Crowding the news headline, the Ethereum Foundation announced on June 23, 2026, that it had eliminated 54 positions, roughly 20% of its approximately 270-person workforce. Not just the menpower, it also cut its 2026 operating budget by 40%, reorganizing the remaining organization into five domain-focused clusters alongside dedicated operations and management support functions, according to a post published by Vitalik Buterin on the EF’s official blog.
This is not simply a headcount reduction. It is a deliberate pivot away from the EF’s historical role as Ethereum’s central development engine toward a narrower mandate as protocol overseer, with the financial architecture to match.
Ethereum News: Ethereum Foundation Layoffs and New Cluster Structure: What the Reorganization Covers
The five clusters replacing the prior functional structure are: Protocol Layer, focused on post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy; Access Layer, building tools for users and AI agents to transact and delegate on-chain without intermediary reliance; User Layer, conducting empirical research on actual ETH network usage to ground protocol decisions; Community Layer, managing the EF’s public positioning across crypto, open-source software, and cryptography research; and Institutional Layer, engaging financial institutions, enterprises, governments, and academics on Ethereum integration and policy tracking.
The Protocol Layer cluster’s published mandate states it “does not exist to make Ethereum more marketable or focused on short-term interests, or to make it easier to turn into another financial rail controlled by intermediaries.” That framing is a direct signal about the EF’s intended distance from TradFi-adjacent product development, even as its Institutional Layer deepens engagement with exactly those counterparties.
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Endowment Model and the Financial Mechanics Behind the Cuts
The restructuring advances a crypto restructuring of the EF’s treasury policy that began in earnest in June 2025 and was formalized in a 38-page mandate document published in March 2026.
Current annual spend runs at approximately 15% of remaining treasury assets; the target under the new endowment model is to reduce that rate to roughly 5% by 2030, a pace the foundation describes as sufficient to sustain operations indefinitely, per research compiled by CoinMarketCap Academy.
Departing employees will receive severance of at least one month’s salary per year of service, a retirement payment, and access to a support fund that includes career coaching and ecosystem placement assistance. Nine senior figures have left the EF since January 2026, including former co-executive directors Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang, with Bastian Aue serving in an interim leadership role.
