The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has laid off 54 employees, or about 20% of its workforce, as part of a major organizational restructuring.
According to the blog post published on Tuesday, EF will reorganize itself around five specialized clusters covering protocols, access, users, community and institutional work. The foundation said the changes are intended to focus resources on Ethereum’s long-term technical priorities, including scaling, privacy, security and censorship resistance.
Under the fresh structure, separate teams will oversee Ethereum’s core protocol, user access tools, community engagement and institutional collaboration, while governance and operations functions will remain organized independently.
The announcement came a day after former Ethereum Foundation contributors Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma announced the launch of Ethlabs, an independent, non-profit research organization.
Backed by BitMine, SharpLink and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, Ethlabs said it would focus on scaling, interoperability and other protocol-level improvements.
Source: EthLabs
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Buterin Claims Ethereum Foundation Cuts Budget by 40%
On Tuesday postEthereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the Ethereum Foundation is reducing its budget by approximately 40% as it transitions to a long-term grant-based organization. He said the foundation intends to reduce annual expenses from about 15% of remaining funds to about 5% after 2030, which he said required hard staffing decisions. Buterin’s post said:
Recent years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside and outside the EF.
Buterin said the foundation will continue to prioritize major protocol initiatives while moving some work outside of EF as Ethereum development becomes more distributed.
Source: Vitalik Buterin
The Ethereum Foundation has also adjusted its treasury strategy in recent months. The organization staked 17,000 ETH in overdue April and another 21,270 ETH in early May, after reaching almost 70,000 ETH staked earlier this year. The Foundation also sold 10,000 ETH to BitMine in an OTC transaction on May 1.
Last week, former EF contributor Trenton Van Epps warned that Ethereum’s core development ecosystem could face a “slow-motion funding crisis,” arguing that spending cuts and the expiration of the network’s customer incentive program have forced some authors to seek fresh sources of funding.
The warning comes amid broader changes at EF, including the departure of co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang and a wave of departures that has already included about 19 employees and executives this year, ahead of Tuesday’s announcement of additional layoffs.
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