The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a significant organizational restructuring, marking the conclusion of a multi-month process designed to align its operations with its long-term mandate and treasury management policies. This strategic overhaul sees the EF adopting a more focused structure, comprising seven distinct clusters dedicated to specific domains of work, alongside a reduction in personnel. The changes, detailed in a recent announcement, aim to equip the foundation with the necessary architecture and expertise to address critical future challenges within the Ethereum ecosystem.
This reorganization, rooted in the implementation of the EF’s core mandate and its updated Treasury Management Policy, signifies a pivotal moment for the organization. While the foundation asserts that the new structure is robust and capable of executing essential tasks, it also comes with the departure of 54 colleagues, representing approximately 20% of the EF’s workforce. The foundation has indicated that many of these individuals are expected to continue contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem from new roles outside the EF in the coming weeks. The announcement provides a high-level overview of the new organizational framework and outlines the support mechanisms being offered to departing employees.
A Refined Structure for a Complex Ecosystem
The newly defined structure of the Ethereum Foundation is organized into seven specialized clusters. Five of these clusters are dedicated to distinct domains of work critical to Ethereum’s evolution: the Protocol Layer, the Access Layer, the User Layer, the Community Layer, and the Institutional Layer. Complementing these functional clusters are two operational units: one focused on overarching operations and another comprising management and support teams directly assisting leadership.
This tiered approach acknowledges the multifaceted nature of Ethereum development and adoption. Each domain of work possesses unique challenges, necessitates tailored strategies, and requires distinct metrics for success. The EF plans to elaborate on the specific activities and objectives of each cluster in subsequent communications, offering a more granular understanding of their respective roles.
Deep Dive into the EF’s New Clusters:
Protocol Layer: The Bedrock of Self-Sovereignty
The Protocol Layer cluster inherits and champions the Ethereum Foundation’s foundational responsibility: ensuring that Ethereum fulfills its core promise of scaling self-sovereignty. This cluster’s primary objective is to fortify and advance the Ethereum protocol itself, laying the groundwork for future innovations. Its work is geared towards preserving and enhancing the fundamental properties that make Ethereum a robust and defensible platform. These properties include censorship and capture resistance, adherence to open-source principles, a commitment to privacy, and unwavering security guarantees.
The Protocol Layer is not driven by marketability or short-term commercial interests. Instead, its focus is on making Ethereum inherently more resilient to corruption and external control, and more reliable when counterparties falter, platforms engage in censorship, governments overreach, or intermediaries extract undue value. Key initiatives within this cluster involve the safe deployment of protocol upgrades, the reduction of unnecessary complexity, the minimization of trusted dependencies, and the active defense of the transaction pipeline against detrimental practices like toxic Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and privileged order flow. Furthermore, this cluster is tasked with accelerating and translating long-horizon research, such as advancements in zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) technology, Layer 1 privacy solutions, and post-quantum cryptography, into tangible protocol changes that uphold and amplify self-sovereignty at scale. This commitment to fundamental security and decentralization is crucial for maintaining user trust and the integrity of the network.
Access Layer: Bridging Ethereum to Practical Self-Sovereignty
The Access Layer cluster addresses the critical juncture where Ethereum either empowers or fails individuals seeking to practically exercise the core properties of self-sovereignty – namely, censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security (CROPS). This cluster is tasked with making self-sovereignty accessible, understandable, and sustainable across essential user interactions: reading blockchain data, transacting, proving ownership, delegating responsibilities, and exiting network participation.
These functions must be robust not only for individual users but increasingly for the agents acting on their behalf. Such agents require the ability to access current state, historical data, and related information without relying on intermediaries whose trustworthiness cannot be independently verified. Users should be able to transact with privacy and immunity from censorship, with transaction outcomes that are either guaranteed or fail without incurring costs if predefined conditions are not met. As more of these functions are delegated to agents, it is paramount that users retain ultimate control, able to grant bounded authority, revoke it at will, and maintain custody of their own intentions rather than exposing them to third parties. The interfaces through which users interact with Ethereum, from the silicon level to the frontend applications, must be verifiable, comprehensible, and recoverable, irrespective of user experience or technical expertise.
A guiding principle for this cluster is the "zero option": for every path that involves an intermediary, a credible, direct, 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 favor aggregation, identification, and centralized control. This focus on user empowerment and verifiable interfaces is essential for fostering widespread adoption and trust in Ethereum.
User Layer: Grounding Development in Real-World Needs
The User Layer cluster ensures that the Ethereum Foundation’s work remains firmly rooted in the needs of users and organizations that have a vested interest in the self-sovereign use of Ethereum. It also focuses on expanding the adoption of such tools and norms as broadly as possible. This cluster’s role is to help the EF identify the most critical capabilities, the most severe failure modes, and the most acceptable trade-offs when compromises are necessary.
Its responsibilities encompass defining user segments, developing user personas, creating educational materials, conducting use-case research, and evaluating the impact of Ethereum’s development. The objective is not for the EF to transform into a product development studio, but rather to ensure that decisions made at the Protocol and Access Layer levels are informed by the realities faced by current and potential users, actual constraints, and concrete measures of self-sovereignty. This user-centric approach is vital for ensuring that Ethereum remains relevant and accessible to a diverse range of participants.
Community Layer: Defining Ethereum’s Identity and Reach
The Community cluster is responsible for how the Ethereum Foundation presents itself to the world, both within and beyond the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Its mandate is to clearly articulate what the EF stands for and how its mission fundamentally differs from speculative financial cryptocurrency, compromised corporate-driven crypto initiatives, and the often passive, status-quo-preserving grant-making structures within the non-profit sector that can be susceptible to geopolitical manipulation. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining independence from these and other counterproductive entanglements.
This cluster also cultivates the EF’s relationships with communities outside of the immediate cryptocurrency sphere. The concept of self-sovereignty finds natural allies in the free and open-source software movement, secure and local-first hardware and software development, privacy and cryptography research and advocacy, and civil liberties organizations, as well as the decentralized web and public-interest technology sectors. The Community cluster actively works to foster fruitful, authentic, and high-quality connections between Ethereum and these allied domains, promoting mutual understanding and collaboration. This outward-looking strategy is key to broadening Ethereum’s appeal and impact.
Institutional Layer: Navigating Enterprise and Government Adoption
The Institutional Layer cluster spearheads the EF’s engagement with the institutions that influence how end-users interact with Ethereum through intermediated pathways. This encompasses a wide spectrum of entities, including financial institutions involved in consumer payments, insurance, and other services. It also extends to non-financial enterprises across sectors such as manufacturing, social media, publishing, and numerous others. Government applications and academic or non-profit organizations also fall within its purview.
Across all these engagements, the primary goal is to showcase effective integration of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies. This integration should maximize CROPS properties and the guarantees they provide to both institutions and end-users. These guarantees include ensuring fair and accurate execution, enabling data portability, facilitating practical exit strategies, protecting the privacy of all actors, verifying data authenticity, and improving the detection and prevention of misconduct. The EF believes that many enterprises, governments, and non-profits will recognize that their own incentives align with serving users in ways that bolster self-sovereignty, while still retaining the guarantees necessary to create value or fulfill their missions. Ethereum and cryptographic technologies are positioned as crucial enablers of this evolution. Beyond direct engagement, the Institutional cluster aims to establish and disseminate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials to facilitate institutional adoption.
Furthermore, this cluster collaborates with academics and allied advocacy organizations globally to ensure a precise understanding of Ethereum’s current capabilities and future potential. It also monitors and responds to policy and regulatory developments that could impact Ethereum’s core commitment to self-sovereign use and its foundational principles of censorship (and capture) resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
The Human Element: Supporting Departing Colleagues
The organizational transformation also involves a reduction in the Ethereum Foundation’s workforce. The departure of 54 colleagues is described as a difficult but necessary step to ensure the EF is appropriately resourced and structured to focus on its core mission without undue disruption from short-term market fluctuations.
To facilitate a smooth transition for those leaving, the EF is providing a comprehensive package that includes severance pay and transition support. The severance package is structured to be the greater of one month’s salary for each year of employment at the EF or the amount mandated by local jurisdiction, mirroring the support offered to colleagues who departed in recent months. The transition support includes assistance in identifying new opportunities within the ecosystem and a modest transition grant designed to cover individual expenses such as career coaching. The foundation expressed deep gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by each departing individual, and anticipates continued collaboration with those who find new roles within the broader Ethereum community.
Looking Ahead: A Focused Future
The Ethereum Foundation emerging from this reorganization is characterized as leaner and more strategically focused. The organization has committed to providing further details in the coming weeks and months regarding the evolution of its work and guidance on how the ecosystem can best engage with its new structure. This period of introspection and recalibration signals a determined effort by the EF to solidify its role as a steward of Ethereum’s core principles and a catalyst for its continued decentralized evolution. The foundation’s commitment to its long-term mandate, coupled with a pragmatic approach to organizational efficiency, sets the stage for its future endeavors in supporting the growth and resilience of the Ethereum ecosystem.
