Ethereum Foundation New Organizational Structure: Five Business Layer Framework, Streamlining 20% of Staff

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

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is undergoing an organizational restructuring. To implement the core work authorization documents and fund management policies, the months-long reorganization is now complete.

After this restructuring, the Foundation has acquired the organizational structure, business segments, and personnel teams needed to advance the subsequent core work, but has simultaneously reduced its staff by 54 people, representing approximately 20% of the total Foundation workforce. 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 provide detailed information on the support packages provided by the Foundation for departing employees.

New Organizational Structure

The Ethereum Foundation is currently divided into five major business clusters, corresponding to different business areas: the Protocol Layer, the Access Layer, the User Layer, the Community Layer, and the Institutional Layer; with one additional cluster dedicated to operational affairs, and a final cluster consisting of management and teams directly supporting management.

The working models and assessment objectives vary across business areas, and the internal structures have been customized according to their specific business needs. We will publish more detailed introductions to each segment next month; this article only provides an overview of the top-level framework.

Protocol Layer

The Protocol business cluster carries the core legacy of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and shoulders the mission of realizing Ethereum's underlying vision — scalable sovereign autonomy. The core work of this cluster is to build the foundation for hardening and scaling the Ethereum protocol. Its goal is to ensure the Ethereum protocol continues to possess its unshakable core characteristics: censorship and capture resistance, openness and transparency, privacy and security as hard-coded protocol guarantees.

The original intention of establishing the Protocol cluster is to drive continuous iteration of the underlying protocol, never compromising the guarantees related to sovereign autonomy. It is not meant to boost Ethereum's commercial popularity, chase short-term profits, or transform Ethereum into a traditional financial channel controlled by intermediaries. The core focus of this segment is to make Ethereum harder to corrupt and capture; to allow users to still rely on Ethereum with confidence when counterparties default, platforms impose censorship, governments overstep their authority, or intermediaries arbitrarily extract fees.

Specific work includes: Safely deploying hard forks, reducing redundant complexity, minimizing trusted dependency components, resisting harmful MEV and privileged transaction flows to secure transaction pipelines; simultaneously advancing long-term frontier research implementations, such as post-quantum security, zkEVM, L1 privacy solutions, and translating research results into protocol upgrades, consolidating and optimizing user sovereignty on a large scale.

Access Layer

Whether users can practically obtain the core CROPS characteristics depends on the effectiveness of the Access Layer construction. The task of this cluster is to make sovereign autonomy achievable, understandable, and sustainable across various core operations, covering five major scenarios: on-chain reading, transactions, zero-knowledge proofs, delegated authorization, and asset withdrawal.

These functions must be provided to ordinary users and also adapted for smart agent (AI Agent) programs acting on behalf of users. Agents need to independently read the current on-chain state, historical data, and related information without relying on unverifiable third-party intermediaries; users can privately initiate transactions to avoid censorship risks, with the transaction result either fully executed or costlessly rolled back if execution conditions are not met.

With the proliferation of smart agent applications, users must always maintain control: they can grant limited permissions to agents, revoke authorization at any time, custody their own transaction intents, and avoid exposing core information to intermediaries. From the underlying hardware to the front-end interaction interface, all interaction channels must be verifiable, understandable, and recoverable, regardless of user frequency or technical depth.

This cluster follows the zero-intermediary principle: any usage path that relies on an intermediary must be accompanied by a reliable, intermediary-free alternative that remains permanently open and usable. At the implementation level, on one hand, it strengthens CROPS characteristics within existing infrastructure; on the other hand, because market economic incentives naturally tend toward aggregating user identities and centralizing control, this segment will also build viable intermediary-free alternatives.

User Layer

The User business cluster anchors all work of the Ethereum Foundation to real users and institutions — groups that highly rely on sovereign autonomy-style Ethereum usage scenarios and continuously promote related tools and industry standards.

**This segment helps the Foundation clarify the most critical functional needs, the most harmful failure modes, and the boundaries of acceptable trade-offs. Work content includes user segmentation, user personas, educational materials, application scenario research, and assessment of implementation effectiveness.

The Foundation is not transforming into a product development team. Instead, through the User Layer work, it ensures that decisions in the Protocol and Access Layers are based on real existing users, potential users, objective reality constraints, and quantifiable sovereign autonomy indicators.

Community Layer

The Community business cluster oversees the overall external image of the Ethereum Foundation, covering all scenarios inside and outside the Ethereum ecosystem. The core work is to clearly communicate the Foundation's central stance, distinguishing itself from three types of tracks: zero-sum game crypto-finance, crypto projects hijacked by corporate capital, and grant management within the non-profit industry that tends toward maintaining the status quo, distorted incentive mechanisms, and susceptibility to exploitation by geopolitical forces for interest laundering. The Ethereum Foundation insists on maintaining independence, eliminating any interest entanglements that hinder core objectives, and maximizing community value.

This cluster simultaneously builds partnerships outside the crypto industry. The concept of sovereign autonomy has numerous natural allies: free and open-source software, locally prioritized secure hardware and software, privacy cryptography research and industry advocacy organizations, civil liberty institutions, decentralized networks, public interest technology projects, etc. The Community segment is responsible for promoting efficient, voluntary, and high-quality cross-border collaborations between Ethereum and these fields.

Institutional Layer

The Institutional business cluster is responsible for the Foundation's cooperative work with various institutions that provide end-users with channels for interacting with Ethereum through intermediary systems. Cooperation partners include:

• Financial Institutions: Consumer payment, insurance, and other financial service providers;

• Real Economy Enterprises: Manufacturing, social media platforms, publishing industries, and various other non-financial enterprises;

• Government-Related Application Projects;

• Universities and Other Non-Profit Organizations.

The core goal of all collaborations: Create benchmark cases for the efficient implementation of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies, maximize CROPS core characteristics, and at the same time provide comprehensive guarantees for institutions and users, including fair and compliant contract execution, data portability and free exit capabilities, privacy protection for all participants, data authenticity verification, identification of violations, and even pre-prevention measures.

We believe that a large number of enterprises, governments, and non-profit organizations will eventually find that their business missions and interests can be fully realized by strengthening user sovereign autonomy while retaining the basic guarantees needed for their operations, and that Ethereum and cryptographic technologies are the vehicles to achieve this goal.

In addition to directly engaging with partners, the Institutional cluster will also compile and disseminate industry best practices, unified standards, reference architectures, and step-by-step guides for institutional adoption, thereby driving large-scale adoption at the institutional level.

This segment simultaneously engages with the global academic community and industry advocacy organizations to ensure the outside world correctly understands Ethereum's current form and long-term potential; it continuously tracks global policy and regulatory developments, promptly addressing regulatory rules that may undermine Ethereum's sovereign autonomy positioning or violate the four core principles: anti-censorship/anti-capture, open source, privacy, and security.

Regarding 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.

This decision was very difficult but necessary. In the coming years, the Foundation must streamline personnel and optimize its organizational structure to focus on the core work that only the Foundation can and must do, without excessive interference from short-term market fluctuations.

To ensure a smooth transition for departing colleagues, the Foundation provides a complete severance package, including severance pay and career transition support: severance pay is calculated as the higher of two standards: one month's salary for each year of service at the Foundation, or the statutory minimum compensation standard in the employee's location. This compensation standard is consistent with that provided to employees who left in recent months. Transition support consists of two parts: assisting employees in finding new job opportunities within the Ethereum ecosystem, and issuing a special transition grant for personal transformation expenses such as career coaching.

We sincerely thank each departing colleague for the talent, passion, and time they contributed during their tenure at the Foundation, and look forward to continuing to build Ethereum together with colleagues who move to other tracks within the ecosystem.

Next Steps

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