The Ethereum Foundation (EF), a cornerstone of the Ethereum ecosystem, has officially concluded a months-long comprehensive reorganization, fundamentally reshaping its operational structure and reducing its global workforce by 54 individuals, approximately 20% of its total staff. This significant strategic pivot is a direct outcome of the implementation of the Foundation’s recently established Mandate and Treasury Management Policy, signaling a renewed, sharpened focus on Ethereum’s core protocol development and its foundational principles of self-sovereignty.
Background to the Reorganization
For years, the Ethereum Foundation has served as a critical non-profit entity, stewarding the development, research, and widespread adoption of the Ethereum blockchain. Its mission has encompassed funding crucial projects, supporting core developers, and fostering a robust, decentralized ecosystem. However, the rapidly evolving landscape of blockchain technology, coupled with the inherent volatility of the cryptocurrency markets, necessitated a reevaluation of the Foundation’s long-term sustainability and strategic priorities.
The journey towards this reorganization began months ago, culminating in the formal adoption of the EF Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy, the latter published on June 4, 2025. These documents laid the groundwork for a more disciplined, impact-driven approach to resource allocation and operational management. The Mandate likely defines the EF’s core purpose and scope, narrowing its focus to areas where its involvement is uniquely critical, while the Treasury Management Policy outlines a framework for prudent financial stewardship, ensuring the Foundation’s ability to support Ethereum’s infrastructure irrespective of short-term market fluctuations. This move reflects a growing maturity within the broader crypto space, where organizations are increasingly prioritizing fiscal resilience and strategic alignment over expansive, unfocused growth. The goal, as articulated by the Foundation, is to be "resourced and organized in a way that allows us to focus on the critical work that only EF can, and therefore must, do in the coming years, without excessive disruption from short-term market movements."
A New Operational Framework: The Cluster Model
At the heart of the EF’s new structure lies a cluster-based operational model, designed to streamline efforts and enhance accountability across distinct domains of work. The Foundation now operates with five primary operational clusters—Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer—complemented by dedicated clusters for Operations and Management. This modular approach is intended to allow each domain to adopt a tailored strategy, reflecting the unique challenges and objectives inherent to its specific responsibilities.
-
Protocol Layer: This cluster embodies the EF’s enduring legacy and paramount responsibility: ensuring Ethereum’s core promise of scaling self-sovereignty. Its mandate is to harden and scale the Ethereum protocol itself, upholding non-negotiable properties such as censorship and capture resistance, open source principles, privacy, and security. The Protocol Layer is tasked with advancing the core protocol without compromising these self-sovereignty guarantees, distinguishing its work from efforts focused on marketability or short-term financial interests. Key initiatives include safe hard forks, complexity reduction, minimizing trusted dependencies, defending the transaction pipeline against toxic Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and privileged orderflow, and driving long-horizon research. This research spans critical areas like post-quantum security, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) development, and Layer 1 privacy solutions, all aimed at enhancing self-sovereignty at scale. This focus underscores the EF’s commitment to Ethereum as a public good, resilient against external pressures and systemic failures.
-
Access Layer: Focused on the practical application of Ethereum’s "CROPS properties"—Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, and Security—for individual users, the Access Layer is crucial for making self-sovereignty tangible and survivable. Its mission is to ensure that individuals can interact with Ethereum effectively and securely across essential actions: reading chain data, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. This necessitates supporting users, and increasingly their automated agents, to access current state, historical data, and related information without reliance on unverifiable intermediaries. The cluster champions private, censorship-resistant transactions with guaranteed or cost-free outcomes. As interactions shift towards agents, the Access Layer emphasizes user control, ensuring bounded authority grants, revocability, and custody of user intents away from intermediaries. Verifiable, understandable, and recoverable interfaces, from hardware to front-end, are a key objective, regardless of technical proficiency. The guiding principle is the "zero option": for every intermediated path, a credible, intermediary-free alternative must exist and remain accessible, strategically identifying where stronger CROPS properties can be applied or where alternatives are essential due to economic incentives favoring aggregation and control.
-
User Layer: This cluster serves as a vital anchor, grounding the EF’s work in the real-world needs of users and organizations committed to self-sovereign Ethereum use. Its objective is to widely extend the tools and norms of such use. By focusing on user segments, personas, educational materials, use-case research, and impact evaluation, the User Layer helps the EF understand crucial capabilities, serious failure modes, and acceptable trade-offs. The goal is not to become a product development studio, but to ensure that decisions made by the Protocol and Access Layers are informed by the realities of current and potential users, practical constraints, and measurable indicators of self-sovereignty. This ensures that technical advancements translate into meaningful, usable benefits for the end-user.
-
Community Layer: The Community Layer manages the Ethereum Foundation’s public presence and engagement, both within the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond. Its primary responsibility is to clearly articulate the EF’s values and differentiate its mission from "zero-sum financial crypto," "corpo-compromised crypto," and potentially compromised non-profit entities. The EF is committed to maximizing community value by maintaining independence from such counterproductive entanglements. Additionally, this cluster builds relationships outside the traditional crypto sphere, recognizing natural allies in free and open-source software, secure and local-first technologies, privacy and cryptography research, civil liberties advocacy, decentralized web initiatives, and public-interest technology. Through these collaborations, the Community Layer seeks to foster fruitful, high-quality overlaps between Ethereum’s mission and these broader movements.
-
Institutional Layer: This cluster focuses on the EF’s engagement with institutions—financial, non-financial enterprises, government bodies, universities, and other non-profit groups—that shape institutionally intermediated paths for end-users to interact with Ethereum. The core objective is to create showcases of effective integration of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that maximize CROPS properties and guarantees for both institutions and users. This includes ensuring fair and correct execution, enabling data portability and practical exit options, protecting privacy, proving data authenticity, and preventing misbehavior. The EF believes that many institutions will find it advantageous to serve users in ways that strengthen self-sovereignty while meeting their own operational and mission-critical requirements. Beyond direct engagement, the Institutional Layer will establish and disseminate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials for institutional adoption. It also works proactively with academics and advocacy organizations globally to ensure a correct understanding of Ethereum and to track and respond to policy and regulatory developments that could impact Ethereum’s commitment to self-sovereign use and its core principles.
Impact on Personnel and Transition Support
The restructuring has led to the difficult decision of parting ways with 54 colleagues, representing approximately 20% of the Ethereum Foundation’s workforce. This significant reduction underscores the Foundation’s commitment to a leaner, more focused operational model. EF leadership acknowledged the difficulty of these decisions, emphasizing their necessity to align resources with the Foundation’s sharpened strategic mandate and ensure long-term sustainability, particularly in light of fluctuating market conditions.
To support the departing employees, the EF has implemented a comprehensive severance and transition package. This includes severance pay calculated as the higher of one month’s salary per year worked at the EF or the amount mandated by the individual’s local jurisdiction. This policy aligns with severance terms previously offered to employees who departed in recent months, ensuring consistency and fairness. Furthermore, the transition support includes assistance in finding new roles within the broader Ethereum ecosystem, complemented by a small transition grant earmarked for individual expenses such as career coaching and professional development. The Foundation expressed profound gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by these individuals to Ethereum, hoping for their continued involvement in the ecosystem in new capacities.
Broader Implications for the Ethereum Ecosystem
This reorganization carries significant implications for the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
Firstly, it solidifies the Ethereum Foundation’s role as a guardian of the core protocol and its underlying philosophy, rather than a broad-based grant-making organization for all ecosystem projects. By narrowing its focus to areas where it can have the most critical impact—such as core protocol research, development, and the defense of self-sovereignty—the EF signals a mature approach to its stewardship. This strategic clarity is crucial for a decentralized project like Ethereum, ensuring that essential infrastructure remains robust and aligned with its founding principles.
Secondly, the emphasis on fiscal responsibility through the Treasury Management Policy sets a precedent for sustainability within the crypto non-profit sector. By de-risking its operations from short-term market volatility, the EF aims to ensure its ability to provide consistent, long-term support for critical infrastructure, which is vital for Ethereum’s continued evolution and resilience. This move may encourage other decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and foundations to adopt similar prudent financial strategies.
Thirdly, the redistribution of talent resulting from the workforce reduction could invigorate other projects within the Ethereum ecosystem. The 54 departing employees possess invaluable expertise and institutional knowledge gained at the heart of Ethereum’s development. Their integration into other teams, startups, or research initiatives could inject new energy and accelerate progress across various segments of the ecosystem, effectively decentralizing expertise and fostering broader innovation.
Finally, the new cluster structure, particularly the Community and Institutional Layers, indicates a concerted effort to expand Ethereum’s reach and relevance beyond its traditional enthusiast base. By engaging with open-source communities, civil liberties advocates, and mainstream institutions, the EF aims to articulate Ethereum’s value proposition in a broader societal context. This strategic outreach is crucial for driving mainstream adoption, fostering regulatory understanding, and positioning Ethereum as a foundational technology for a more self-sovereign digital future. The explicit aim to differentiate from "zero-sum financial crypto" and "corpo-compromised crypto" underscores a commitment to ethical development and public utility over purely speculative or centralized applications.
The Ethereum Foundation that emerges from this comprehensive reorganization is demonstrably leaner and more strategically focused. While the reduction in workforce represents a challenging period for those affected, the Foundation’s leadership is confident that this pivot is essential for securing Ethereum’s long-term health and its foundational commitment to self-sovereignty. The coming weeks and months are expected to bring further details on how the broader ecosystem can best engage with the EF’s new structure and contribute to its refined mission.
