Community Layer: Defining and Amplifying EF’s Values
The Community cluster is responsible for the EF’s public presence and engagement, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its mandate is to clearly articulate what the EF stands for and how its mission diverges from zero-sum financial crypto, compromised corporate interests, and bureaucratic grant management that can be susceptible to geopolitical manipulation. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining its independence from such entanglements.
This cluster also cultivates the EF’s relationships with external communities. Self-sovereignty naturally aligns with movements in free and open-source software, secure and local-first hardware and software development, privacy and cryptography research, civil liberties advocacy, decentralized web initiatives, and public-interest technology. The Community Layer works to foster fruitful, authentic, and high-quality connections between Ethereum and these vital domains.
The Institutional Layer: Bridging Ethereum with Established Sectors
The Institutional Layer cluster spearheads the EF’s engagement with the entities that shape how end-users interact with Ethereum through intermediated pathways. This includes financial institutions involved in consumer payments, insurance, and other services, as well as non-financial enterprises across manufacturing, social media, publishing, and diverse industries. It also encompasses governmental applications and academic or non-profit organizations.
The overarching goal is to showcase effective integrations of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that maximize CROPS properties and the guarantees they offer to both institutions and users. These guarantees include fair and accurate execution, data portability, practical exit capabilities, enhanced privacy, data authenticity, and improved misbehavior detection or prevention. The EF anticipates that many enterprises, governments, and nonprofits will recognize that their incentives align with strengthening user self-sovereignty while retaining necessary guarantees for value creation and mission fulfillment, and that Ethereum can be instrumental in this process. Beyond direct engagement, this cluster will contribute by establishing and disseminating best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials for institutional adoption.
Furthermore, the Institutional Layer collaborates with academics and allied advocacy groups globally to ensure a clear understanding of Ethereum’s current capabilities and future potential. It actively monitors and responds to policy and regulatory developments that could impact Ethereum’s commitment to self-sovereign use and its foundational principles of censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
A Difficult Transition: Supporting Departing Colleagues
The reorganization necessitated difficult decisions regarding personnel. The departure of 54 colleagues represents a strategic recalibration of the EF’s operational capacity. These individuals constituted approximately 20% of the Foundation’s staff.
"These decisions were hard, but they are necessary," a spokesperson for the EF stated. "We must be resourced and organized in a way that allows us to focus on the critical work that only the EF can, and therefore must, do in the coming years, without excessive disruption from short-term market movements."
To facilitate a smooth transition for those leaving, the EF is providing a comprehensive support package. This includes severance pay calculated as the greater of one month’s salary per year of service at the EF or the amount mandated by local jurisdiction, a policy consistent with previous departures. In addition to severance, departing employees will receive transition support, including assistance in identifying new roles within the broader Ethereum ecosystem and a dedicated transition grant to cover expenses such as career coaching.
The EF expressed profound gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by each departing colleague to Ethereum’s development. The Foundation looks forward to continuing to collaborate with those who will find new avenues for contribution within the ecosystem.
Looking Ahead: A Focused Future for the Ethereum Foundation
The restructured Ethereum Foundation emerges from this period of change as a leaner, more agile, and more strategically focused organization. The immediate future will involve the detailed rollout of cluster-specific strategies and operational plans. The EF anticipates sharing further insights in the coming weeks and months, outlining how its work will evolve and providing guidance on how the wider ecosystem can best engage with the newly established structure. This period of adaptation underscores the EF’s unwavering commitment to the long-term vision of Ethereum as a platform for global decentralization and user empowerment.
