Layla Zulfa
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has officially concluded a months-long process of significant reorganization, reshaping its operational structure and reducing its global workforce by 54 individuals, approximately 20% of its total staff. This strategic overhaul is part of a comprehensive implementation of the Foundation’s newly defined Mandate and its robust Treasury Management Policy, signaling a more focused and resilient approach to guiding the development and ecosystem growth of the Ethereum blockchain.
The extensive restructuring aims to align the EF’s resources, activities, and personnel with a clear vision for the critical tasks ahead, emphasizing long-term sustainability and the core principles of decentralization and self-sovereignty. The decision, while described as difficult, underscores the Foundation’s commitment to adapting to the evolving demands of the Ethereum ecosystem and ensuring its ability to operate effectively regardless of short-term market fluctuations.
A Phased Approach to Strategic Alignment: The Road to Reorganization
The journey to this significant organizational change began several months prior, driven by a recognition within the EF that as Ethereum matured and its ecosystem expanded exponentially, the Foundation’s structure needed to evolve. Initial discussions likely centered on optimizing operational efficiency, enhancing strategic focus, and ensuring financial prudence. This led to the development and articulation of two foundational documents: the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy.
The Mandate, publicly released and accessible, presumably outlines the EF’s refreshed mission, core values, and strategic priorities in an increasingly complex and competitive blockchain landscape. It would serve as the guiding star for all subsequent organizational decisions, including resource allocation and personnel management. Concurrently, the Treasury Management Policy, detailed in a June 2025 blog post, indicates a proactive stance on financial stewardship. Given the EF’s significant holdings in Ethereum (ETH), market volatility poses a constant challenge. This policy likely establishes clear guidelines for managing its assets, ensuring sufficient runway for its operations, and safeguarding its ability to fund critical research and development irrespective of market cycles. This financial discipline is crucial for a non-profit organization whose mission is to support a global public good.
The reorganization itself would have involved a meticulous review of existing projects, teams, and roles against the new Mandate. This internal audit process would have identified areas of overlap, opportunities for consolidation, and roles that, while valuable, might no longer directly align with the refined core objectives. The "months-long process" suggests a methodical and deliberate approach, involving internal consultations, strategic planning sessions, and careful consideration of human resources implications. The announcement today marks the culmination of these efforts, transitioning from strategic planning to operational implementation.
The New Organizational Blueprint: Five Dedicated Layers
At the heart of the EF’s new structure are five distinct operational clusters, each responsible for a specific domain of work, alongside dedicated clusters for operations and management support. This multi-layered approach is designed to provide tailored strategies and accountability for diverse challenges within the Ethereum ecosystem. The new clusters are:
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Protocol Layer: This cluster is the bedrock of the EF’s mission, inheriting the responsibility for ensuring Ethereum’s foundational promise of scaling self-sovereignty. Its primary objective is to harden and scale the Ethereum protocol itself, safeguarding its non-negotiable properties: censorship and capture resistance, open source principles, privacy, and security. Unlike market-driven initiatives, this layer focuses on making Ethereum resilient against corruption, reliable during counterparty failures, and resistant to governmental overreach or intermediary extraction. Key initiatives include safe fork deployments, complexity reduction, minimizing trusted dependencies, defending the transaction pipeline against toxic MEV (Maximal Extractable Value), and accelerating long-horizon research such as post-quantum security, zkEVM (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine), and Layer 1 (L1) privacy. The emphasis here is on fundamental integrity and long-term technological advancement, rather than short-term marketability.
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Access Layer: This layer directly addresses the practical application of Ethereum’s "CROPS properties" (likely an acronym for core properties like Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, Security). Its mandate is to make self-sovereignty tangible and survivable for individuals across essential actions: reading the chain, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. This involves enabling users and their agents to interact with the network without relying on unverifiable intermediaries, ensuring private and censorship-resistant transactions, and guaranteeing predictable outcomes. A core principle is the "zero option": for every intermediated path, a credible, intermediary-free alternative must exist and remain accessible. This cluster identifies areas where stronger CROPS properties can be integrated into current infrastructure and where alternative solutions are necessary to counteract the economic incentives that favor aggregation and control.
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User Layer: Grounding the EF’s work in the realities of its end-users, this cluster ensures that Protocol and Access Layer decisions are informed by real-world needs and constraints. It focuses on understanding the capabilities that matter most to users, identifying serious failure modes, and evaluating acceptable trade-offs. Its activities include researching user segments and personas, developing educational materials, conducting use-case research, and evaluating impact. The goal is not for the EF to become a product development studio, but rather to ensure that technical advancements genuinely serve and empower the diverse individuals and organizations utilizing Ethereum, extending the tools and norms of self-sovereign use as widely as possible.
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Community Layer: This cluster defines how the EF presents itself to the world, both within the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond. It is tasked with articulating the EF’s unique identity, differentiating it from "zero-sum financial crypto," "corpo-compromised crypto," and other grant-managing non-profits susceptible to geopolitical influence. The EF emphasizes its commitment to maximizing community value through independence from such entanglements. Additionally, this layer builds relationships outside the immediate crypto sphere, forging alliances with free and open-source movements, privacy and cryptography researchers, civil liberty advocates, and public-interest technology groups. The aim is to foster fruitful, high-quality collaborations that naturally align with Ethereum’s values.
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Institutional Layer: This cluster engages with traditional institutions—including financial bodies, non-financial enterprises, governments, universities, and other non-profits—that are exploring or implementing Ethereum-based solutions. The objective is to facilitate integrations that maximize CROPS properties for both institutions and end-users. This includes showcasing effective applications that guarantee fair execution, ensure data portability and exit options, protect privacy, prove data authenticity, and prevent misbehavior. The EF believes many institutions will find that strengthening self-sovereignty aligns with their incentives to create value and fulfill their missions. The cluster also works upstream with academics and advocacy organizations globally to ensure a correct understanding of Ethereum’s current and potential forms, tracking and responding to policy and regulatory developments that could impact Ethereum’s commitment to its core principles.
Impact on Personnel: A Difficult but Necessary Reduction
The reorganization has resulted in the departure of 54 colleagues, representing roughly 20% of the EF’s workforce. This reduction is framed as a necessary measure to enable the Foundation to focus its resources on critical work unique to the EF, thereby reducing vulnerability to market volatility. Such workforce adjustments in large organizations are often a consequence of strategic realignments, aiming to optimize talent distribution and project focus.
Recognizing the human impact of these decisions, the EF has outlined a comprehensive support package for departing staff. This includes severance pay, calculated as the higher of one month’s pay per year worked at the EF or the amount mandated by the individual’s local jurisdiction. This policy mirrors severance packages offered to previous employees who left the EF in recent months, suggesting a standardized approach to such transitions. Beyond financial support, the package also includes "transition support," which encompasses assistance in finding new opportunities within the broader Ethereum ecosystem and a small transition grant earmarked for professional development expenses such as career coaching.
This support package reflects an understanding of the interconnected nature of the Ethereum community. Many departing individuals are highly skilled professionals deeply embedded in the Web3 space. The EF’s intention is not to sever ties but to facilitate their continued contribution to the ecosystem, albeit from outside the Foundation’s direct employment. This approach helps retain valuable talent within the broader decentralized network, potentially seeding new projects or strengthening existing ones.
Broader Implications for the Ethereum Ecosystem
The reorganization of the Ethereum Foundation carries significant implications for the future trajectory of the Ethereum blockchain. A leaner, more focused EF is expected to operate with enhanced agility and precision, directing its efforts more effectively towards its refined Mandate.
- Accelerated Core Development: By prioritizing the Protocol Layer and streamlining operations, the EF aims to accelerate fundamental research and development, ensuring Ethereum’s continued technological leadership and resilience. The explicit focus on "hardening and scaling" and "long-horizon research" indicates a commitment to foundational improvements rather than short-term trends.
- Enhanced User Experience and Adoption: The dedicated Access and User Layers suggest a concerted effort to bridge the gap between complex blockchain technology and practical, self-sovereign user experiences. This could lead to more intuitive interfaces, improved privacy features, and better educational resources, fostering wider adoption.
- Strategic Community Engagement: The Community Layer’s mandate to clearly articulate the EF’s values and build bridges beyond crypto signifies a proactive approach to shaping public perception and fostering meaningful collaborations. This could help differentiate Ethereum from less principled ventures and attract broader societal support.
- Responsible Institutional Integration: The Institutional Layer’s focus on "showcases of effective integration" that maximize CROPS properties is crucial. As traditional institutions increasingly explore blockchain, the EF’s guidance can ensure that these integrations uphold Ethereum’s core values, rather than compromising them for expediency. This proactive engagement could establish best practices and standards for responsible institutional adoption.
- Talent Redistribution: While the layoffs are a difficult aspect, they could lead to a healthy redistribution of talent across the wider Ethereum ecosystem. Many former EF employees are highly sought-after experts who may now contribute to independent projects, other foundational organizations, or startups, potentially decentralizing expertise and fostering innovation beyond a single entity.
- Financial Stability: The emphasis on the Treasury Management Policy underscores a commitment to long-term financial stability. By insulating itself from excessive disruption due to market volatility, the EF can maintain a consistent funding pipeline for critical, often unprofitable, public goods research and development.
The coming weeks and months will provide further clarity as the EF elaborates on the specific initiatives and strategies within each new cluster. The ecosystem will be closely watching how this restructured Foundation engages with developers, researchers, users, and institutions to advance Ethereum’s mission of building a decentralized, self-sovereign future. The EF’s evolution reflects the maturation of Ethereum itself, moving from an exploratory phase to a more structured and strategically driven era, poised to address the complex challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
