#ETH Major Ethereum breakthrough! Core coordination team officially disbanded, and underlying development governance is fully decentralized

Ethereum’s ecosystem is undergoing a historic architectural shift, marking the official end of years-long centralized development coordination.
Recently, Protocol Support—the core team under the Ethereum Foundation responsible for coordinating the underlying protocol—formally announced the disbandment of all staff via its official social media account.
The news immediately swept across the global crypto developer community, becoming the most heavyweight underlying change event in the Ethereum track recently. Unlike ordinary personnel shuffling and departmental adjustments, this team’s撤销 (cancellation/disbandment) is the concluding core action of the Ethereum Foundation’s months-long staff streamlining and strategic restructuring. As early as the end of June this year, the Ethereum Foundation disclosed a major reform plan to the public: overall layoffs of 20%, a direct 40% reduction in the annual operating budget, and the comprehensive implementation of an entirely new cluster-based organizational model.
The core logic behind the entire reform is crystal clear: shrink the Foundation’s direct operational authority, weaken centralized coordination functions, and further push Ethereum’s underlying development, governance, and iteration toward decentralization. The disbandment of the Protocol Support team is a landmark step in the rollout of this decentralization reform, fundamentally rewriting Ethereum’s long-standing rules for underlying development collaboration.
01 The disbanded core team: the “central hub” for Ethereum’s underlying development
Many external practitioners don’t understand Protocol Support’s core value. Simply put, this team is the only full-domain coordination hub for developing Ethereum L1’s underlying protocol—connecting the full chain from research, development, and testing to governance and talent cultivation. Developers regard it as the “central nervous system” of the Ethereum ecosystem.
The team uses an octopus as its visual identifier, symbolizing multiple tentacles covering every segment of the ecosystem, handling six major indispensable core “must-have” functions.
1、Operating the globally renowned, industry-signaling biweekly AllCoreDevs developer conference—running end to end by this team. From topic solicitation, agenda scheduling, and subtopic discussions to meeting minutes archiving and cross-client team communication and handoff, everything is implemented in a unified manner by the team. This is also the only official communication channel where global Ethereum technical researchers and client development teams exchange disagreements and finalize network upgrade plans.
2、End-to-end tracking of mainnet upgrades and fork iterations Each time Ethereum’s network iterates—from EIP proposal initiation, testnet deployment, and compatibility fork testing to the final activation of mainnet hard forks—is followed and supervised throughout by this team. The team provides real-time updates on each client’s adaptation progress, identifies technical risks, and outputs standardized progress dashboards, ensuring that major expansion upgrades such as Glamsterdam land smoothly. This is a key guarantee for stable iteration of the Ethereum network.
3、Standardized推动 EIP proposal execution To address issues such as confusion in how proposals are carried out and communication barriers across teams, this team built a complete EIP execution service system and published an official proposal operations guide. Meanwhile, it provides process guidance, governance lobbying, and cross-department communication support for proposal creators, bridging information gaps between researchers, development teams, and community governance groups, significantly accelerating the efficiency of mainnet rollout for high-quality technical standards.
4、Exclusive operation of the official protocol talent cultivation system The team is solely responsible for the Ethereum EPF protocol scholarship program. It incubates native underlying development talent in batches, and continuously supplies core development strength to the ecosystem through one-on-one mentorship from senior researchers and access to open hands-on resources. Currently, six cohorts of students have completed the program, and with the team disbanding, preparations for the seventh cohort have been fully paused.
5、Building a developer education and public learning system It routinely offers underlying technical seminar courses covering core technical content such as EVM mechanisms, consensus logic, and expansion solutions. At the same time, it conducts community-wide education on on-chain governance rules, greatly lowering the entry barrier for newcomers to underlying development and eliminating information asymmetry in the industry.
6、Handling long-term maintenance coordination across ecosystem infrastructure The team maintains official development repositories and collaboration tools over the long term, connecting the Foundation’s research, security, the Layer2 ecosystem, and external open-source organizations. It coordinates and manages various underlying public matters, promptly reports back and resolves community technical needs—serving as a critical bridge connecting Ethereum’s internal and external ecosystems.
02 Deep retrospective: three underlying reasons for the team disbandment
This architectural adjustment is not a temporary decision, but the inevitable outcome of the Ethereum Foundation’s two-year deep reforms, driven by three factors at the top level: strategy, financial pressure, and talent structure.
First, top-level strategy: proactively decentralize, weaken the Foundation’s discourse power
The Foundation’s official guiding documents have already clearly stated the long-term ultimate goal: gradually strip centralized coordination functions, ultimately achieving a fully decentralized governance form where “the Foundation can be replaced.” Disbanding a dedicated coordination team is, in essence, breaking up centralized coordination work and moving it outward, preventing any single institution from controlling Ethereum’s development cadence—aligning with the underlying core logic of a permissionless public chain without a centralized主体.
Second, financial optimization: budgets sharply shrink, and non-core functions are separated off
According to Vitalik’s public disclosure, the Foundation has launched a long-term treasury cost-savings plan: the annual operating budget is directly cut by 40%, the treasury spending cadence is comprehensively adjusted, and it is expected that after 2030 it will use only 5% of treasury revenue. Protocol Support focuses on coordination, operations, and education; it does not directly produce underlying code and core technical achievements, making it a key disbandment area for this cost optimization round.
Third, talent loss combined with architectural reorganization: the old system can’t keep going Since 2026, multiple veteran core heads in Ethereum’s protocol segment have left one after another, including senior coordination personnel such as Tim Beiko and Barnabé Monnot. The original tiered operations system has been completely thrown off balance. At the same time, the Foundation internally completed a new architecture integration, splitting into five independent clusters: protocol, access, community, and institutions. The Foundation no longer retains a dedicated comprehensive coordination team, and the original functions will be independently handled by each cluster.
03 A two-sided tug-of-war in the industry: short-term pains vs long-term positives
After the team disbandment news spread, the community quickly split into two camps—optimistic and cautious—forming sharply different judgments about Ethereum’s future development.
Optimistic view: fully decentralized—once the long-term ecosystem is healthier, with the exit of a dedicated centralized coordination主体, Ethereum’s development governance will completely get rid of the Foundation’s single scheduling model. In the future, independent developers, Layer2 teams, and third-party open-source organizations will independently take on work such as organizing meetings, advancing EIPs, and coordinating across the ecosystem. The governance model will be more neutral and more open-source. At the same time, the Foundation can fully shed redundant operational work, concentrating all funding and personnel on core R&D tracks such as L1 expansion, ZK technology iteration, and underlying security protections—accelerating breakthroughs in core technologies. In the long run, it can also avoid regulatory disputes around “the Foundation controlling Ethereum,” significantly reducing global compliance risks and improving the purity of decentralization in the ecosystem.
Cautious view: short-term efficiency decline, and multiple risks already hidden before the new coordination体系 fully forms. Ethereum will face a short-term governance vacuum. With the unified coordination window disappearing, communication costs for multi-client teams and technical researchers will rise significantly. Core meeting organization, network upgrade follow-through, and EIP execution progress will very likely experience handoff gaps. Meanwhile, pausing the EPF talent cultivation program and shutting down the developer public education system will directly cut off the pipeline for incubating underlying newcomers. Over the long term, it will face a shortage of native development talent supply. The market is especially worried that ongoing Glamsterdam expansion upgrades may be delayed due to lack of coordination, and that technical adaptation disagreements may increase. It will also significantly raise the difficulty for small developers and early-stage teams to obtain official resources.
04 Market impact is limited; core trends unchanged
Affected by this architectural adjustment news, ETH’s short-term sentiment weakened slightly: it saw a mild intraday pullback. The Layer2 segment also showed a split in trading. Some capital is concerned that underlying development cadence may slow down, leading to a rise in short-term wait-and-see sentiment. But analysts generally believe this event is an internal organizational structure optimization and does not change Ethereum’s medium- to long-term technical roadmap. The core development directions—Ethereum L1 expansion, Layer2 ecosystem upgrades, and ZK technology rollout—have not been adjusted. Short-term market fluctuations are merely sentiment noise; future price action will continue to be dominated by key factors such as global macro liquidity, US digital asset regulatory policies, and the flow of funds into ETH ETFs, without needing to overemphasize the negative impact of a single event.
05 Key follow-up tracking directions
Ethereum’s governance transformation has just landed, and multiple variables afterward are worth continuous industry monitoring:
1、How the original coordination functions are split into five new clusters, and whether a temporary transition group is set up to ensure smooth work handoffs;
2、Whether the EPF protocol scholarship program will restart, or whether it will be handed over to third-party community organizations to run and operate;
3、Plans for replacing the organizing主体 of the biweekly core developer meetings and the delivery progress;
4、New replacement mechanisms for core matters such as EIP proposal progression and end-to-end network upgrade risk management tracking.$ETH ‌