Ethereum Foundation Restructures: 54 Staff Cut in Bold Move to Focus on Core Mission

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a major restructuring, cutting 54 roles (about 20% of its workforce) as part of implementing its new Mandate and Treasury Management Policy. The reorganization creates a leaner, more focused EF with five core clusters: Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer, plus operations and management teams.

The New Structure

• Protocol Layer: Focuses on hardening and scaling Ethereum's core protocol, ensuring censorship resistance, privacy, and security remain non-negotiable. Key areas include shipping safe forks, reducing complexity, minimizing trusted dependencies, combating toxic MEV, and advancing long-term research like post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy.
• Access Layer: Aims to make self-sovereignty accessible through verifiable, intermediary-free paths for reading the chain, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. The "zero option" principle ensures credible alternatives exist for every intermediated path.
• User Layer: Grounds EF work in real user needs, personas, and use-case research to ensure Protocol and Access Layer decisions are shaped by actual constraints and measures of self-sovereignty.
• Community Layer: Manages EF's external presence, differentiating it from zero-sum or corpo-compromised crypto, and builds alliances with free/open-source software, privacy advocacy, and civil liberty groups.
• Institutional Layer: Engages with financial institutions, enterprises, governments, and nonprofits to create showcases of Ethereum integration that maximize CROPS properties (censorship resistance, openness, privacy, security). Also handles policy and regulatory engagement.

Support for Departing Staff

The EF is offering a severance package (higher of one month's pay per year worked or local legal minimum) plus transition support, including help finding new roles in the ecosystem and a small grant for career coaching.

What's Next

The EF emerges leaner and more focused, with plans to share more details in the coming weeks about how the new structure will engage with the ecosystem.