The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a substantial reorganization, marking the culmination of a months-long strategic review aimed at aligning its structure, activities, and resources with its core mandate and newly established Treasury Management Policy. This significant transformation, while positioning the EF for future execution, has also resulted in the departure of 54 employees, approximately 20% of its workforce.
The restructuring, detailed in a recent announcement from the foundation, introduces a more focused operational framework designed to enhance the EF’s capacity to drive Ethereum’s long-term development. This strategic pivot is underpinned by the foundation’s commitment to its foundational principles, often encapsulated by the acronym CROPS: Censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security. The reorganization aims to ensure these principles remain paramount as Ethereum continues to scale and evolve.
A New Framework for Ethereum’s Future
The revamped structure of the Ethereum Foundation is built around seven distinct clusters, each designed to address specific facets of the Ethereum ecosystem and its development. This strategic division aims to bring greater clarity and accountability to the EF’s diverse responsibilities. The core operational clusters include:
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Protocol Layer: This cluster inherits the EF’s historical responsibility for the foundational integrity and scalability of the Ethereum protocol. Its primary objective is to ensure that Ethereum upholds its core guarantees of censorship and capture resistance, open-source accessibility, privacy, and robust security. The work within this cluster is not driven by marketability or short-term interests, but by the imperative to make Ethereum more resilient against corruption and capture. Key areas of focus include safely executing network upgrades (forks), minimizing complexity, reducing reliance on trusted intermediaries, defending the transaction pipeline against malicious practices like Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and privileged order flow, and advancing long-horizon research such as post-quantum cryptography, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM), and Layer 1 privacy enhancements. The underlying principle is to preserve and enhance self-sovereignty at scale through protocol evolution.
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Access Layer: This cluster is dedicated to ensuring that the benefits of Ethereum’s self-sovereign properties are practically accessible to individuals. Its mandate covers critical user interactions such as reading blockchain data, transacting, proving identity or data, delegating stake, and exiting the network. The Access Layer focuses on making these actions legible, survivable, and available without reliance on unverified intermediaries. This includes enabling private and censorship-resistant transactions, ensuring transaction outcomes are either guaranteed or fail cost-effectively, and empowering users to maintain control over their digital assets and intents. A key principle guiding this cluster is the "zero option," meaning that for every path that involves an intermediary, a credible, direct, and accessible alternative must exist.
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User Layer: This cluster ensures that the EF’s work remains grounded in the needs and realities 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 work involves defining user segments, creating personas, developing educational materials, conducting use-case research, and evaluating the impact of EF initiatives. The goal is not to transform the EF into a product development studio, but rather to ensure that decisions made at the Protocol and Access Layer levels are informed by real-world user constraints and the practical application of self-sovereignty.
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Community Layer: This cluster is responsible for the EF’s public presence and engagement, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its objective is to clearly articulate what the EF stands for and how its mission differentiates from speculative "financial crypto," "corporate-compromised crypto," and the often-passive grant-managing segments of the non-profit sector that can be vulnerable to geopolitical manipulation. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining independence from such entanglements. This cluster also cultivates relationships with external communities, including free and open-source software, secure and local-first hardware and software development, privacy and cryptography research, civil liberties advocacy, the decentralized web movement, and public-interest technology initiatives. The aim is to foster a fruitful and high-quality overlap between Ethereum and these allied fields.
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Institutional Layer: This cluster focuses on the EF’s engagement with institutions that shape how end-users interact with Ethereum through intermediated channels. This includes financial institutions, non-financial enterprises across various industries, governmental bodies, and academic or non-profit organizations. The primary goal is to showcase effective integrations of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that maximize CROPS properties, providing tangible benefits such as guaranteed fair execution, data portability, practical exit capabilities, enhanced privacy, data authenticity, and improved misbehavior detection. The EF believes that many institutions will find that aligning with user-centric self-sovereignty strengthens their own value proposition. This cluster will also contribute to establishing best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials for institutional adoption. Furthermore, it engages with academics and advocacy organizations to ensure accurate understanding of Ethereum and to monitor and respond to policy and regulatory developments affecting its core principles.
In addition to these domain-specific clusters, the EF has also established a cluster dedicated to Operations and another comprising Management and supporting teams. This comprehensive structure aims to provide a robust and agile framework for executing the EF’s long-term vision.
A Strategic Shift: The Context of Reorganization
The current reorganization is not an isolated event but rather a culmination of a deliberate strategic planning process that has been underway for several months. This process was initiated in response to the evolving landscape of the cryptocurrency industry and the increasing maturity of the Ethereum protocol itself. As Ethereum has transitioned from a nascent technology to a global platform supporting a diverse range of applications and a multi-trillion dollar economy, the role and structure of the foundational organization supporting its development have also needed to adapt.
The implementation of the EF’s Mandate, a document outlining its core mission and strategic objectives, and the adoption of the Treasury Management Policy, which governs how the foundation’s financial resources are managed and deployed, have served as key drivers for this organizational redesign. These policy documents emphasize a more focused approach, prioritizing long-term, protocol-level development and the strengthening of Ethereum’s core properties over potentially short-term or speculative initiatives.
The decision to implement a new structure reflects a commitment to long-term sustainability and impact. By clearly delineating areas of responsibility and aligning resources with specific objectives, the EF aims to maximize its effectiveness in furthering Ethereum’s mission of empowering individuals and fostering a more decentralized and resilient digital future.
Workforce Transition: A Difficult but Necessary Step
The reorganization has inevitably led to a reduction in the EF’s workforce. The departure of 54 colleagues, representing approximately 20% of the foundation’s staff, was described as a difficult but necessary decision. This move is intended to streamline operations and ensure that the remaining team is optimally resourced and organized to tackle the critical tasks ahead without being overly influenced by short-term market fluctuations.
The Ethereum Foundation has stated its commitment to supporting those departing colleagues through this transition. Affected individuals are being offered a comprehensive severance package. This package includes severance pay, calculated as the higher of one month’s salary per year of service at the EF or the amount mandated by their local jurisdiction. This approach mirrors severance packages offered in previous workforce adjustments.
In addition to financial support, the EF is providing transition assistance aimed at helping individuals find new roles within the broader Ethereum ecosystem. This includes career coaching and a small transition grant to cover individual expenses related to career advancement or job searching. The foundation expressed deep gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by these individuals to Ethereum and the EF, and indicated an anticipation of continued collaboration with many of them as they find new avenues to contribute to the ecosystem.
Looking Ahead: A Leaner, More Focused EF
The Ethereum Foundation views this reorganization as a pivotal moment, leading to a leaner and more focused organization. The insights gained from the past months of strategic review and the implementation of new policies are expected to guide the EF’s future actions. In the coming weeks and months, the foundation plans to provide further details on how its work is evolving and how the broader Ethereum ecosystem can best engage with the newly structured organization.
The current move signifies a strategic recalibration, emphasizing the EF’s enduring commitment to the core principles that underpin Ethereum’s value proposition. By refining its internal structure and resource allocation, the foundation aims to strengthen its capacity to drive innovation and ensure the long-term health and decentralized nature of the Ethereum network. The success of this restructuring will be measured not only by the efficiency of the new operational framework but also by its ability to foster continued, principled development of the Ethereum protocol and its ecosystem, ensuring it remains a powerful tool for self-sovereignty and open innovation in the years to come.
