Ethereum Foundation Cuts 20% of Staff, 54 Employees Depart: The Survival Logic Behind the Restructuring
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Ethereum Foundation Cuts 20% of Staff, 54 Employees Depart: The Survival Logic Behind the Restructuring
For investors, this signals Ethereum’s shift from a broad-based approach to a focused emphasis on the protocol layer and sovereignty assurance—but it also exposes the financial strain on nonprofit organizations amid the bear market.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Ethereum Foundation
Translated and edited by TechFlow
TechFlow Editorial Note: The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a 20% reduction in staff—54 people have departed—as part of a months-long organizational restructuring. This is not merely cost-cutting but a strategic contraction: EF is concentrating its resources on critical tasks that “only EF can do—and must do,” reorganizing into five clusters. For investors, this signals Ethereum’s shift from broad-based expansion toward focused protocol-layer development and sovereignty assurance—but it also reveals the financial pressures facing nonprofits during bear markets.
Today, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is transforming, concluding a months-long restructuring process undertaken as part of implementing its Mandate and Treasury Management Policy.
The restructured EF now possesses the structure, activities, and personnel required to execute future critical tasks—but 54 colleagues have departed, representing approximately 20% of EF’s total headcount. Many of them will continue contributing to Ethereum in other capacities over the coming weeks.
This article provides a brief overview of the new structure and details how we are supporting departing colleagues.
New Structure
EF now comprises five clusters, each responsible for a distinct work domain—Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer—as well as one cluster dedicated to operations and another composed of management plus teams directly supporting managerial functions.
Each work domain demands different approaches, accountability for different types of outcomes, and internally tailored structures suited to its specific workload. We will share further details next month; today’s overview remains at the highest level only.
Protocol Layer
The Protocol Cluster carries forward EF’s tradition and responsibility: ensuring Ethereum fulfills its foundational promise of scaling sovereignty. It achieves this by laying the groundwork for strengthening and extending the Ethereum protocol itself. Its goal is to ensure the Ethereum protocol continues delivering the properties worth defending: censorship resistance and capture resistance, open source and openness, privacy and security as non-negotiable protocol guarantees.
The Protocol Cluster exists to advance the core protocol without compromising sovereignty guarantees. Its purpose is not to increase Ethereum’s market value or prioritize short-term gains, nor to make Ethereum more easily co-opted into yet another financial rail controlled by intermediaries. Its work makes Ethereum harder to corrupt or capture—and more reliable when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, or intermediaries extract rents. This means securely delivering forks, reducing unnecessary complexity, minimizing trusted dependencies, protecting transaction pipelines from harmful MEV and privileged order flow, and accelerating long-term research—including post-quantum security, zkEVMs, and L1 privacy—into protocol upgrades that preserve and improve sovereignty at scale.
Access Layer
The Access Layer is where Ethereum succeeds—or fails—at serving individuals who genuinely need CROPS properties in practice. This cluster’s work ensures sovereignty is accessible, understandable, and sustainable across critical operations: reading the chain, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. These operations must support users—and increasingly, agents acting on their behalf—who must be able to read current state, history, and related data without relying on unverifiable intermediaries. They should be able to transact privately and without censorship risk; transaction outcomes must either be guaranteed or fail freely if conditions aren’t met. As more work shifts to agents, users must retain control—granting limited permissions and revoking them at will—and retain custody of their intent, rather than exposing it to intermediaries. Interfaces—from chips to frontends—must be verifiable, understandable, and recoverable, regardless of usage frequency or technical expertise.
This cluster applies the principle of zero options: for every mediated path, a trustworthy, unmediated alternative must exist—and remain accessible. Strategically, this means identifying opportunities to apply stronger CROPS properties to existing infrastructure, while acknowledging that credible alternatives are essential where economic incentives favor aggregation, identification, and control.
The User Layer Cluster grounds EF’s work in users and organizations with significant stakes in autonomous Ethereum use—and expands tools and standards for such use as broadly as possible. It helps EF understand the most critical capabilities, the most severe failure modes, and tradeoffs acceptable when necessary.
Its work includes user segmentation, role modeling, educational materials, use-case studies, and impact assessments. The goal is not to turn EF into a product studio—but to ensure decisions in the Protocol and Access Layers are shaped by real current and prospective users, real constraints, and real sovereignty metrics.
Community Layer
The Community Cluster governs how EF presents itself in the world—both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its work clarifies EF’s stance—and how it differs substantively from zero-sum financial cryptocurrencies, from cryptocurrencies compromised by corporate interests, and from bland, status-quo-maintaining, incentive-distorted nonprofit grant-management worlds vulnerable to geopolitical whitewashing. EF maximizes its community value by maintaining independence from these—and other counterproductive entanglements.
This cluster also builds EF’s relationships beyond cryptocurrency. Sovereignty has natural allies in free and open-source, security- and locality-first software and hardware; in privacy and cryptography research and advocacy; and in civil liberties, decentralized networks, and public-interest technology. This cluster ensures overlaps between Ethereum and these domains are productive, non-coercive, and high-quality.
Institutional Layer
This cluster manages EF’s collaboration with institutions shaping how end users interact with Ethereum via institutional intermediaries. These may include financial institutions—whether consumer payments, insurance, or others. They may include non-financial enterprises—manufacturing, social platforms, publishing, and many other sectors. They may include government applications. They may include universities or other nonprofits.
In all cases, our aim is to prioritize building demonstrable use cases that effectively integrate Ethereum and cryptographic technologies—maximizing CROPS properties and the safeguards they deliver to institutions and users alike. Examples include guarantees of fair and correct execution; ensuring data portability and broader practical exit rights; protecting privacy for all participants; verifying data authenticity; better detecting—or even preventing—misconduct. We believe many enterprises, governments, and nonprofits will recognize that their incentives align with serving users in ways that strengthen sovereignty—while retaining the safeguards needed to create value or fulfill missions—and that Ethereum and cryptographic technologies can help achieve this. Beyond direct engagement, the Institutional Cluster pursues these goals by helping establish—and thoughtfully communicate—institutional adoption best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials.
The Institutional Cluster also collaborates upstream with academia and allied advocacy organizations worldwide—to ensure Ethereum is correctly understood both in its current form and potential, and to track and respond to policy and regulatory developments that could affect Ethereum’s commitment to autonomous use and its core principles of censorship resistance (and capture resistance), open source, privacy, and security.
Departing Colleagues
As part of reshaping EF’s structure, activities, and spending profile, we are today parting ways with 54 colleagues.
These decisions were difficult—but necessary. We must configure our resources and organization to focus, over the coming years, on the critical work that only EF can do—and therefore must do—without being overly disrupted by short-term market fluctuations.
To prepare departing colleagues for transition, we offer a comprehensive package including severance pay and transition support. Severance equals the higher of one month’s salary per year worked at EF or the locally mandated amount in the individual’s jurisdiction. This matches the severance provided to colleagues who left EF over the past several months. Transition support includes assistance finding new contribution opportunities within the ecosystem, plus a modest transition stipend specifically earmarked for personal transition expenses (e.g., career coaching).
We thank each departing colleague for their talent, dedication, and time contributed to Ethereum at EF—and look forward to continuing to work alongside those who find new homes elsewhere in the ecosystem.
What’s Next
The EF emerging from this transformation is leaner and more focused. Over the coming weeks and months, we will share more about how our work is changing—and how the ecosystem can best engage with the new structure.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@ethereum
