EF Foundation's new organizational structure: five major business layer framework, 20% staff reduction

Source: Ethereum Foundation; Edited by: Shaw, Golden Finance

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has undergone an organizational restructuring. To implement the core work authorization documents and funding management policies, the months-long reorganization process has now concluded.

After this restructuring, the Foundation has assembled the organizational structure, business units, and personnel teams needed to advance subsequent core work, but has also reduced 54 employees, accounting for about 20% of the Foundation’s total staff. In the coming weeks, most of these departing employees will choose to continue contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem outside the Foundation.

This article will briefly introduce the new organizational structure and detail the support measures provided by the Foundation for departing employees.

New Organizational Structure

The Ethereum Foundation currently divides into five major business clusters, corresponding to different areas: protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer; there is also a dedicated cluster responsible for operational affairs, and a final cluster composed of management and teams supporting management.

The working models and assessment goals vary across these business areas, and the internal structures are customized according to their specific needs. A more detailed introduction to each segment will be published next month; this article provides only an overview of the top-level framework.

Protocol Layer

The protocol business cluster carries the core legacy of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), tasked with realizing Ethereum’s fundamental vision — scalable autonomous sovereignty. The core work of this cluster is to strengthen and expand the Ethereum underlying protocol infrastructure. Its goal is to ensure that Ethereum’s core features remain unshakable: resistance to censorship and control, open source openness, privacy, and security as hard protocol guarantees.

The original intent of establishing the protocol cluster was to promote continuous iteration of the underlying protocol, without compromising autonomous sovereignty protections. It is not aimed at boosting Ethereum’s commercial hype or chasing short-term profits, nor transforming Ethereum into a traditional financial channel controlled by intermediaries. The core focus of this segment is to make Ethereum more resistant to corruption and capture by powerful interests; when counterparties default, platforms implement censorship, governments overreach, or intermediaries extract arbitrary fees, users can still rely confidently on Ethereum.

Specific tasks include: secure deployment of hard forks, reduction of redundant complex logic, minimization of trusted dependency components, defense against harmful MEV and privileged transaction flows to ensure transaction chain security; at the same time, advancing long-term frontier research such as post-quantum security, zkEVM, L1 privacy solutions, and transforming research results into protocol upgrades to consolidate and optimize user sovereignty under scalable conditions.

Access Layer

Whether users can practically obtain the core features of CROPS depends on the effectiveness of the access layer. This cluster’s mission is to make autonomous sovereignty realizable, understandable, and sustainable across key operations, covering five major scenarios: on-chain reading, transactions, zero-knowledge proofs, delegated authorization, and asset exit.

It must serve both ordinary users with these functionalities and intelligent proxy (AI Agent) programs acting on behalf of users. These agents should be able to independently read current on-chain states, historical data, and related information without relying on unverifiable third-party intermediaries; users can privately initiate transactions, avoid censorship risks, and the transaction results should either be fully fulfilled or, if execution conditions are not met, rolled back at no cost.

As the application of intelligent proxies becomes widespread, users must always retain control: they can grant limited permissions to proxies, revoke authorizations at any time, and independently manage transaction intents without exposing core information to intermediaries. From hardware to front-end interfaces, all interaction channels must be verifiable, understandable, and recoverable, allowing users of varying technical levels and usage frequencies to operate normally.

This cluster adheres to the zero-intermediary principle: any reliance on intermediaries must be supported by reliable, alternative non-intermediary solutions that are permanently available. In practice, this involves strengthening CROPS features within existing infrastructure; additionally, due to market incentives naturally tending to aggregate user identities and centralize control, this segment will also develop feasible non-intermediary alternatives.

User Layer

The user business cluster anchors all of the Ethereum Foundation’s work to real users and institutions — groups that highly depend on autonomous sovereignty-based Ethereum use cases and are continuously promoted through relevant tools and industry standards.

This segment helps the Foundation clarify the most core functional needs, identify the most critical failure modes, and define trade-off boundaries. Its work includes user stratification, user profiling, educational materials, application scenario research, and implementation effectiveness evaluation.

The Foundation is not transitioning into a product development team but aims to ensure that decisions at the protocol and access layers are based on real existing users, potential users, objective constraints, and quantifiable autonomous sovereignty indicators through user layer work.

Community Layer

The community business cluster oversees the overall external image of the Ethereum Foundation, covering all scenarios within and outside the Ethereum ecosystem. Its core task is to clearly communicate the Foundation’s core stance and distinguish its essence from three types of tracks: zero-sum crypto finance, enterprise-capital-driven crypto projects, and nonprofit industry entities that are stuck in maintaining the status quo, with distorted incentives, and easily exploited by geopolitical forces to whitewash interests. The Ethereum Foundation insists on maintaining independence, avoiding any利益绑架 that hinder core objectives, and maximizing community value.

This segment also builds cooperative relationships outside the crypto industry. Autonomous sovereignty principles have many natural allies: free open-source software, locally prioritized secure hardware and software, privacy cryptography research and advocacy organizations, civil liberties groups, decentralized networks, and public-interest technology projects. The community team promotes efficient, voluntary, high-quality cross-sector cooperation with these fields.

Institutional Layer

The institutional business cluster manages cooperation between the Foundation and various organizations, which provide Ethereum interaction channels relying on intermediary systems for end users. Cooperation targets include:

• Financial institutions: consumer payments, insurance, and other financial service providers;

• Physical enterprises: manufacturing, social platforms, publishing industries, and other non-financial companies;

• Government-related projects;

• Universities and other nonprofit organizations.

The core goal of all collaborations is: to create benchmark cases for the effective implementation of Ethereum and cryptography technologies, maximize CROPS core features, and provide comprehensive safeguards for institutions and users, including fair and compliant contract execution, data portability and free exit capabilities, privacy protection for all participants, data authenticity verification, misconduct detection, and preemptive prevention.

We believe that many enterprises, governments, and nonprofits will ultimately find that their business missions and interests can be fully realized through strengthening user sovereignty, while retaining the fundamental protections needed for their operations. Ethereum and cryptography are the vehicles to achieve this.

In addition to direct cooperation, the institutional cluster will also organize, promote, and standardize industry best practices, reference architectures, and implementation tutorials to facilitate large-scale adoption on the institutional side.

This segment also collaborates with global academia and advocacy organizations to help the outside world understand Ethereum’s current state and long-term potential; it continuously monitors global policies and regulatory developments to respond promptly to rules that could undermine Ethereum’s autonomous sovereignty, violate censorship resistance, open-source principles, privacy, and security.

About the Departing Colleagues

With the comprehensive adjustment of the Foundation’s organizational structure, business segments, and budget, we will bid farewell to 54 colleagues today.

Making this decision was very difficult but necessary. In the coming years, the Foundation must streamline personnel and optimize organizational structure, focusing on core work that only the Foundation can and must undertake, without being overly affected by short-term market fluctuations.

To ensure a smooth transition for departing colleagues, the Foundation provides a complete separation plan, including severance pay and career transition support: severance pay is based on the higher of two standards: one month’s salary for each year worked at the Foundation; the other is the statutory minimum severance standard in the employee’s location, consistent with recent months’ departing staff. Transition support includes two parts: assisting employees in finding new opportunities within the Ethereum ecosystem, and providing a special transition subsidy for career counseling and personal transformation expenses.

We sincerely thank each departing colleague for their talent, enthusiasm, and time dedicated during their tenure at the Foundation, and look forward to continuing to work together with those moving into other sectors of the ecosystem to build Ethereum.

Future Plans

After this adjustment, the Ethereum Foundation will become leaner and more focused. In the coming weeks and months, we will continue to release more details about the direction of business adjustments and how ecosystem participants can adapt to the new structure.