Layla Zulfa
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has officially concluded a months-long, comprehensive reorganization, dramatically altering its internal structure and operational focus while reducing its global workforce by approximately 20%, impacting 54 employees. This strategic overhaul is a direct implementation of the recently adopted "Mandate" and "Treasury Management Policy," signaling a deliberate shift towards a leaner, more agile, and strategically aligned entity poised to guide the Ethereum ecosystem through its next phase of development. The foundation asserts that this restructuring will enable it to concentrate on critical tasks unique to its mission, insulate itself from short-term market volatility, and reinforce Ethereum’s core values of self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open-source principles, privacy, and security.
The Ethereum Foundation’s Evolving Role and the Impetus for Change
Since its inception, the Ethereum Foundation has played a pivotal role in fostering the growth and development of the Ethereum blockchain, initially by supporting the core protocol development and later by stewarding various aspects of the ecosystem. As Ethereum transitioned from a nascent technology to a global decentralized network, the EF’s responsibilities expanded, leading to a significant increase in its operational complexity and personnel count. This growth, while necessary for initial scaling, also presented challenges in maintaining optimal strategic focus and adaptability, especially amidst the dynamic and often unpredictable cryptocurrency market cycles.
The decision to reorganize stems from a deep introspection articulated in the "Mandate," a foundational document outlining the EF’s refined purpose and long-term vision. Complementing this, the "Treasury Management Policy" provides a framework for financial prudence, ensuring the foundation’s sustainability and resilience against market fluctuations. These documents collectively underscore a commitment to strategic efficiency and a sharper alignment of resources with the EF’s core mission: to support and safeguard Ethereum’s foundational properties. The foundation aims to move beyond simply funding projects to actively shaping the ecosystem’s future in a highly targeted manner, focusing on areas where its unique influence can yield the greatest impact without compromising its independence or core tenets.
A Chronology of Strategic Realignment
The restructuring process was not an abrupt decision but rather a carefully orchestrated, months-long initiative. Internal discussions and strategic reviews likely commenced well before public announcement, evolving from the conceptualization of the "Mandate" to the detailed planning of the new organizational model. The "Treasury Management Policy," publicly unveiled on June 4, 2025, served as a crucial precursor, setting the financial parameters for the subsequent organizational changes. This policy likely dictated the need for a more disciplined allocation of resources, influencing the scope and scale of the reorganization.
The current round of layoffs is not an isolated event. The EF explicitly mentioned that similar severance packages were offered to "colleagues who left the EF in the past few months," indicating that this process has been ongoing and incremental rather than a single, drastic cut. This suggests a phased approach to downsizing and recalibrating the workforce, allowing for continuous adaptation and refinement of the strategic direction. The culmination of this process today marks a significant milestone, solidifying the new structure and team composition designed for the "critical tasks ahead." The foundation has pledged to share more detailed insights into its evolving work and new engagement mechanisms in the coming weeks and months, suggesting further transparency and communication regarding its future trajectory.
The Architecture of a Leaner, More Focused EF: Five Core Clusters
At the heart of the reorganization is the establishment of a streamlined operational framework comprising five distinct "clusters," each dedicated to specific domains of work, alongside an operations cluster and a management/support cluster. This new structure is designed to foster specialized expertise, clear accountability, and tailored approaches to diverse challenges within the Ethereum ecosystem.
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Protocol Layer: This cluster is positioned as the torchbearer of Ethereum’s foundational promise: scaling self-sovereignty. Its primary objective is to harden and scale the Ethereum protocol, ensuring it remains resistant to censorship and capture, open-source, private, and secure. Unlike initiatives focused on marketability or short-term gains, the Protocol Layer’s mandate is to fortify Ethereum against corruption and external control. Key areas of focus include the safe implementation of network forks, reduction of protocol complexity, minimization of trusted dependencies, defense against toxic Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and privileged orderflow, and advanced research into long-horizon technologies such as post-quantum security, zkEVM (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine), and Layer 1 privacy solutions. This work aims to enhance self-sovereignty at scale, making Ethereum more reliable in scenarios where intermediaries, platforms, or governments might overreach.
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Access Layer: This cluster is dedicated to ensuring that Ethereum’s core properties are practically accessible and survivable for individuals. It focuses on empowering users to engage with the blockchain without relying on verifiable intermediaries. This includes supporting fundamental actions such as reading chain data, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting the network. The Access Layer emphasizes privacy, censorship resistance, and guaranteed transaction outcomes. A core principle is the "zero option," meaning that for every intermediated path, a credible, intermediary-free alternative must exist and remain accessible. This involves identifying areas where stronger cryptographic properties can be applied to existing infrastructure and developing alternatives where economic incentives favor aggregation or control by centralized entities. This layer is crucial for realizing Ethereum’s potential as a truly decentralized and user-centric platform.
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User Layer: The User Layer acts as the voice of the end-user within the EF, grounding the foundation’s work in the real-world needs and interests of individuals and organizations. Its role is not to function as a product development studio but to ensure that decisions made by the Protocol and Access Layers are informed by actual user capabilities, potential failure modes, and acceptable trade-offs. This cluster conducts research into user segments, develops personas, creates educational materials, explores use cases, and evaluates the impact of Ethereum technologies. By focusing on real constraints and measuring self-sovereignty from a user perspective, it ensures that the technical advancements remain relevant and beneficial to the broader community.
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Community Layer: This cluster manages the EF’s external presence and engagement, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its mandate is to clearly articulate the EF’s values and differentiate it from speculative "zero-sum financial crypto," "corpo-compromised crypto," and non-profit entities susceptible to external geopolitical influences. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value through staunch independence. Furthermore, the Community Layer builds crucial relationships outside the immediate crypto sphere, forging alliances with advocates of free and open-source software, secure and local-first hardware, privacy and cryptography research, civil liberties groups, and public-interest technology organizations. This outreach aims to foster high-quality, unforced collaborations that align with Ethereum’s ethos.
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Institutional Layer: The Institutional Layer is responsible for engaging with traditional institutions—including financial bodies, non-financial enterprises, government agencies, universities, and other non-profits—that seek to integrate with Ethereum. The goal is to create compelling showcases of effective cryptographic technology integration that prioritize and maximize self-sovereign properties for both institutions and users. This includes guaranteeing fair execution, ensuring data portability, enabling practical exit strategies, protecting privacy, proving data authenticity, and preventing misbehavior. The EF believes that many institutions will increasingly recognize the value of serving users in ways that strengthen self-sovereignty. Beyond direct engagement, this cluster will establish best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials for institutional adoption. It also collaborates with academics and advocacy organizations globally to ensure accurate understanding of Ethereum and to monitor and respond to policy and regulatory developments that could impact its core principles.
Impact on Personnel: A Difficult but Necessary Transition
The reorganization has resulted in the departure of 54 colleagues, representing approximately 20% of the EF’s total workforce. The foundation acknowledges the difficulty of these decisions, emphasizing their necessity to ensure the organization is "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." This statement highlights a strategic pivot towards a more focused core team, optimized for long-term impact rather than broad operational scope.
To support the departing employees, the EF has provided 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, mirroring policies from previous workforce adjustments. Additionally, a "transition support" package offers assistance in finding new roles within the vibrant Ethereum ecosystem and a small transition grant earmarked for expenses such as career coaching. This demonstrates an effort to facilitate their continued contribution to the broader blockchain space, acknowledging their talent and dedication. While the direct impact on individuals is undoubtedly challenging, the foundation expresses gratitude for their contributions and anticipates many will continue to enrich the ecosystem from new vantage points.
Broader Implications and Future Outlook
The restructuring of the Ethereum Foundation carries significant implications for both the organization itself and the wider Ethereum ecosystem. For the EF, this transformation heralds a new era of heightened specialization and strategic discipline. By concentrating resources on clearly defined clusters, the foundation aims to maximize its impact on core protocol development, user empowerment, community engagement, and responsible institutional adoption. This leaner structure is expected to enhance operational efficiency and responsiveness, enabling the EF to navigate complex technical challenges and regulatory landscapes with greater agility.
For the Ethereum ecosystem, a more focused EF could lead to several outcomes. On one hand, it may foster greater decentralization of initiative, as other organizations and community-led projects may naturally step up to fill any perceived gaps. This could ultimately strengthen the ecosystem’s resilience and diversity. On the other hand, the intensified focus of the EF on fundamental aspects of self-sovereignty and core protocol integrity provides a clear signal of its enduring commitment to Ethereum’s original vision, potentially inspiring greater confidence among developers, users, and institutional partners.
Industry analysts suggest that such a strategic consolidation is a natural evolution for mature decentralized projects. As the network itself becomes more robust and decentralized, the central coordinating entity, like the EF, can refine its role from broad support to targeted stewardship, focusing on areas where centralized coordination remains most impactful and efficient. The emphasis on "defending the transaction pipeline against toxic MEV and privileged orderflow" and accelerating "long-horizon research" like post-quantum security underscores a proactive stance against emerging threats and a commitment to future-proofing the protocol.
The challenges ahead for the newly structured EF include maintaining strong community ties despite a reduced workforce, effectively communicating its refined mission, and ensuring that the specialized clusters work in cohesive synergy. The foundation’s pledge to share more details in the coming weeks and months will be crucial for the ecosystem to understand how best to engage with this transformed entity. Ultimately, this reorganization represents a critical inflection point, repositioning the Ethereum Foundation to continue its vital work in an ever-evolving digital landscape, reinforcing its dedication to the principles that underpin the world’s leading decentralized platform.
