The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has undergone a significant organizational transformation, culminating in a streamlined structure designed to accelerate its core mission and adapt to the evolving blockchain landscape. This months-long process, driven by the implementation of the EF’s Mandate and its new Treasury Management Policy, has reshaped the foundation’s operational framework and strategic priorities. While this reorganization aims to enhance execution capabilities, it has also resulted in a reduction of its workforce, with approximately 20% of its staff, or 54 colleagues, departing. These individuals are expected to continue contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem in various capacities outside the foundation.
The overarching goal of this strategic realignment is to equip the EF with the necessary structure, activities, and personnel to effectively tackle the critical tasks ahead. This includes a renewed focus on the foundational principles of Ethereum, such as self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, and open access, as outlined in its updated Mandate. The implementation of a robust Treasury Management Policy further underscores a commitment to fiscal responsibility and strategic resource allocation, ensuring that the foundation’s investments are aligned with its long-term objectives.
A New Architecture for Ethereum’s Future
The restructured Ethereum Foundation is now organized into seven distinct clusters, each dedicated to specific domains of work crucial for the advancement of the Ethereum protocol and its ecosystem. These clusters represent a strategic division of labor, allowing for specialized focus and tailored approaches to complex challenges.
The five primary domains of work are:
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Protocol Layer: This cluster inherits the EF’s foundational responsibility for the Ethereum protocol itself. Its mission is to ensure Ethereum’s continued evolution in a way that hardens its core properties and scales its capabilities. The objective is to safeguard and enhance Ethereum’s inherent characteristics of censorship and capture resistance, its open-source nature, and the non-negotiable guarantees of privacy and security. The Protocol Layer is not focused on short-term marketability or transforming Ethereum into a centrally controlled financial rail. Instead, its work is centered on making Ethereum more resilient to corruption and capture, and more dependable in scenarios where counterparties fail, platforms censor, or intermediaries exploit. This involves the safe execution of network upgrades, simplification of complex protocols, minimization of trusted dependencies, defense against malicious MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) and privileged order flow, and the acceleration of long-horizon research such as post-quantum cryptography, zkEVM (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine), and Layer 1 privacy enhancements. These advancements are aimed at preserving and improving self-sovereignty at scale.
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Access Layer: This cluster is dedicated to ensuring that Ethereum’s core properties of censorship resistance, open access, privacy, and security (CROPS) are practically accessible and survivable for individuals. It focuses on key user actions such as reading chain data, transacting, proving identity, delegating resources, and exiting the network. These functions must be robustly supported not only for individual users but also for the agents acting on their behalf. The Access Layer strives to enable users and their agents to access current state, historical data, and related information without reliance on unverifiable intermediaries. A critical aspect of this layer is facilitating private transactions that are censorship-resistant, with outcomes that are either guaranteed or fail cost-effectively. As more functionality shifts to agents, user control remains paramount, with mechanisms for granting bounded authority, revoking it at will, and maintaining custody of user intents rather than exposing them to third parties. The interfaces, from silicon to frontend applications, must be verifiable, comprehensible, and recoverable, regardless of user technical expertise or frequency of use. The guiding principle is the "zero option": for every intermediated pathway, 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 where economic incentives drive aggregation, identification, and control.
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User Layer: This cluster ensures that the EF’s work remains grounded in the needs and experiences of the users and organizations that have a vital interest in the self-sovereign use of Ethereum. Its remit includes extending the tools and norms of such use as widely as possible. The User Layer helps the EF identify the most critical capabilities, the most serious failure modes, and the acceptable trade-offs when necessary. Its activities encompass defining user segments and personas, developing educational materials, conducting use-case research, and evaluating the impact of EF initiatives. The objective is not to transform the EF into a product development studio, but rather to ensure that decisions made at the Protocol and Access Layer are informed by the realities faced by current and potential users, practical constraints, and measurable outcomes of self-sovereignty.
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Community Layer: This cluster defines how the EF presents itself to the world, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its primary role is to clearly articulate the EF’s values and to differentiate them from zero-sum financial cryptocurrency projects, compromised corporate-backed crypto, and the often status-quo-preserving, 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 its independence from such counterproductive entanglements. Furthermore, the Community Layer cultivates relationships with entities outside the immediate crypto sphere. 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, civil liberties advocacy, decentralized web initiatives, and public-interest technology. This cluster works to foster fruitful, organic, and high-quality collaborations between Ethereum and these allied fields.
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Institutional Layer: This cluster spearheads the EF’s engagement with institutions that shape how end-users interact with Ethereum through intermediated pathways. This includes financial institutions involved in payments, insurance, and other services, as well as non-financial enterprises across manufacturing, social media, publishing, and various other industries. Government applications and collaborations with universities and other non-profit groups also fall under its purview. The core objective is to champion the creation of successful integration models of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that maximize CROPS properties and the guarantees they offer to both institutions and users. These guarantees encompass fair and correct execution, data portability, practical exit capabilities, enhanced privacy for all actors, robust data authenticity, and improved detection and prevention of misbehavior. The EF believes that many enterprises, governments, and non-profits will recognize the mutual benefit in serving users in ways that strengthen self-sovereignty while retaining the guarantees necessary for value creation or mission fulfillment, with Ethereum and cryptographic technologies playing a key role. Beyond direct engagement, the Institutional Layer will work to establish and disseminate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational resources for institutional adoption. Additionally, this cluster collaborates with academics and allied advocacy organizations globally to ensure a correct understanding of Ethereum’s current state and potential, and to monitor and respond to policy and regulatory developments that could impact Ethereum’s commitment to self-sovereign use and its core principles.
In addition to these five core domains, the EF has established two supporting clusters:
- Operations Cluster: This cluster is dedicated to the essential internal functions that ensure the smooth and efficient running of the foundation.
- Management and Support Cluster: This cluster comprises the leadership team and the individuals directly supporting management functions, providing strategic oversight and operational guidance.
Each of these clusters is designed with a distinct operational approach, accountability framework, and internal structure tailored to its specific objectives. The EF plans to release more detailed information about the specific activities and teams within each cluster in the coming month.
Navigating a Period of Transition
The organizational overhaul, while strategically imperative, has necessitated difficult decisions regarding personnel. The departure of 54 colleagues represents a significant shift for the Ethereum Foundation. These decisions were framed as necessary steps to ensure the EF is appropriately resourced and structured to focus on its unique and critical responsibilities in the years ahead, minimizing disruption from short-term market volatility.
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 policy mirrors the support offered to staff in previous, smaller transitions. In addition to financial severance, departing colleagues will receive transition support, including assistance in finding new roles within the broader ecosystem and a small transition grant earmarked for career coaching and related expenses.
The foundation has expressed deep gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by these individuals to Ethereum during their tenure at the EF. The organization anticipates that many of these former colleagues will continue to contribute to the Ethereum ecosystem in their new endeavors.
Looking Ahead: A Focused Future
The Ethereum Foundation emerges from this reorganization as a leaner, more focused entity. The strategic restructuring is designed to enhance its capacity to deliver on its core mandate and to adapt to the dynamic nature of the blockchain space. The EF has indicated that further details regarding its evolving workstreams and how the ecosystem can best engage with its new structure will be shared in the coming weeks and months. This period of transformation signals a commitment to long-term strategic vision and operational excellence as Ethereum continues its journey towards greater scalability, decentralization, and user empowerment. The implementation of the Mandate and Treasury Management Policy represents a clear articulation of the EF’s priorities and its dedication to fostering a robust and self-sovereign digital future.
