The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a significant organizational overhaul, marking the culmination of a months-long strategic realignment aimed at enhancing its operational efficiency and reinforcing its commitment to the long-term development of the Ethereum protocol. This restructuring, deeply rooted in the recently published EF Mandate and Treasury Management Policy, involves a redefined organizational architecture, a reshaped team, and a refined approach to its core responsibilities within the rapidly evolving Ethereum ecosystem. However, this transformative period also entails the departure of 54 valued colleagues, representing approximately 20% of the Foundation’s workforce.
This pivotal moment signifies the EF’s strategic pivot to ensure its structure, activities, and personnel are optimally aligned for the critical tasks ahead. The Mandate, released earlier this year, outlines a clear vision for the Foundation’s future, emphasizing its role in safeguarding and advancing Ethereum’s core principles of decentralization, censorship resistance, and open access. The accompanying Treasury Management Policy further solidifies this by establishing robust financial stewardship principles, ensuring responsible allocation of resources to support these long-term goals. The current reorganization is a direct consequence of these foundational documents, designed to translate their ambitious objectives into actionable strategies.
The Foundation has articulated that the departing employees will be supported through comprehensive severance packages and transition assistance, with many expected to continue their contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem in new capacities. This announcement arrives at a time of increasing scrutiny and expectation for major blockchain foundations to demonstrate clear roadmaps and efficient resource allocation. The EF’s decision to consolidate its focus and streamline its operations can be seen as a proactive response to these broader industry pressures, aiming to solidify its position as a steadfast steward of the Ethereum protocol.
A New Structural Framework: Clusters for Focused Execution
The revitalized Ethereum Foundation is now organized into seven distinct clusters, each designed to address specific domains of work crucial to Ethereum’s continued growth and security. Five of these clusters are dedicated to core areas of development and engagement: the Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer. Complementing these are two additional clusters focused on internal operations and management, ensuring the smooth functioning of the organization.
This clustered approach signifies a departure from more fluid, project-based structures towards a more specialized and domain-specific model. The rationale behind this shift is that each area of Ethereum development presents unique challenges and requires tailored methodologies for success. By segmenting these into distinct clusters, the EF aims to foster deeper expertise, accountability, and agility within each domain. While detailed operational plans for each cluster will be unveiled in the coming weeks, the overarching objective is to empower specialized teams to drive innovation and address complex issues with greater precision.
The Protocol Layer: Guardians of Ethereum’s Foundation
The Protocol Layer cluster inherits the Ethereum Foundation’s historical mandate to ensure that Ethereum upholds its foundational promise of empowering self-sovereignty through robust scaling. This cluster’s primary objective is to fortify and advance the Ethereum protocol itself, guaranteeing its continued adherence to the core properties that make it a defensible and indispensable technology. These properties include unwavering censorship and capture resistance, a commitment to open-source principles and broad accessibility, and the non-negotiable guarantee of privacy and security for its users.
This cluster’s work is not geared towards enhancing Ethereum’s marketability or catering to short-term speculative interests. Instead, it is dedicated to making Ethereum more resilient to corruption and adversarial capture, and more reliable when other counterparties falter, platforms engage in censorship, governments overstep, or intermediaries extract undue value. Key initiatives within this cluster will include the safe deployment of protocol upgrades (hard forks), the reduction of unnecessary complexity within the codebase, and the minimization of reliance on trusted third parties. Furthermore, it will focus on defending the transaction pipeline against detrimental practices like Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and privileged order flow. Long-horizon research, encompassing advancements in post-quantum cryptography, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs), and Layer 1 privacy solutions, will be accelerated and translated into concrete protocol changes that preserve and enhance self-sovereignty at scale. This dedication to fundamental protocol integrity is paramount to Ethereum’s enduring value proposition.
The Access Layer: Bridging Self-Sovereignty and Practicality
The Access Layer cluster is positioned at the critical juncture where Ethereum’s promise of self-sovereignty either becomes a tangible reality for individuals or remains an unattainable ideal. This cluster’s core responsibility is to make self-sovereignty accessible, comprehensible, and survivable across a range of fundamental user actions: reading blockchain data, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting the network. These capabilities must be robustly supported not only for individual users but also for the increasingly sophisticated agents acting on their behalf.
Users and their agents must be able to access current state, historical data, and related information without relying on intermediaries that cannot be independently verified. The cluster aims to facilitate private and censorship-resistant transactions, where outcomes are either guaranteed or fail without cost if predefined conditions are not met. As more functions are delegated to agents, maintaining user control is paramount. This involves enabling users to grant bounded authority, revoke it at will, and retain custody of their intentions rather than exposing them to potential intermediaries. The interfaces, from the silicon level to the user-facing frontends, must be verifiable, intuitive, and recoverable, irrespective of the user’s technical proficiency or frequency of interaction.
A guiding principle for the Access Layer cluster is the "zero option": for every path that involves intermediation, a credible, intermediary-free alternative must exist and remain accessible. Tactically, this means identifying opportunities to apply stronger cryptographic properties (CROPS) to existing infrastructure and acknowledging the necessity of credible alternatives when economic incentives favor aggregation, identification, and centralized control. This dual approach ensures that while efficiency is sought, the fundamental right to opt out of intermediation is always preserved.
The User Layer: Grounding Development in Real-World Needs
The User Layer cluster serves as the vital link between the Ethereum Foundation’s technical development efforts and the individuals and organizations who have a vested interest in the practical, self-sovereign use of Ethereum. This cluster’s role is to ensure that the EF’s work remains grounded in the realities of its user base, providing critical insights into the capabilities that matter most, the failure modes that pose the most significant risks, and the acceptable trade-offs when compromises are necessary.
The work undertaken by this cluster encompasses identifying key user segments and developing detailed personas, creating comprehensive educational materials, conducting in-depth use-case research, and implementing rigorous impact evaluations. The intention is not for the EF to transform into a product development studio. Instead, the goal is to ensure that decisions made at the Protocol and Access Layer levels are consistently informed by the needs and constraints of current and potential users, as well as by objective measures of self-sovereignty. This user-centric approach is fundamental to building an Ethereum ecosystem that is both technologically advanced and genuinely useful.
The Community Layer: Defining the EF’s Public Identity
The Community cluster is responsible for shaping how the Ethereum Foundation presents itself to the world, both within the broader Ethereum ecosystem and beyond. Its primary mission is to clearly articulate what the EF stands for and how its mission fundamentally differs from speculative, profit-driven cryptocurrency ventures, from compromised corporate interests in the crypto space, and from the often passive, status quo-reinforcing practices of some non-profit organizations. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining a strong stance of independence from counterproductive entanglements that could compromise its core principles.
This cluster actively cultivates the EF’s relationships with communities outside of the direct cryptocurrency sphere. Self-sovereignty, as championed by Ethereum, finds natural allies in movements and disciplines such as 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 Community cluster works diligently to foster a productive, organic, and high-quality intersection between Ethereum and these allied spaces. This outreach is crucial for building broader understanding and support for Ethereum’s foundational ideals.
The Institutional Layer: Navigating Corporate and Governmental Adoption
The Institutional Layer cluster spearheads the Ethereum Foundation’s engagement with the various institutions that influence how end-users interact with Ethereum through intermediated pathways. This includes a wide spectrum of entities, from financial institutions involved in consumer payments and insurance to non-financial enterprises in manufacturing, social sectors, publishing, and numerous other industries. It also encompasses government applications and collaborations with universities and other non-profit organizations.
Across all these engagements, the EF’s primary objective is to foster the development of showcases that demonstrate the effective integration of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies. These integrations are designed to maximize the benefits of CROPS properties and the guarantees they provide to both institutions and users. This includes ensuring fair and correct execution of transactions, facilitating data portability and the practical ability to exit systems, protecting the privacy of all actors, enabling robust authentication of data, and improving the detection and prevention of misbehavior. The EF posits that many enterprises, governments, and nonprofits will discover that their own incentives align with serving users in ways that strengthen self-sovereignty, while simultaneously retaining the guarantees necessary for them to create value or fulfill their missions. Ethereum and related cryptographic technologies are seen as integral to achieving this synergy.
Beyond direct engagement, the Institutional Layer cluster will also contribute by helping to establish and disseminate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials tailored for institutional adoption. Furthermore, this cluster will collaborate with academics and allied advocacy organizations globally to ensure Ethereum is accurately understood, both in its current form and its potential future evolution. This proactive engagement aims to monitor and respond effectively to policy and regulatory developments that could impact Ethereum’s commitment to self-sovereign use and its core principles of censorship resistance, open source development, privacy, and security.
Supporting Departing Colleagues Through Transition
The organizational restructuring has led to the difficult but necessary decision to part ways with 54 employees. The EF emphasizes that these decisions, while challenging, are crucial for ensuring the organization is adequately resourced and structured to focus on the unique and critical work that only the Foundation can undertake in the coming years, minimizing disruption from short-term market fluctuations.
To facilitate a smooth transition for those departing, the EF is providing a comprehensive support 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 the individual’s local jurisdiction. This severance policy mirrors that offered to employees who departed in previous months. In addition to financial support, transition assistance includes help in finding new roles within the broader ecosystem and a small transition grant earmarked for individual expenses such as career coaching. The Foundation has expressed profound gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by each departing individual, acknowledging their integral role in advancing Ethereum at the EF. They look forward to continued collaboration with those who will find new avenues to contribute within the ecosystem.
Charting the Course Forward: A Leaner, More Focused EF
The Ethereum Foundation emerging from this restructuring is leaner, more focused, and better positioned to execute its long-term strategic objectives. The coming weeks and months will see further disclosures regarding the evolution of the Foundation’s work and guidance on how the broader ecosystem can best engage with its newly defined structure. This period of significant organizational change signals a commitment to adapt and evolve, ensuring that the Ethereum Foundation remains a steadfast and effective steward of the protocol’s future. The emphasis on core principles and a clear, structured approach suggests a deliberate effort to navigate the complexities of the blockchain landscape with renewed purpose and efficiency.
