Ethereum Foundation cuts 20% of its workforce as new 5-cluster structure takes shape

The Ethereum Foundation has concluded a months-long reorganization process, emerging with a new five-cluster operational structure and 54 fewer staff, or roughly 20% of its total workforce, as it implements its Mandate and Treasury Management Policy.

The foundation announced the changes Tuesday in a post on its official blog, saying the changes give the organization "the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead."

Departing colleagues will also receive severance at the higher of one month's pay per year worked at the EF or the locally mandated amount for their jurisdiction — the same package offered to colleagues who left in prior months.

The EF said transition support will include ecosystem placement assistance and a small grant to cover individual transition costs such as career coaching. Many of the departing staff, the foundation said, are expected to continue contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem from outside the organization.

The move comes just one day after a new Ethereum R&D organization called Ethlabs launched, to help with institutional adoption, and a wave of resignations of several EF executives, including two co-executive directors and the three co-leads of the major Protocol Cluster. In previous announcements, the EF has announced it will now focus its efforts on developing and supporting censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure (CROPS) technologies. 

5-cluster system

The new structure organizes the EF into five domain-focused clusters — protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer — alongside a dedicated operations cluster and a management cluster comprising teams that directly support leadership.

Each cluster is designed with its own internal structure and accountability framework tailored to its function.

The protocol cluster sits at the core, tasked with hardening and scaling the Ethereum base protocol against capture and censorship while advancing long-horizon work including post-quantum security, zkEVM development, and L1 privacy.

Next, the access layer cluster focuses on ensuring users can read the chain, transact, prove, delegate, and exit without relying on unverifiable intermediaries. Its governing principle, per the blog post, is a "zero option" standard: for every intermediated path, a credible intermediary-free alternative must remain available.

The user layer is designed to keep EF decision-making grounded in the needs of actual users and organizations, feeding real-world input into Protocol and Access Layer choices.

The community cluster governs how the foundation presents itself — both inside and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem — and is tasked with differentiating the EF from what the blog post called "zero-sum financial crypto" and "corpo-compromised crypto."

Meanwhile, the institutional layer handles the EF's engagement with financial institutions, enterprises, governments, universities, and nonprofits integrating Ethereum, while also working with academics and advocacy organizations on policy and regulatory developments.

18-month process

The restructuring is the formal conclusion of a transformation that has reshaped the EF's leadership and team composition over the past 18 months.

Buterin announced sweeping leadership changes in January 2025 amid calls from figures including Joseph Lubin for new direction at the foundation, with Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stanczak later appointed co-executive directors.

Both have since departed — Stanczak in February 2026, Wang earlier this month — alongside a wave of senior figures including Josh Stark, Protocol team leads Tim Beiko and Barnabe Monnot, and researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma, as The Block has reported extensively.

Former EF researchers have already begun organizing outside the foundation. Ethlabs, a nonprofit focused on Ethereum's institutional growth phase and backed by Joe Lubin, Bitmine, and SharpLink, launched in recent days and has ties to the departed researcher cohort.

The EF said it will share more on how each cluster operates and how the broader ecosystem can engage with the new structure in the weeks ahead.