The Ethereum Foundation announced today it's parted ways with ~20% of the organization, specifically 54 employees. In parallel, the EF has now reorganized into five main domain clusters to support a leaner, more sustainable structure. Here's what's changed.
• New clusters
Beyond the board and management teams, the EF will now operate through 5 central spokes: the Protocol layer (scaling, hardening Ethereum), the Access layer (making CROPS tech available), the User layer (use-case research and etc.), the Community layer (IRL engagements), and the Institutional layer (optimizing for institutions).
• Hard goodbyes
The EF called the layoffs "hard, but [...] necessary," i.e. a way for the organization to stay maintainable in the years ahead "without excessive disruption from short-term market movements." The org offered severance packages to its departing contributors and said it will have more updates "in the coming weeks and months about how our work is changing and how the ecosystem can best engage with the new structure."
In a quote tweet (via Firefly) of the EF's restructuring announcement earlier this morning, Vitalik Buterin shared his perspectives on these new changes at the Foundation:
• No dressing up
"Brilliant people" were lost in these cuts, Vitalik said, so their absence won't be trivial. He wished them "fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside" and hoped many would continue contributing to the "wider Ethereum ecosystem, or even the wider CROPS world."
• Multi-client evolution
Vitalik also noted that the EF is moving away from client diversity as a pure redundancy strategy and toward AI-assisted formal verification as the new primary security paradigm.
• PSE is winding down
The Privacy and Scaling Explorations team is dissolving as a standalone pod, but Vitalik noted this is more of a graduation, as work here is shifting from research to direct implementations of ZK proof privacy solutions.
• Looking ahead
Zooming out, Vitalik said he advocates for a "soft lean-and-done" ossification approach to Ethereum once the current Strawmap roadmap is complete, i.e. trending away from new features toward mostly security fixes.