The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has officially announced a substantial reorganization, concluding a months-long strategic realignment aimed at enhancing its operational efficiency and clarity of purpose. This restructuring, driven by the implementation of the EF’s Mandate and a new Treasury Management Policy, signifies a pivotal moment for the organization as it prepares for the critical development phases ahead. The transformation has resulted in a refined organizational structure, a redefined set of activities, and a more concentrated team, albeit with a reduction in personnel. Approximately 20% of the EF’s workforce, totaling 54 individuals, will be departing, many of whom are expected to continue their contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem in new capacities.
This comprehensive overhaul seeks to equip the EF with the precise architecture, focused endeavors, and dedicated personnel required to address the complex challenges and opportunities facing the Ethereum protocol. The organization emphasized that the changes were necessitated by the need to align resources with its core mission and to ensure sustained, long-term progress on foundational Ethereum development.
A New Architectural Blueprint for Ethereum Development
The core of the EF’s transformation lies in its newly defined organizational structure, which has been reshaped into seven distinct clusters. These clusters are strategically organized around five primary domains of work: the Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer. Complementing these are two crucial clusters dedicated to Operations and Management support, ensuring the foundational infrastructure and strategic oversight necessary for the EF’s operations.
This multi-faceted approach acknowledges that each domain of work within the Ethereum ecosystem demands a unique strategy, distinct accountability metrics, and a tailored internal structure. While the EF plans to release more granular details about each cluster in the coming weeks, a high-level overview reveals a deliberate effort to decentralize focus and specialize expertise.
The Protocol Layer: Guardians of Ethereum’s Foundational Promise
The Protocol Layer cluster inherits the EF’s historic mandate to ensure Ethereum fulfills its core promise of scaling self-sovereignty. Its primary objective is to lay the technical groundwork for hardening and scaling the Ethereum protocol itself. This cluster is tasked with upholding and advancing the foundational properties that make Ethereum a robust and defensible network: censorship and capture resistance, open-source principles, transparency, privacy, and security as non-negotiable guarantees.
This team is not focused on short-term marketability or commercial interests, nor on transforming Ethereum into another intermediary-controlled financial rail. Instead, its work is geared towards making Ethereum more resilient against corruption and capture, and more reliable when counterparties fail, platforms impose censorship, governments overreach, or intermediaries exploit. Key areas of focus include safely implementing protocol upgrades, reducing unnecessary complexity, minimizing reliance on trusted third parties, defending the transaction pipeline against disruptive forces like MEV (Miner Extractable Value) and privileged order flow, and accelerating long-horizon research. This includes advancements in areas such as post-quantum security, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) implementations, and enhancing Layer 1 privacy features, all with the overarching goal of preserving and improving self-sovereignty at scale.
The Access Layer: Bridging Self-Sovereignty and Practical Application
The Access Layer cluster addresses the critical challenge of making Ethereum’s self-sovereign properties practically available and usable for individuals and entities. This cluster’s mission is to ensure that self-sovereignty is accessible, comprehensible, and survivable across key user interactions: reading blockchain data, transacting, proving ownership, delegating responsibilities, and exiting the network. These fundamental actions must be robustly supported for end-users and, increasingly, for the agents acting on their behalf.
Users and their agents require the ability to access current state, historical data, and related information without relying on opaque intermediaries. Transactions should be executable with a high degree of privacy and immunity from censorship, with outcomes that are either guaranteed or fail cost-effectively if conditions are not met. As more functionality shifts to sophisticated 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 third-party platforms. Interfaces, from the silicon level to front-end applications, must be verifiable, intuitive, and recoverable, regardless of user familiarity 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. Tactically, this involves identifying opportunities to enhance the "CROPS" (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security) properties within existing infrastructure and acknowledging where credible, decentralized alternatives are essential to counter economic incentives that favor aggregation, identification, and control.
The User Layer: Grounding Development in Real-World Needs
The User Layer cluster ensures that the EF’s work remains anchored in the needs of users and organizations that have a vested interest in the self-sovereign use of Ethereum. Its role is to extend the tools and norms of such usage as widely as possible, thereby deepening the EF’s understanding of the most critical capabilities, the most serious failure modes, and the acceptable trade-offs required for broad adoption.
The activities within this cluster encompass user segmentation, persona development, educational material creation, use-case research, and impact evaluation. The objective is not for the EF to become a product development studio, but rather 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 concrete measures of self-sovereignty. This feedback loop is vital for ensuring that Ethereum’s development remains aligned with its foundational ethos and practical utility.
The Community Layer: Defining the EF’s Public Face and Ecosystem Role
The Community cluster is responsible for the EF’s outward presence and engagement, both within and beyond the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Its mandate is to clearly articulate what the EF stands for and how its mission distinctly differentiates from speculative financial cryptocurrency, corporate-influenced blockchain projects, and the often-status quo-preserving and perversely incentivized segments of the non-profit world that can be susceptible to geopolitical manipulation. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining independence from such entanglements.
This cluster also actively cultivates the EF’s relationships with external communities and institutions. Self-sovereignty finds natural allies in movements and fields such as free and open-source software, secure and local-first hardware and software development, privacy and cryptography research, civil liberties advocacy, decentralized web initiatives, and public-interest technology. The cluster works to foster fruitful, organic, and high-quality connections between Ethereum and these diverse domains.
The Institutional Layer: Navigating Enterprise and Governance Adoption
The Institutional Layer cluster spearheads the EF’s engagement with institutions that shape how end-users interact with Ethereum through intermediated pathways. This encompasses a wide range of entities, including financial institutions involved in payments, insurance, and other services; non-financial enterprises across manufacturing, social sectors, publishing, and various other industries; governmental applications; and academic and non-profit organizations.
Across these diverse engagements, the primary goal is to showcase effective integration of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies. This integration aims to maximize CROPS properties and the guarantees offered to both institutions and users, such as ensuring fair and accurate execution, facilitating data portability, enabling practical exit strategies, protecting user privacy, verifying data authenticity, and enhancing misbehavior detection and prevention. The EF believes that many enterprises, governments, and non-profits will recognize the strategic advantage of serving users in ways that strengthen self-sovereignty while retaining essential guarantees for value creation and mission fulfillment. Ethereum and cryptographic technologies are positioned as key enablers of this evolution.
Beyond direct engagement, the institutional cluster will champion these objectives by developing and disseminating best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials tailored for institutional adoption. Furthermore, this cluster collaborates with academics and allied advocacy organizations globally to ensure a correct 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.
Supporting Departing Colleagues Through Transition
The EF acknowledged the difficult nature of the decisions that led to the departure of 54 colleagues. These actions were deemed necessary to ensure the organization is appropriately resourced and structured to focus on the critical, long-term work that only the EF can undertake, without undue disruption from short-term market fluctuations.
To facilitate a smooth transition for those leaving, 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 local jurisdiction. This severance policy is consistent with previous departures. Additionally, departing employees will receive transition support, which includes assistance in identifying new opportunities within the Ethereum ecosystem and a modest transition grant to cover individual career development expenses, such as coaching.
The EF expressed profound gratitude for the talent, dedication, and time contributed by each departing individual. The organization looks forward to continuing to collaborate with those who will find new roles within the broader ecosystem.
Looking Ahead: A Leaner, More Focused Ethereum Foundation
The Ethereum Foundation that emerges from this reorganization is characterized as leaner and more focused. The organization has indicated that further details regarding the evolution of its work and how the ecosystem can best engage with the new structure will be shared in the coming weeks and months. This strategic realignment underscores the EF’s commitment to navigating the complexities of Ethereum’s ongoing development and solidifying its position as a crucial steward of the protocol’s future. The organization’s renewed focus aims to ensure sustained progress on its core mission of building a decentralized, censorship-resistant, and user-empowering global computer.
