Ethereum Foundation rebrands R&D division to Protocol

The Ethereum Foundation dismissed some members from its Research and Development team as part of its restructuring plan.

In a Monday blog post, the company announced it was restructuring to focus on its design challenges.

It commented:

We must rethink our current approach to designing, developing, and stewarding the protocol. […] This means some members of PR&D won’t be continuing with the Ethereum Foundation.

Still, the firm expressed confidence that they will remain active within the Ethereum ecosystem and encouraged other projects to consider them for new opportunities.

Ethereum Foundation rebrands R&D division to Protocol

Aside from laying off some of its members, the foundation is rebranding its Protocol Research and Development division, renaming it to just  “Protocol.” 

With the rebrand, the foundation hopes to focus on its new priorities: scaling the Ethereum base layer and blobspace and improving user experience. It has called on all teams within Protocol to help drive these initiatives forward. The Foundation emphasizes that the rebrand was completely necessary, seeing how their work in zero-knowledge rollups (zkEVMs) and layer-2 technologies is pushing the blockchain closer to large-scale adoption.

While the foundation has yet to disclose how many staff members it laid off, it insisted that the new team will continue to lead Ethereum’s core development and improve public access to upgrade schedules, technical resources, and research outputs.

Hsiao-Wei Weng, co-executive director at Ethereum Foundation, also shared on X that he hopes the new structure will encourage their staff to focus and drive key initiatives forward.

Additionally, he acknowledged Tim Beiko, Alex Stokes, and Barnabé Monnot for their work in restructuring the Protocol team.

The Ethereum Foundation has been instituting changes to its leadership and structure

The Ethereum Foundation has been making changes to its structure and leadership since the start of the year.

In January, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced the model’s leadership reforms, arguing that they needed to address key challenges stalling the platform’s competitiveness. At the time, he claimed the EF would aim to improve communication with ecosystem stakeholders and ensure privacy, open-source innovation, and censorship resistance. 

Moreover, he argued that the leadership changes would bring fresh talent, improve execution ability, and make EF more actively supportive of app builders.

However, his announcement was soon followed by internal friction and heated discussions over the foundation’s strategic priorities and transparency standards. Some critics even pointed out the foundation’s failure to improve transaction speeds or draw in more developers compared to rival Solana. The foundation also faced complaints about its high transaction fees, stalled expansion, and leadership stagnation.

The foundation added a division between its board and executive functions in April. A month before that, the EF made Hsiao-Wei Wang, a longtime Ethereum researcher, and Tomasz Stańczak, CEO of infrastructure company Nethermind, its new co-executive directors. Aya Miyaguchi also left her directorial role to be the foundation’s new president. In addition, a former EF researcher, Danny Ryan, joined Etherealize, a project focused on infusing ETH to Wall Street.

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