Ethereum Foundation job cuts 54 roles, reshapes protocol and access teams

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) says it has completed its months-long reorganization under its Mandate and Treasury Management Policy. The Ethereum Foundation will cut 54 roles (about 20%) and provide severance (higher of 1 month per year worked vs local minimum), plus transition help across the Ethereum ecosystem and a small expense grant. Operationally, EF reorganized into five work clusters—Protocol, Access, User, Community, and Institutional—plus operations and management/support. The Protocol Layer will focus on scaling and hardening Ethereum while preserving self-sovereignty (anti-censorship/capture resistance), safer fork shipping, reducing complexity and trusted dependencies, mitigating toxic MEV, and turning long-horizon research (post-quantum security, zkEVM, L1 privacy) into protocol changes. The Access Layer targets practical self-sovereignty for reading, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting, including verifiable and censorship-resistant paths and “zero option” alternatives when intermediaries are involved. User/Community/Institutional layers prioritize user needs and expand institutional integration, emphasizing CROPS properties such as fair execution, data portability, privacy, authenticity proofs, and misbehavior detection. For ETH traders, this looks like an organizational focus shift rather than an immediate protocol upgrade. Still, the Ethereum Foundation restructure could affect research-to-spec execution speed and tooling/integration timelines in the coming quarters.