The Ethereum Foundation (EF) today unveiled a significant restructuring, marking the culmination of a months-long strategic overhaul aimed at aligning its operations with its long-term mandate and a newly implemented Treasury Management Policy. This pivotal moment sees the organization adopting a leaner, more focused operational framework, designed to tackle critical developmental milestones for the Ethereum network. Concurrently, the EF announced the departure of approximately 20% of its workforce, a reduction of 54 colleagues, who are expected to continue contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem in various capacities.
This comprehensive reorganization, detailed in a recent announcement, signifies a strategic pivot for the foundational entity of Ethereum. The EF has long played a crucial role in funding and coordinating development efforts across the vast Ethereum ecosystem. However, as the network matures and its ecosystem expands, the need for a more agile and purpose-driven organizational structure has become increasingly apparent. The Mandate, a document outlining the EF’s core objectives, and the recently established Treasury Management Policy, which governs its financial stewardship, have served as the guiding principles for this transformation.
A New Architecture for Ethereum’s Future
The revamped structure of the Ethereum Foundation is now organized around seven distinct clusters, each dedicated to a specific domain of work crucial for the network’s advancement. This strategic segmentation aims to foster specialization, improve accountability, and tailor internal processes to the unique demands of each area. The five core domains of work include the Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer. These are complemented by an Operations cluster and a Management cluster, which oversees and supports the core leadership and strategic functions.
The EF has indicated that detailed insights into each cluster’s specific functions and objectives will be disseminated in the coming weeks. However, a high-level overview provides a glimpse into the strategic intent behind this new architecture.
Protocol Layer: Fortifying Ethereum’s Core
The Protocol Layer cluster inherits the EF’s foundational responsibility: ensuring Ethereum fulfills its promise of scaling self-sovereignty. This cluster is tasked with strengthening and scaling the Ethereum protocol itself, with a paramount objective of preserving and enhancing its core properties. These include censorship and capture resistance, open-source principles, privacy, and security as non-negotiable guarantees. The work within this cluster is not driven by marketability or short-term interests, nor by the desire to transform Ethereum into a centrally controlled financial rail. Instead, its focus is on making Ethereum more resilient to corruption and capture, and more reliable when external systems falter. Key initiatives will involve safely implementing protocol upgrades (forks), reducing unnecessary complexity, minimizing reliance on trusted third parties, defending the transaction pipeline against exploitative practices like MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) and privileged order flow, and accelerating long-horizon research such as post-quantum cryptography, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) advancements, and Layer 1 privacy enhancements. These efforts are designed to translate cutting-edge research into protocol changes that safeguard and augment self-sovereignty at scale.
Access Layer: Empowering Practical Self-Sovereignty
The Access Layer is where Ethereum either succeeds or fails individuals seeking practical self-sovereign experiences. This cluster’s mission is to make self-sovereignty accessible, understandable, and survivable across critical user actions: reading blockchain data, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. These functionalities must be robust for individual users and increasingly for the agents acting on their behalf. These agents must be able to access current state, historical data, and related information without relying on unverifiable intermediaries. Users should be able to transact with enhanced privacy and freedom from censorship, with transaction outcomes that are either guaranteed or fail at no cost if conditions are not met. As more complex operations are delegated to agents, it is crucial that users retain ultimate control, able to grant and revoke authority as needed, and maintain custody of their intentions rather than exposing them to third parties. Interfaces, from the silicon level to front-end applications, must be verifiable, intuitive, and recoverable, regardless of user experience or technical expertise. The guiding principle for this cluster is the "zero option": for every path that involves an intermediary, a credible intermediary-free alternative must exist and remain accessible. This involves identifying opportunities to embed stronger self-sovereignty properties into existing infrastructure and acknowledging the necessity of credible alternatives where economic incentives might favor aggregation and control.
User Layer: Grounding Development in Real-World Needs
The User Layer cluster ensures that the EF’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 aims to expand the adoption of such tools and norms as widely as possible. This cluster’s function is to provide the EF with critical insights into which capabilities are most important, which failure modes are most severe, and which trade-offs are acceptable when compromises are necessary. Its activities will encompass defining user segments and personas, developing educational materials, conducting use-case research, and evaluating the impact of EF initiatives. The EF’s intention is not 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, practical constraints, and tangible measures of self-sovereignty.
Community Layer: Articulating and Amplifying Ethereum’s Values
The Community cluster is responsible for how the EF presents itself to the world, both within and beyond the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Its primary role is to clearly articulate what the EF stands for and how its mission diverges from zero-sum financial crypto, compromised corporate interests, and the often-stagnant, status-quo-preserving 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 these and other counterproductive entanglements. This cluster also focuses on cultivating the EF’s relationships with entities outside the cryptocurrency space. The principles of self-sovereignty find natural allies in the open-source movement, secure and local-first software and hardware development, privacy and cryptography research and advocacy, civil liberties organizations, the decentralized web movement, and public-interest technology initiatives. This cluster works to foster fruitful, authentic, and high-quality collaborations between Ethereum and these aligned fields.
Institutional Layer: Bridging Ethereum with Established Systems
This cluster spearheads the EF’s engagement with institutions that influence how end-users interact with Ethereum through established, intermediated channels. This includes financial institutions involved in payments, insurance, and other services, as well as non-financial enterprises across manufacturing, social sectors, publishing, and more. Government applications and academic or non-profit organizations also fall within its purview. The overarching goal is to champion the creation of successful integration models for Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that amplify self-sovereignty properties and the guarantees offered to both institutions and users. These guarantees include ensuring fair and accurate execution, facilitating data portability and practical exit strategies, protecting user privacy, enabling data authenticity, and improving the detection or prevention of misbehavior. The EF believes that many enterprises, governments, and non-profits will recognize the strategic advantages of serving users in ways that bolster self-sovereignty while retaining the assurances necessary for value creation and mission fulfillment. Ethereum and cryptographic technologies are seen as key enablers of this paradigm shift. Beyond direct engagement, the Institutional Layer will work to establish and disseminate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational resources to support institutional adoption. Furthermore, this cluster collaborates with academics and allied advocacy groups globally to ensure a clear and accurate understanding of Ethereum’s current capabilities and future potential. It also monitors and responds to policy and regulatory developments that could impact Ethereum’s commitment to self-sovereign use and its core principles of censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
A Difficult Transition for Valued Colleagues
The reorganization necessitated difficult decisions regarding staffing, resulting in the departure of 54 colleagues, representing approximately 20% of the EF’s workforce. The EF emphasized that these decisions, while challenging, were essential for the organization to effectively focus on its critical, long-term objectives without undue disruption from short-term market fluctuations.
To support those leaving, the EF has implemented a comprehensive package that includes severance pay and transition assistance. The severance is structured to be the greater of one month’s salary for each year of service at the EF or the amount mandated by the individual’s local jurisdiction. This policy mirrors the support provided to colleagues who departed the EF in recent months. The transition support encompasses practical assistance in identifying new opportunities within the broader Ethereum ecosystem, alongside a modest transition grant designed to cover individual career development expenses, such as coaching.
The Ethereum Foundation expressed profound gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by each departing member. The organization anticipates that many of these individuals will continue to make significant contributions to Ethereum from their new roles within the ecosystem.
Looking Ahead: A Focused Future for the EF
The Ethereum Foundation that emerges from this period of transformation is characterized by a more streamlined and focused operational approach. The EF has committed to providing further details in the coming weeks and months regarding the evolution of its work and how the broader ecosystem can best engage with its newly structured organization. This strategic realignment is poised to enable the EF to more effectively pursue its mission of fostering a decentralized, secure, and self-sovereign digital future built on Ethereum. The organization’s ability to adapt and evolve in response to the dynamic landscape of blockchain technology and its global impact will be critical to its continued success.
