The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a significant reorganization, marking the culmination of a months-long strategic overhaul designed to align its structure, activities, and workforce with its long-term objectives. This initiative, driven by the implementation of the foundational EF Mandate and a newly established Treasury Management Policy, aims to create a more focused and execution-oriented organization. The restructuring, however, has also resulted in the departure of 54 colleagues, representing approximately 20% of the EF’s workforce, a move the foundation states is necessary for its future strategic direction.
Background and Context: A Mandate for Change
The Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and fostering the development of the Ethereum protocol, has consistently played a pivotal role in the ecosystem’s growth. Over the years, its scope has broadened, encompassing research, development grants, community building, and core protocol advancements. As Ethereum has matured and its ecosystem has expanded exponentially, the need for a more refined organizational structure and a clear mandate became apparent.
The EF Mandate, a guiding document outlining the foundation’s core mission and strategic priorities, provides the philosophical and practical framework for this reorganization. It emphasizes the enduring principles of Ethereum: self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open-source ethos, privacy, and security. The accompanying Treasury Management Policy signals a commitment to prudent financial stewardship, ensuring the long-term sustainability of the foundation’s operations and its ability to fund critical research and development.
This period of transition is not unprecedented for the Ethereum Foundation. Historically, the foundation has adapted its structure to meet the evolving needs of the rapidly developing blockchain space. Previous reorganizations have focused on specific areas, such as scaling research or improving developer tooling. However, this latest overhaul appears to be more comprehensive, touching upon the fundamental organizational design and operational clusters.
The New Structure: A Layered Approach to Ethereum’s Future
The revamped Ethereum Foundation is now organized around seven distinct clusters, each addressing a crucial domain within the broader Ethereum ecosystem. This layered approach aims to tailor internal structures and accountability to the specific demands of each area, fostering greater specialization and efficiency.
Core Operational Clusters:
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Protocol Layer: This cluster inherits the EF’s long-standing commitment to the foundational principles of Ethereum. Its primary objective is to fortify and scale the core protocol itself, ensuring it continues to uphold its core properties of censorship and capture resistance, open-source accessibility, privacy, and security. The Protocol Layer’s work is not driven by marketability or short-term interests, but by the imperative to make Ethereum more resilient against corruption and capture. This involves the safe execution of network upgrades (hard forks), the reduction of unnecessary complexity, the minimization of trusted dependencies, the defense of the transaction pipeline against malicious actors (such as those exploiting MEV – Miner Extractable Value – and privileged order flow), and the acceleration of long-horizon research like post-quantum cryptography, zkEVMs (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines), and Layer 1 privacy enhancements. The goal is to translate these advancements into protocol changes that preserve and enhance self-sovereignty at scale.
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Access Layer: This cluster focuses on ensuring that individuals can practically access and leverage Ethereum’s self-sovereign properties. Its mandate is to make self-sovereignty legible, available, and survivable across key user actions: reading chain data, transacting, proving identity, delegating, and exiting the network. These functions must be robust for individual users and increasingly for the decentralized agents acting on their behalf. Users and their agents must be able to access current state, historical data, and related information without relying on unverified intermediaries. The aim is for users to transact privately, without censorship risk, and with guaranteed outcomes or cost-free failures. As more functionality moves to agents, maintaining user control through bounded authority and easy revocation is paramount. Interfaces, from the silicon level to the user-facing frontend, must be verifiable, understandable, and recoverable, regardless of user expertise. A core principle here is the "zero option": for every intermediated path, a credible, intermediary-free alternative must exist and remain accessible.
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User Layer: This cluster ensures that the EF’s work remains grounded in the needs of current and potential Ethereum users and organizations. It aims to identify the most critical capabilities, the most serious failure modes, and the most acceptable trade-offs for self-sovereign Ethereum use. The User Layer’s activities include defining user segments, developing personas, creating educational materials, conducting use-case research, and evaluating the impact of EF initiatives. The objective is not to transform the EF into a product studio, but to ensure that decisions made by the Protocol and Access Layers are informed by the realities and constraints of actual users.
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Community Layer: This cluster defines how the EF engages with the world, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its role is to clearly articulate the EF’s values and differentiate them from what it perceives as zero-sum financial crypto, corporate-compromised crypto, and grant-managing non-profits that may be vulnerable to geopolitical influence. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining independence from these and other counterproductive entanglements. Furthermore, this cluster cultivates relationships with external communities that share Ethereum’s commitment to self-sovereignty, such as free and open-source software, secure hardware, privacy research, cryptography advocacy, civil liberties organizations, and public-interest technology initiatives. The aim is to foster fruitful and high-quality intersections between Ethereum and these related fields.
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Institutional Layer: This cluster is responsible for the EF’s engagement with institutions that facilitate end-user interaction with Ethereum through intermediated paths. This includes financial institutions (e.g., payments, insurance), non-financial enterprises (e.g., manufacturing, social media, publishing), government entities, and academic or non-profit groups. The primary goal is to foster the creation of successful integration showcases of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that enhance CROPS (Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, Security) properties for both institutions and users. This includes guaranteeing fair execution, ensuring data portability and exitability, protecting privacy, proving data authenticity, and detecting or preventing misbehavior. The EF believes that many institutions will recognize the benefits of strengthening self-sovereignty while retaining necessary guarantees for value creation and mission fulfillment. Beyond direct engagement, this cluster will work to establish best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials for institutional adoption. It also collaborates with academics and advocacy organizations globally to ensure Ethereum is accurately understood and to monitor and respond to policy and regulatory developments that could impact its core principles.
Operational and Management Clusters:
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Operations Cluster: This cluster provides the essential infrastructure and support services required for the EF’s day-to-day functioning, ensuring smooth operational execution across all other clusters.
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Management and Direct Support: This cluster encompasses the leadership and teams directly responsible for overarching strategic direction, resource allocation, and the coordination of EF-wide initiatives.
The Human Element: Supporting Departing Colleagues
The organizational restructuring has led to a reduction in the EF’s workforce. The foundation stated that parting ways with 54 colleagues was a difficult but necessary decision to ensure the organization is "resourced and organized in a way that allows us to focus on the critical work that only EF can, and therefore must, do in the coming years, without excessive disruption from short-term market movements."
To support those departing, the EF is providing a comprehensive package. This includes severance pay, calculated as the higher of one month’s salary per year of service at the EF or the amount mandated by local jurisdiction. This severance policy is consistent with previous departures. Additionally, departing employees will receive transition support, which includes assistance in finding new roles within the Ethereum ecosystem and a modest transition grant earmarked for individual expenses such as career coaching.
The EF expressed gratitude for the contributions of these individuals, acknowledging their talent, dedication, and time invested in Ethereum. The foundation also anticipates continuing to collaborate with many of these former colleagues as they find new avenues for contribution within the broader ecosystem.
Implications and Future Outlook
This reorganization signifies a strategic pivot for the Ethereum Foundation, emphasizing a more streamlined and purpose-driven approach. The introduction of clearly defined, layered clusters suggests a move towards greater specialization and accountability, aiming to accelerate progress on critical Ethereum development fronts.
The focus on principles like self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, and privacy is reinforced through the mandate and the new structure. The Protocol Layer’s commitment to advancing these core tenets, even at the expense of short-term marketability, underscores a long-term vision for Ethereum as a resilient and decentralized global platform.
The Access and User Layers highlight a growing emphasis on making Ethereum’s benefits tangible and accessible to a wider audience, while the Community and Institutional Layers aim to broaden Ethereum’s reach and understanding within both the crypto space and beyond.
The departure of a significant portion of the workforce, while a difficult consequence, is presented as a necessary step in realigning resources with strategic priorities. The EF’s commitment to supporting departing employees suggests an effort to maintain positive relationships and facilitate continued contributions to the ecosystem from individuals who may be leaving the foundation.
Looking Ahead
The Ethereum Foundation has indicated that further details regarding the evolution of its work and optimal modes of ecosystem engagement with the new structure will be shared in the coming weeks and months. This period of reorientation is poised to reshape the EF’s operational landscape, with the stated goal of fostering a more agile and impactful organization dedicated to the continued advancement of the Ethereum protocol and its foundational principles. The success of this new structure will ultimately be measured by its ability to deliver on Ethereum’s promise of a more decentralized, secure, and user-empowering future.
