Ethereum Foundation cuts 54 staff as five-cluster plan begins

The Ethereum Foundation reduced its workforce by 54 employees, roughly 20%, as it implemented a new five-cluster operational structure, the organization announced on its blog Tuesday. The reorganization follows an 18-month process to align staff and budgets with a new Mandate and Treasury Management Policy.

The new structure groups work into protocol, access, user, community and institutional clusters, supported by dedicated operations and management clusters. The foundation wrote the configuration is intended to align people and activities with core technical and ecosystem goals.

The protocol cluster will sit at the center of the reorganized foundation and is charged with hardening and scaling Ethereum's base protocol against capture and censorship. It will also pursue long-horizon projects such as post-quantum security, zkEVM development and layer-1 privacy work.

The access layer cluster will focus on ensuring users can read the chain, transact, prove, delegate and exit without relying on unverifiable intermediaries. The blog post framed that work around a ‘zero option' standard, requiring credible intermediary-free alternatives where intermediated paths exist.

The user layer is designed to feed real-world input into protocol and access decisions by keeping work grounded in the needs of users and organizations. The community cluster will manage how the foundation presents itself inside and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem and will seek to distinguish the foundation from what the blog post described as ‘zero-sum financial crypto' and ‘corpo-compromised crypto.' The institutional cluster will handle engagement with banks, enterprises, governments, universities and nonprofits and will coordinate with academics and advocacy groups on policy and regulation.

The reorganization finalizes leadership changes that began in January 2025. Co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stanczak have left, and several senior technical and research staff have departed, including Josh Stark, protocol leads Tim Beiko and Barnabe Monnot, and researchers Carl Beek and Julian Ma. The foundation expects many departing colleagues to continue contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem from outside the organization.

One day before the foundation's announcement, a new nonprofit called Ethlabs launched to focus on Ethereum's institutional adoption phase. Ethlabs is backed by Joe Lubin, Bitmine and SharpLink and has ties to some members of the departing researcher cohort.

The foundation confirmed departing staff will receive severance equal to the higher of one month's pay per year worked or the locally mandated amount for their jurisdiction. Transition support will include ecosystem placement assistance and a small grant to cover individual transition costs such as career coaching. The foundation wrote it will publish more details in the weeks ahead about how each cluster will operate and how outside projects and contributors can engage with the new structure.