The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has undergone a significant organizational overhaul, culminating in a new structure designed to align with its updated Mandate and Treasury Management Policy. This strategic shift, the culmination of months of planning and execution, aims to sharpen the Foundation’s focus and enhance its capacity to drive the continued development and adoption of the Ethereum protocol. However, this transformation also entails a reduction in workforce, with approximately 20% of its staff, or 54 individuals, departing the organization. These changes signal a deliberate recalibration of the EF’s operational priorities and its long-term vision for the Ethereum ecosystem.
A Streamlined Structure for a Evolving Ecosystem
The EF’s new organizational blueprint is built around seven distinct clusters, each tasked with specific domains of work critical to Ethereum’s advancement. This strategic segmentation aims to bring greater clarity, accountability, and specialization to the Foundation’s diverse initiatives. The core clusters represent key areas of Ethereum’s layered architecture: the Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer. Complementing these are dedicated clusters for Operations and Management, ensuring the smooth functioning of the organization and direct support for its leadership.
"We come out of this process with the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead of us," a statement from the EF indicated, underscoring the deliberate nature of these changes. The new structure is designed to be agile and responsive to the evolving needs of the Ethereum ecosystem, recognizing that each domain of work requires a tailored approach, distinct performance metrics, and an internal organization optimized for its specific objectives. While detailed insights into each cluster’s specific activities will be unveiled in the coming weeks, the high-level overview provides a clear direction for the Foundation’s future endeavors.
Deep Dive into the New Clusters:
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Protocol Layer: This cluster inherits the EF’s foundational responsibility for ensuring Ethereum fulfills its promise of scaling self-sovereignty. Its primary objective is to fortify and advance the Ethereum protocol itself. The focus remains steadfast on upholding core principles such as censorship and capture resistance, open-source ethos, privacy, and security as non-negotiable guarantees. This cluster is not driven by marketability or short-term interests, but rather by making Ethereum more resilient against corruption and capture. It will spearhead initiatives like safe hard fork implementations, complexity reduction, minimizing trusted dependencies, defending the transaction pipeline against toxic MEV and privileged order flow, and accelerating long-horizon research into areas like post-quantum security, zkEVMs, and L1 privacy to enhance self-sovereignty at scale.
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Access Layer: This crucial cluster addresses how Ethereum serves individuals requiring robust "CROPS" (censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security, and self-sovereignty) properties in practical applications. Its mandate is to make self-sovereignty accessible, understandable, and sustainable across fundamental actions: reading the chain, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. These functionalities must be seamless for both individual users and the agents acting on their behalf, enabling them to access chain state, history, and related data without reliance on unverifiable intermediaries. The goal is to facilitate private and censorship-free transactions, with outcomes that are either guaranteed or fail at no cost. 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: Grounded in the needs of individuals and organizations with a vested interest in the self-sovereign use of Ethereum, this cluster aims to extend these principles as broadly as possible. It will provide critical insights into the most impactful capabilities, the most severe failure modes, and the acceptable trade-offs for decision-making within the Protocol and Access Layers. Activities will encompass user segmentation, persona development, educational material creation, use-case research, and impact evaluation. The EF clarifies that it does not intend to become a product studio but rather to ensure that its strategic decisions are informed by the realities and needs of current and potential users.
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Community Layer: This cluster is responsible for the EF’s external presence and how it engages with the world, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its mission is to clearly articulate the EF’s values and how they distinctly differ from zero-sum financial crypto, corporate-compromised projects, and passive grant-managing organizations vulnerable to geopolitical manipulation. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining independence from such entanglements. Furthermore, this cluster actively cultivates relationships with external communities, identifying natural allies in open-source software, secure hardware, privacy research, civil liberties advocacy, and public-interest technology to foster fruitful collaborations.
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Institutional Layer: This cluster focuses on the EF’s engagement with institutions that influence how end-users interact with Ethereum through intermediated channels. This includes financial institutions, enterprises across various sectors, government entities, and academic or non-profit organizations. The overarching goal is to showcase effective integrations of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that enhance CROPS properties and provide guarantees for both institutions and users, such as fair execution, data portability, practical exit strategies, privacy protection, data authenticity, and misbehavior detection. The EF believes that many entities will recognize the strategic advantage of strengthening self-sovereignty while retaining necessary assurances for value creation and mission fulfillment. This cluster will also contribute to establishing best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials for institutional adoption, alongside upstream engagement with academics and advocacy groups to ensure Ethereum’s principles are accurately understood and to navigate policy and regulatory landscapes.
A Difficult Transition: Supporting Departing Colleagues
The organizational restructuring necessitated the departure of 54 employees, representing a significant portion of the EF’s workforce. The Foundation emphasized that these decisions, while difficult, were deemed essential for aligning resources and organizational capacity with the critical, long-term work only the EF can undertake. This strategic realignment aims to minimize disruption from short-term market fluctuations and ensure sustained progress.
To support those leaving, the EF is providing a comprehensive package that includes severance pay and transition assistance. The severance offer is structured to be the greater of one month’s salary per year of service at the EF or the amount mandated by the individual’s local jurisdiction, consistent with previous departures. The transition support includes resources to help individuals find new opportunities within the broader Ethereum ecosystem, alongside a modest transition grant to cover expenses such as career coaching. The EF expressed deep gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by each departing colleague and anticipates their continued contributions to Ethereum from their new roles within the ecosystem.
Background and Chronology of the Reorganization
The genesis of this reorganization can be traced back to the publication of the EF’s updated Mandate, a foundational document outlining the organization’s core mission and strategic imperatives for the coming years. This was further contextualized by the introduction of the Treasury Management Policy, which governs the allocation and management of the EF’s financial resources. These policy documents, released in June 2025, laid the groundwork for a comprehensive review of the EF’s operational structure and workforce alignment.
The months leading up to today’s announcement were marked by internal assessments, strategic planning sessions, and the development of the new cluster-based organizational model. This process involved evaluating existing workflows, identifying areas of overlap or inefficiency, and determining the optimal configuration of teams and resources to achieve the objectives outlined in the Mandate. The decision to reduce staff numbers was a direct consequence of this strategic recalibration, aimed at creating a more focused and sustainable operational capacity.
Implications and Future Outlook
This reorganization signifies a maturation of the Ethereum Foundation, moving towards a more specialized and mission-aligned operational framework. By clearly delineating responsibilities across distinct layers of the Ethereum ecosystem, the EF aims to enhance its effectiveness in driving core protocol development, fostering widespread adoption, and championing the principles of self-sovereignty.
The reduction in workforce, while regrettable for those affected, reflects a strategic decision to optimize resource allocation and ensure long-term sustainability. The focus on specific, high-impact areas like protocol security, user accessibility, and institutional adoption suggests a commitment to addressing both the foundational technical challenges and the broader societal implications of decentralized technologies.
The EF’s commitment to transparency is evident in its promise to share further details about the new structure and its ongoing work in the coming weeks and months. This approach suggests a phased rollout of information, allowing stakeholders to gradually understand and engage with the evolved EF. The emphasis on fostering continued contributions from departing colleagues highlights a desire to maintain a strong and interconnected talent pool within the Ethereum ecosystem, even as organizational lines shift.
The success of this new structure will likely hinge on the EF’s ability to foster robust inter-cluster collaboration, maintain clear communication channels with the wider Ethereum community, and adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape of blockchain technology and its applications. The Foundation’s renewed focus and streamlined operations position it to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of decentralized systems and their impact on global digital infrastructure.
