The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has officially concluded a months-long organizational overhaul, restructuring its operational framework, internal activities, and overall spending strategy. The changes mark the implementation of two foundational documents released earlier: the EF Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy.
While the organization emerges from the transition with a newly defined operational model designed to execute its critical long-term roadmap, the restructuring comes with a significant human cost. The Foundation is parting ways with 54 colleagues, representing roughly 20 percent of its total workforce. Leadership notes that many of these departing individuals are expected to find alternative avenues to contribute to the broader Ethereum ecosystem from outside the EF in the coming weeks.
This comprehensive reorganization introduces a streamlined structure intended to shield the Foundation from short-term market fluctuations while sharpening its focus on self-sovereignty, protocol hardening, and censorship resistance. The leadership team has outlined the details of the new operational clusters and the transition support being provided to departing staff.
The New Structure
Under the revamped framework, the Ethereum Foundation is now divided into five core domain clusters, alongside a dedicated operations cluster and a management cluster that directly supports leadership activities. Each domain is tailored to a specific area of work, operating under distinct accountability metrics, approaches, and internal architectures.
The five primary domain clusters consist of the protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer. Leadership plans to release more granular details regarding each division in the coming month, but has introduced the overarching philosophy governing each layer.
Protocol Layer
The protocol cluster bears the historical legacy and core responsibility of ensuring that Ethereum delivers on its foundational promise: scaling self-sovereignty. This division lays the crucial groundwork for hardening and scaling the base Ethereum protocol. Its primary objective is to safeguard the properties that make Ethereum worth defending, establishing censorship resistance, open-source transparency, privacy, and security as non-negotiable protocol guarantees.
Rather than focusing on marketability, short-term commercial interests, or transforming the network into a financial rail controlled by intermediaries, the protocol cluster exists to advance the core protocol without compromising self-sovereignty. Its daily work involves making Ethereum harder to corrupt or capture, and more reliable when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, or intermediaries attempt to extract value.
Practically, this translates to shipping network upgrades safely, minimizing unnecessary complexity, reducing trusted dependencies, and defending the transaction pipeline against toxic Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and privileged order flow. Furthermore, the cluster accelerates long-horizon research—such as post-quantum security, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVM), and Layer 1 privacy—converting theoretical cryptography into protocol changes that preserve and enhance self-sovereignty at scale.
Access Layer
The access layer addresses the practical realities of how individuals interact with the network, serving as the frontline where Ethereum either empowers or fails users who rely on censorship-resistant, open, and private systems. The cluster’s mandate is to make self-sovereignty available, legible, and survivable across fundamental actions, including reading the blockchain, transacting, proving identity or state, delegating authority, and exiting the system.
These capabilities must be supported not only for human users but increasingly for autonomous agents acting on their behalf. Users and their agents must be able to read current state, history, and related data without depending on unverified intermediaries. Transactions must occur privately and free from censorship risks, with outcomes that are explicitly guaranteed or fail without cost if specified conditions are unmet.
As automation and autonomous agents become more prevalent, the access layer ensures that users retain control, granting bounded authority, revoking it at will, and maintaining custody of their own intents rather than exposing them to third-party extractors. The interfaces bridging silicon to frontends must remain verifiable, understandable, and recoverable for all users, regardless of their technical depth.
The guiding principle for this cluster is the "zero option": for every intermediated path, a credible, intermediary-free path must exist and remain accessible. Tactically, this involves identifying where stronger self-sovereignty properties can be embedded into existing infrastructure, while acknowledging where credible alternatives are necessary due to economic incentives favoring aggregation, identification, and control.
User Layer
The user layer cluster keeps the Ethereum Foundation grounded in the needs of individuals and organizations whose vital interests lie in the self-sovereign use of the network. This division works to extend the tools, capabilities, and cultural norms of self-sovereign use as widely as possible.
By conducting user segment research, developing personas, producing educational materials, and evaluating real-world impact, the user layer helps the EF understand which capabilities matter most, where failure modes are most severe, and what tradeoffs are acceptable during settlement processes. The EF is explicitly not operating as a traditional product studio; rather, this cluster ensures that decisions made within the protocol and access layers remain deeply informed by real users, genuine constraints, and concrete measures of self-sovereignty.
Community Layer
The community cluster manages how the Ethereum Foundation presents itself to the world, both within the immediate crypto ecosystem and across broader external landscapes. Its primary responsibility is to articulate what the EF stands for, highlighting how its mission differs fundamentally from zero-sum financial speculation, corporate-compromised blockchain projects, and the status-quo-preserving non-profit models that remain vulnerable to geopolitical co-optation.
The EF remains committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining strict independence from counterproductive entanglements. Beyond the crypto space, the community cluster builds relationships with natural ideological allies in 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. This work ensures that the overlap between Ethereum and these allied fields remains fruitful, unforced, and high quality.
Institutional Layer
The institutional layer oversees the EF’s engagement with major institutions that shape intermediated pathways for end-users. These institutions span consumer payments, financial services, insurance, non-financial enterprises across manufacturing and publishing, government applications, and academic or nonprofit groups.
The overarching goal is to pioneer showcases of effective integration between Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that maximize fundamental guarantees for both institutions and users. These guarantees include fair and correct execution, data portability, practical exit rights, strict privacy protection, verifiable data authenticity, and enhanced prevention of misbehavior. Leadership believes that many enterprises, governments, and nonprofits will increasingly recognize that serving users in ways that strengthen self-sovereignty aligns with their own institutional missions.
To support this adoption, the institutional cluster establishes and communicates best practices, technical standards, reference architectures, and educational materials. Furthermore, the cluster collaborates upstream with academic researchers and advocacy organizations worldwide to ensure Ethereum is accurately understood, while actively monitoring and responding to regulatory developments that could impact the network’s commitment to self-sovereignty and core principles of censorship resistance, open-source integrity, privacy, and security.
The People Leaving
The structural transition and corresponding adjustments to activities and spending have resulted in the departure of 54 colleagues. Foundation leadership acknowledges that these personnel decisions were exceptionally difficult, but stresses that they are necessary to ensure the organization remains properly resourced and organized for the critical years ahead, shielded from the turbulence of short-term market movements.
To support departing staff through the transition, the EF is offering a comprehensive support package consisting of severance pay and transition assistance. The severance formula provides the higher of one month’s salary for every year worked at the Foundation or the amount legally mandated by the employee’s local jurisdiction. This package mirrors the terms offered to colleagues who departed in preceding months.
Transition support includes dedicated assistance in identifying new roles within the broader Ethereum ecosystem, alongside a transition grant earmarked for individual career expenses such as coaching. Leadership expressed deep gratitude to all departing staff for their talent, dedication, and time contributed to the Foundation, and voiced optimism about continuing to collaborate with those who find new homes within the ecosystem.
What Comes Next
The Ethereum Foundation that emerges from this reorganization is positioned to be leaner, more focused, and strictly aligned with its core mandate. Leadership has indicated that additional details regarding shifts in ongoing work and guidance on how the wider ecosystem can best interact with the new structure will be shared in the coming weeks and months.
Ethereum & Smart Contracts
Ethereum & Smart Contracts
Ethereum & Smart Contracts
