The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has officially announced a substantial reorganization, marking the culmination of a months-long strategic overhaul aimed at enhancing its operational efficiency and strategic focus. This restructuring, driven by the implementation of the EF Mandate and the new Treasury Management Policy, has reshaped the organization’s structure, activities, and personnel. While the EF asserts that this process has equipped it with the necessary elements for future execution, it has also resulted in the departure of 54 employees, approximately 20% of its workforce. Many of these individuals are expected to continue their contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem in new capacities.
This pivotal organizational shift signals a deliberate effort by the Ethereum Foundation to align its internal structure with its long-term strategic objectives. The move comes at a time when the Ethereum network continues to evolve rapidly, facing both unprecedented opportunities and complex challenges. The EF, as a central coordinating body for much of the core development and research surrounding Ethereum, plays a critical role in ensuring the protocol’s continued growth, security, and decentralization. The reorganization is therefore a significant event for the entire Ethereum community.
A New Structural Blueprint: Five Clusters and Core Functions
The revitalized Ethereum Foundation now operates under a more streamlined structure, organized into seven distinct clusters, each with a specific domain of focus. This new architecture is designed to foster greater specialization and accountability within the organization. The five core clusters dedicated to specific areas of Ethereum development are:
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Protocol Layer: This cluster inherits the EF’s historical mandate and responsibility for ensuring Ethereum fulfills its core promise of scaling self-sovereignty. Its primary objective is to fortify and scale the Ethereum protocol itself, safeguarding its foundational properties such as censorship and capture resistance, open-source ethos, privacy, and security. The work within this cluster is geared towards advancing the protocol’s capabilities without compromising these core guarantees. It focuses on long-horizon research such as post-quantum security, zkEVM, and Layer 1 privacy, aiming to translate these into tangible protocol upgrades that enhance self-sovereignty at scale. The emphasis is on making Ethereum more resilient against corruption and capture, and a more reliable foundation when intermediaries fail or censorship occurs.
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Access Layer: This cluster is crucial for ensuring that Ethereum’s promise of self-sovereignty is practically accessible to individuals. Its mission is to make self-sovereignty readily available, understandable, and survivable across key user interactions: reading chain data, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. This includes supporting users and their agents in accessing current state and historical data without relying on unverifiable intermediaries. The cluster prioritizes private and censorship-resistant transactions, with guaranteed outcomes or cost-free failures. A core principle guiding the Access Layer is the "zero option" – for every intermediated path, a credible, intermediary-free alternative must exist and remain accessible. This involves identifying opportunities to enhance cryptographic properties in existing infrastructure and acknowledging the need for credible alternatives where economic incentives drive aggregation and control.
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User Layer: Grounded in the needs of users and organizations with a vested interest in self-sovereign Ethereum, this cluster focuses on understanding the capabilities that matter most, identifying critical failure modes, and evaluating acceptable trade-offs. Its work encompasses defining user segments and personas, developing educational materials, conducting use-case research, and performing impact evaluations. The aim is not to transform the EF into a product studio, but to ensure that decisions made at the Protocol and Access Layer levels are informed by the realities of current and potential users, practical constraints, and measurable outcomes 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 mandate is to clearly articulate the EF’s values and distinguish them from zero-sum financial crypto, corporate-compromised crypto, and bureaucratic, status-quo-preserving non-profits. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining independence from such entanglements. This cluster also cultivates relationships with external communities, including those in free and open-source software, secure hardware, privacy and cryptography research, civil liberties, the decentralized web, and public-interest technology. The goal is to foster fruitful and high-quality collaboration between Ethereum and these allied fields.
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Institutional Layer: This cluster spearheads the EF’s engagement with institutions that influence how end-users interact with Ethereum through intermediated channels. This includes financial institutions, non-financial enterprises, government bodies, universities, and other non-profit organizations. The primary objective is to showcase effective integrations of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that enhance self-sovereignty for both institutions and users. This involves demonstrating fair and correct execution, ensuring data portability and the practical ability to exit, protecting privacy, authenticating data, and mitigating misbehavior. The EF believes that many organizations will recognize the benefits of strengthening user self-sovereignty while retaining essential guarantees. 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.
Complementing these five domain-specific clusters are two essential operational units:
- Operations Cluster: This cluster will likely manage the foundational infrastructure, administrative functions, and cross-functional coordination necessary for the EF’s effective operation.
- Management and Support Cluster: This unit comprises leadership and teams directly supporting management, ensuring strategic direction and internal cohesion.
The EF has indicated that further detailed explanations of each cluster’s specific mandates and internal structures will be released in the coming month.
A Difficult Transition: Supporting Departing Colleagues
The organizational restructuring has inevitably led to a reduction in staff. The EF has announced that 54 individuals, representing approximately 20% of its workforce, are departing the organization. The foundation emphasized that these decisions, while difficult, were necessary to ensure the EF is adequately resourced and organized to focus on its critical long-term mission, minimizing disruptions from short-term market volatility.
To support those leaving, the EF has implemented 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 severance policy is consistent with previous departures. Additionally, departing employees will receive transition support, which includes assistance in finding new roles within the Ethereum ecosystem and a transition grant to cover individual expenses such as career coaching. The EF expressed profound gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by these individuals and anticipates continued collaboration with those who will find new opportunities within the broader Ethereum community.
Context and Chronology of the Reorganization
This significant reorganization follows a period of intense strategic deliberation within the Ethereum Foundation. The process was formally initiated with the publication of the EF Mandate, a document outlining the foundation’s core mission and strategic direction for the coming years. This mandate, alongside the recently established Treasury Management Policy, provided the guiding principles for the restructuring.
The Treasury Management Policy, detailed in a blog post from early June 2025, signaled a more prudent and strategic approach to the EF’s financial resources. This policy likely informed decisions regarding resource allocation and organizational efficiency, contributing to the need for a leaner, more focused structure. The months leading up to today’s announcement would have involved extensive planning, role assessment, and difficult personnel decisions. The EF has consistently emphasized its commitment to long-term sustainability and impactful development, suggesting that this reorganization is a proactive step towards achieving those goals rather than a reactive measure to immediate pressures.
Broader Implications for the Ethereum Ecosystem
The Ethereum Foundation’s reorganization carries significant implications for the broader Ethereum ecosystem. A more focused EF, with clearly defined clusters dedicated to specific areas of development, could lead to more streamlined and impactful contributions to the protocol and its surrounding infrastructure.
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Enhanced Protocol Development: A dedicated Protocol Layer cluster, prioritizing core properties like censorship resistance and scalability, suggests a continued commitment to the fundamental principles that have driven Ethereum’s success. This focus may accelerate progress on critical upgrades and research initiatives, such as advancements in zero-knowledge proofs (zkEVM) and Layer 1 privacy solutions.
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Improved User Experience and Accessibility: The emphasis on the Access and User Layers signals a renewed commitment to making Ethereum more usable and accessible for a wider audience. By focusing on user needs and intermediary-free alternatives, the EF aims to bolster self-sovereignty for everyday users and developers alike. This could translate into more robust tools, clearer documentation, and a more intuitive user experience.
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Strategic Financial Management: The implementation of the Treasury Management Policy and the resulting leaner structure suggest a more disciplined approach to resource allocation. This could lead to a more efficient deployment of capital towards high-impact initiatives, ensuring the long-term sustainability of the EF’s mission.
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Ecosystem Collaboration: The continued emphasis on community engagement and external partnerships, particularly through the Community and Institutional Layers, highlights the EF’s understanding that Ethereum’s success is a collaborative effort. This could foster stronger relationships with other organizations, academic institutions, and policymakers, promoting a more unified and supportive ecosystem.
The departure of 54 colleagues, while a difficult consequence, also presents opportunities for innovation and decentralization within the ecosystem. Many of these individuals are expected to contribute their expertise to other projects, potentially diversifying development efforts and fostering new areas of innovation outside the direct purview of the EF. This diffusion of talent could be a net positive for the overall health and resilience of the Ethereum network.
Looking Ahead: A Leaner, More Focused EF
The Ethereum Foundation has stated that this reorganization marks the beginning of a new chapter. The organization that emerges is intended to be leaner, more focused, and better equipped to tackle the complex challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for Ethereum. The EF plans to provide further updates in the coming weeks and months, detailing how its work will evolve and how the broader ecosystem can best engage with the newly structured organization. This period of transition is critical, and the clarity and transparency with which the EF navigates it will be closely watched by developers, users, and stakeholders across the global Ethereum community. The success of this strategic realignment will ultimately be measured by its ability to further solidify Ethereum’s position as a leading decentralized platform, advancing its core principles of self-sovereignty, decentralization, and open innovation.
