Ethereum Foundation cuts 20% of staff in big reorganization move

The Ethereum Foundation officially reduced its staff by 54 employees (roughly 20% of its workforce) yesterday, June 22, 2026.

The Foundation described the recent staff cuts as the final step in a restructuring process that began in June 2025 when the Foundation adopted a new set of objectives and a stricter treasury policy. 

This was done to improve the Foundation’s financial discipline and focus resources on the most important development priorities.

Ethereum Foundation moves from the old structure to five new domains

The Ethereum Foundation published a blog post earlier today, sharing a new operational plan that reorganizes the company around five main areas: the protocol, access, user, community, and institutional layers.

As such, management and general operations will be handled by separate teams.

Each cluster has a specific objective. The protocol layer will be responsible for strengthening Ethereum against censorship and external control, ensuring that network upgrades are launched safely, and conducting long-term research into areas like post-quantum security and Layer 1 privacy.

The access layer will be tasked with making it practical for users to interact with the blockchain independently, such as reading data or sending transactions without needing intermediaries.

Finally, the institutional layer was created to help enterprises, governments, and non-profits easily adopt Ethereum’s cryptographic tools.

The wave of resignations before the layoffs

The restructuring comes just after eight senior contributors left the organization. The most recent exit was co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang’s resignation on June 22 after eight years with the research team, following the departure of her co-director, Tomasz Stańczak back in February. As a result, board member Bastian Aue is now the sole executive leader in charge of daily operations.

Researchers and engineers who departed since January include Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps, Tim Beiko, Barnabé Monnot, Carl Beek, and Julian Ma.

Former researcher Dankrad Feist attributed the exits to management problems rather than strategic disagreements. Coinbase head of engineering Yuga Cohler called the situation “dysfunction,” according to Cryptopolitan’s coverage of the departures.

Money troubles causing the layoffs

These layoffs are happening alongside growing funding concerns. As a core development coordinator from 2021 till April this year, Van Epps recently warned that developer funding could hit a crisis point within the next three to nine months. He estimated that maintaining Ethereum’s network of more than ten client teams requires roughly $30 million annually.

The Foundation’s four-year Client Incentives Program, which bankrolled the teams building and maintaining Ethereum’s core software, expired in April 2026. The Foundation has signaled plans to bring annual spending down from about 15% of its treasury to a 5% baseline by 2030, a strategy it calls “Subtraction.”

Protocol Guild, an independent collective that pools donations for Ethereum contributors, has distributed roughly $38 million since 2022. However, because it relies entirely on voluntary donations rather than a set budget, its funding remains unpredictable.

One day before the Foundation announced its cuts, five former EF researchers launched Ethlabs, an independent nonprofit research lab. Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma founded the organization with backing from Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, Bitmine Immersion Technologies, SharpLink, Anchorage, and more than 50 community partners.

What next for the Ethereum Foundation?

The Foundation will share more details about each cluster’s work by next month.

Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has also introduced the CROPS framework (censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security) to anchor this new direction.

In his latest post on X, Buterin emphasized that this tighter focus is essential, and that he views the rise of independent, community-funded organizations like Ethlabs as the necessary evolution to ensure Ethereum’s core development stays strong and decentralized even as the Foundation reduces its own spending.

However, there’s still a heightened sense of uncertainty surrounding Ethereum, as shown by the significant drop in ETH’s price. The token is currently trading at $1,662 according to CoinMarketCap, which is a sharp fall from its near $4,950 peak in August 2025.

Whether this new approach (supported by independent communities) can cover the estimated $30 million annual cost of core development is now the question racing through everyone’s minds as we move into the second half of the year.

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