Key Takeaways
- The Ethereum Foundation cut 54 staff members, about 20% of its workforce, as part of a formal reorganization completed June 23, 2026.
- The EF’s new five-cluster structure prioritizes Protocol Layer work, including post-quantum security and L1 privacy research over short-term market goals.
- Departing employees receive severance of at least one month per year of EF service, plus transition grants and ecosystem job placement support.
Leaner Structure, Narrower Focus
The foundation published a formal post from EF management outlining the new organizational shape. The cuts are effective immediately. The EF described the move as necessary to avoid “excessive disruption from short-term market movements” and said the new configuration positions it to execute on long-horizon priorities.
The departing employees will receive severance calculated as the higher of one month’s pay per year of service at the EF or the amount required under local law. The foundation is also providing transition support, including help finding positions elsewhere in the Ethereum ecosystem and a small grant to cover costs like career coaching.
“These decisions were hard, but they are necessary,” EF management wrote in the post.
Five Clusters Replace the Old Model
The EF’s new structure organizes its work into five domain clusters plus an operations group and a management support group.
The five domains are:
- Protocol Layer: Focused on scaling and hardening the core Ethereum protocol, including post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy research.
- Access Layer: Covers how individuals and agents interact with Ethereum directly, including reading chain state, transacting privately, and maintaining custody without depending on unverifiable intermediaries.
- User Layer: Keeps EF decisions grounded in real user needs through research, personas, and impact evaluation.
- Community Layer: Manages how the EF presents itself publicly and builds relationships outside the crypto space, including with civil liberties organizations and open-source communities.
- Institutional Layer: Handles EF engagement with financial institutions, governments, enterprises, and universities exploring Ethereum integration.
Protocol Work Comes First
The EF was direct about the Protocol Layer’s mandate. The cluster exists, the foundation said, to make Ethereum “harder to corrupt or capture, and easier to rely on when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, and intermediaries extract.”
The post drew a clear line between protocol work and market-facing priorities. The Protocol Layer, the EF stated, “does not exist to make Ethereum more marketable or focused on short-term interests, or to make it easier to turn into another financial rail controlled by intermediaries.”
EF’s Goal Separation and ETH Market Performance
That framing signals a deliberate separation between the EF’s core development mission and commercial or institutional pressures, even as the new Institutional Layer cluster moves to engage governments, enterprises, and financial firms.
The announcement comes as ethereum’s market performance has been in the gutter. Over the last 12 months, ether is down more than 26%. At $1,659 per ETH, the second-largest crypto asset by market cap is also down more than 66% below its all-time price high of $4,946 per coin. Out of the $2.14 trillion crypto market valuation aggregate, ETH’s market cap of just over $200 billion equates to 9% of the total.
What Comes Next
The EF said it will share more details about the new structure and how the broader Ethereum ecosystem can engage with it over the coming weeks and months.
The foundation characterized the new EF as “leaner and more focused,” adding that the people leaving may still contribute to Ethereum from outside the organization. Several individuals who departed in recent months received the same severance terms now being offered to the 54 employees leaving today.