Ethereum Foundation cuts 20% of staff in sweeping restructure

Investing.com -- The Ethereum Foundation announced Tuesday it is eliminating 54 positions, roughly 20% of its workforce, as part of a months-long reorganisation that reshapes the non-profit into five domain-focused clusters.

The overhaul, described by the Foundation as the conclusion of a process tied to its updated mandate and treasury policy, reorganises the organisation into protocol, access, user, community, and institutional layers, alongside operations and management clusters.

"We come out of this process with the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead of us, but also with 54 fewer colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom will be finding ways to contribute to Ethereum from outside the EF in the coming weeks," the Foundation wrote in its official blog post.

Co-founder Vitalik Buterin framed the cuts as financially necessary and strategic. The Foundation is reducing its overall budget by roughly 40% this year, he said, part of a shift toward an endowment-based operating model. The current annual spend rate of approximately 15% of remaining funds is targeted to fall to around 5% per year after 2030, ensuring the organisation can operate indefinitely rather than drawing down its treasury. Buterin acknowledged the toll: the cuts include talented engineers who worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade, and the remaining organisation, he said, would not fully replace everything being eliminated.

The restructuring caps an 18-month transformation marked by significant leadership turnover. Approximately nine senior figures have departed since the process began, including both co-executive directors: Tomasz Stańczak, who left in February 2026, and Hsiao-Wei Wang, who stepped down earlier this month, according to CoinDesk. Protocol team leads Tim Beiko and Barnabe Monnot also departed. The Privacy and Scaling Explorations unit is being wound down as a standalone team, with its research priorities absorbed or discontinued.

Departing staff will receive severance at the higher of one month's pay per year of service or the locally mandated amount, plus ecosystem placement assistance and a small transition grant.

The new structure signals a deliberate narrowing of the Foundation's remit. Its protocol cluster, the organisation said, "exists to make sure the core protocol continues to advance without compromising on self-sovereignty guarantees" and explicitly does not exist to make Ethereum "more marketable" or to serve short-term interests. Long-horizon research priorities for that cluster include post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy. A newly created institutional layer will target financial institutions, enterprises, governments, universities, and nonprofits as Ethereum adopters, while the access layer introduces a "zero option" principle requiring that a credible intermediary-free path exist for every intermediated product or service on the network.

The announcement arrives against a difficult price backdrop for Ethereum. The token is trading well below its 52-week high of $4,955.90 and not far above its 52-week low of $1,388.12, reflecting what an Investing.com analysis published June 16 described as the worst performance among major digital assets in 2026, with Ether down roughly 60% from its August 2025 peak compared with a drawdown of around 48% for Bitcoin over the same period.

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