以太坊基金会裁员 20%，54 人离职：重组背后的生存逻辑

Author: Ethereum Foundation

Translation: Deep潮 TechFlow

Deep潮 Guide: The Ethereum Foundation announces a 20% layoff, with 54 people leaving, and has completed a months-long organizational restructuring. This is not just simple cost-cutting but a strategic contraction — the foundation will focus resources on "only EF can do, must do" key tasks, redividing into five major clusters. For investors, this marks Ethereum shifting from broad outreach to focusing on protocol layer and sovereignty assurance, but also exposes financial pressures on non-profit organizations during a bear market.

Today, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is changing its form, ending a months-long restructuring process as part of implementing Mandate and treasury management policies.

The restructured EF has the necessary structures, activities, and personnel to execute key future tasks, but also 54 colleagues have left, accounting for about 20% of EF’s total staff. Many of them will continue to contribute to Ethereum in other ways over the coming weeks.

This article briefly introduces the new structure and details how we support departing staff.

New Structure

EF now has five clusters, each responsible for different work areas — protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer — as well as a cluster focused on operations and a cluster composed of management and teams directly supporting management work.

Each work area requires different approaches, is responsible for different types of results, and has internal structures tailored to the workload. We will share more related information next month; today, only a high-level overview.

Protocol Layer

The protocol cluster carries EF’s tradition and responsibility, ensuring Ethereum fulfills its fundamental promise of autonomous scalability. It achieves this by laying the groundwork to strengthen and extend Ethereum’s protocol itself. Its goal is to ensure Ethereum’s core protocol continues to uphold attributes worth defending: censorship resistance and capture resistance, open source and open, privacy and security as non-negotiable protocol guarantees.

The existence of the protocol cluster is to ensure the core protocol continues to advance without compromising sovereignty guarantees. Its purpose is not to make Ethereum more marketable or focus on short-term gains, nor to make it easier to turn into another intermediary-controlled financial track. Its work is to make Ethereum harder to be eroded or captured, and more reliable when counterparties fail, platforms face censorship, governments overreach, or intermediaries extract profits. This means securely delivering forks, reducing unnecessary complexity, minimizing trusted dependencies, protecting transaction pipelines from harmful MEV and privileged order flow, and accelerating and translating long-term research into protocol changes that maintain and improve sovereignty at scale — including post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy.

Access Layer

The access layer is where Ethereum provides services or fails to individuals who need CROPS attributes in practice. The cluster’s work is to make sovereignty available, understandable, and sustainable in critical operations: reading the chain, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. These operations must support users and increasingly support agents acting on their behalf, who must be able to read current state, history, and relevant data without relying on unverifiable intermediaries. They should be able to trade privately and without censorship risk, with transaction outcomes either guaranteed or free to fail if conditions are not met. As more work shifts to agents, users must retain control, grant limited permissions, revoke at will, and keep custody of their intentions rather than exposing them to intermediaries. Interfaces from chips to front-end must be verifiable, understandable, and recoverable, regardless of usage frequency or technical expertise.

The principle applied by this cluster is zero options: for every intermediary path, there must be a trusted, intermediary-free path that remains accessible. Strategically, this means identifying where stronger CROPS attributes can be applied to current infrastructure and recognizing that, when economic incentives favor aggregation, identification, and control, trusted alternatives are necessary.

The user layer cluster roots EF’s work in users and organizations with significant interest in autonomous Ethereum use, and aims to broadly expand tools and standards for such use. It helps EF understand the most critical capabilities, failure modes, and acceptable trade-offs when necessary.

Its work includes user segmentation, roles, educational materials, case studies, and impact assessments. The goal is not for EF to become a product studio but to ensure decisions at the protocol and access layers are shaped by real current and potential users, real constraints, and genuine sovereignty trade-offs.

Community Layer

The community cluster is responsible for how EF presents itself globally, both within and outside the Ethereum ecosystem. Its work is to clarify EF’s stance and how it differs substantively from zero-sum finance crypto, compromised corporate crypto, and the non-profit world’s grant management, which is often bland, status quo-maintaining, and influenced by geopolitical interests. EF is committed to maximizing community value by remaining independent of these and other counterproductive entanglements.

This cluster also builds EF’s relationships outside cryptocurrency. Sovereignty has natural allies in fields like free and open-source, secure and locally prioritized software and hardware, privacy and cryptography research and advocacy, as well as civil liberties, decentralized networks, and public interest technology. The cluster aims to ensure that overlaps between Ethereum and these fields are productive, non-coercive, and high-quality.

Institutional Layer

This cluster is responsible for EF’s cooperation with institutions shaping how end users interact with Ethereum via institutional intermediaries. This can include financial institutions, whether for consumer payments, insurance, or others. It can include non-financial enterprises, such as manufacturing, social, publishing, and many other industries. It can include government applications. It can include universities or other non-profits.

In all cases, our goal is to prioritize creating effective showcase cases integrating Ethereum and crypto tech, maximizing CROPS attributes and guarantees for institutions and users — such as ensuring fair and correct execution, data portability, broader practical exit capabilities, privacy protections, proof of data authenticity, better detection and prevention of misconduct, etc. We believe many businesses, governments, and non-profits will realize their incentives tend to serve users in ways that strengthen sovereignty, while preserving the guarantees needed to create value or fulfill missions. Ethereum and crypto tech can be part of achieving this. Beyond direct participation, the institutional cluster will also pursue these goals by helping establish and thoughtfully communicate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials for institutional adoption.

The cluster also collaborates with academia and advocacy organizations worldwide to ensure Ethereum’s current form and potential are properly understood, and to track and respond to policy and regulatory developments that could impact Ethereum’s commitments to sovereignty, censorship resistance (and capture resistance), open source, privacy, and security principles.

Departing Staff

As part of changing EF’s structure, activities, and expenditure, today we part ways with 54 colleagues.

These decisions are difficult but necessary. We must allocate resources and organize in a way that allows us to focus on the key work only EF can do, and must do, over the coming years — without being overly distracted by short-term market fluctuations.

To prepare departing staff for the transition, we offer a package including severance and transitional support. Severance is calculated as the higher of one month’s salary per year of work at EF or the local statutory amount in their jurisdiction. This is the same severance we provided to departing EF colleagues in recent months. Transitional support includes assistance in finding new contributions within the ecosystem and a small transition grant specifically for covering personal transition costs (career coaching, etc.).

We thank each of them 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 that emerges from this transformation is leaner and more focused. We will share more in the coming weeks and months about how our work is changing and how the ecosystem can best interact with the new structure.