Today, the EF is changing shape, concluding a months-long process of reorganization as part of the implementation of the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy.
We come out of this process with the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead of us, but also with 54 fewer colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom will be finding ways to contribute to Ethereum from outside the EF in the coming weeks.
This post provides a brief introduction to the new structure and details on how we are supporting the people who are leaving.
The new structure
The EF now has five clusters with different domains of work – protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer – as well as a cluster focused on operations and one comprising management and teams directly supporting management work.
Each domain of work requires a different approach, is held accountable for different kinds of results, and has a different internal structure tailored to the work that needs to be done. We will share much more about these in the coming month, so for today we will stick to introducing them at the highest level.
Protocol Layer
The protocol cluster carries the EF’s legacy and responsibility for ensuring that Ethereum delivers on its foundational promise of scaling self-sovereignty. It does so by laying the groundwork for hardening and scaling the Ethereum protocol itself. Its objective is to ensure that the Ethereum protocol continues to enforce the properties which make it worth defending: censorship and capture resistance, open source and openness, privacy and security as non-negotiable protocol guarantees.
The protocol cluster exists to make sure the core protocol continues to advance without compromising on self-sovereignty guarantees. 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. Its work is to make Ethereum harder to corrupt or capture, and easier to rely on when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, and intermediaries extract. This means shipping forks safely, reducing unnecessary complexity, minimizing trusted dependencies, defending the transaction pipeline against toxic MEV and privileged orderflow, and accelerating and turning long-horizon research such as post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy into protocol changes that preserve and improve self-sovereignty at scale.
Access Layer
The access layer is where Ethereum either serves or fails individuals who need CROPS properties in practice. This cluster’s job is to make self-sovereignty available, legible and survivable across key actions: reading the chain, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. These actions must be supported for users, and increasingly for the agents acting on their behalf, who must be able to read current state, history, and related data without depending on intermediaries they can’t verify. They should be able to transact privately and without risk of censorship, with transaction outcomes that are either guaranteed or fail cost-free if conditions are not met. As more of this moves to agents, users have to stay in control, granting bounded authority and revoking it at will, and keeping custody of their own intents rather than exposing them to intermediaries. The interfaces, from silicon to frontend, must be verifiable, understandable and recoverable, regardless of how often someone uses them or how deep their technical knowledge goes.
The principle the cluster applies is the zero option: for every intermediated path, a credible intermediary-free path must exist and stay accessible. Tactically this means identifying where stronger CROPS properties can be applied to current infrastructure, and acknowledging where credible alternatives are necessary because economic incentives favor aggregation, identification and control.
User Layer
The user layer cluster keeps EF work grounded in the users and organizations with vital interests in self-sovereign use of Ethereum, and in extending the tools and norms of such use as widely as possible. It helps the EF understand the capabilities that matter most, the failure modes that are most serious, and the tradeoffs that are acceptable to settle on where necessary.
Its work includes user segments, personas, educational materials, use-case research, and impact evaluation. The goal is not for the EF to become a product studio, but to make sure Protocol and Access Layer decisions are shaped by real current and potential users, real constraints, and real measures of self-sovereignty.
The community cluster owns how the EF shows up in the world, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its job is to make legible what the EF stands for, and how that materially differs from zero-sum financial crypto, from corpo-compromised crypto, and from the bland, status quo-preserving and perversely-incentivized, grant-managing parts of the non-profit world which are vulnerable to use for laundering geopolitical interests. The EF is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining independence from these and other counterproductive entanglements.
This cluster also builds the EF’s relationships beyond crypto. Self-sovereignty has natural allies in free and open source, secure and local-first software and hardware, in privacy and cryptography research and advocacy, and in civil liberty, decentralized web, and public-interest technology, among other fields. This cluster works to ensure the overlap between Ethereum and those spaces is fruitful, unforced, and high quality.
Institutional Layer
This cluster owns the EF’s work with the institutions that shape institutionally intermediated paths for end-users to interact with Ethereum. This can include financial institutions, whether consumer payments, insurance or otherwise. It can include non-financial enterprises, including manufacturing, social, publishing and many other industries. It can include government applications. It can include universities or other nonprofit groups.
In all cases, our goal is to prioritize creating showcases of effective integration of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that maximizes CROPS properties and the guarantees that are made available to both institutions and users – such as guaranteeing fair and correct execution, ensuring data portability and more generally practical ability to exit, protecting all actors’ privacy, proving authenticity of data, better detecting or even preventing misbehavior, and more. We believe that many enterprises, governments, and nonprofits will realize that their incentives favor serving users in ways that strengthen self-sovereignty while retaining the guarantees they need in order to create value or fulfill their mission, and that Ethereum and cryptographic technologies can be a part of making this happen. In addition to direct engagement, the institutional cluster will pursue these ends by helping to establish and thoughtfully communicate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials for institutional adoption.
The institutional cluster also works upstream with academics and allied advocacy organizations around the world to ensure Ethereum is correctly understood in both its current form and potential, and to track and respond to policy and regulatory developments that could affect Ethereum’s commitment to self-sovereign use and its core principles of censorship (and capture) resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
The people leaving
As part of the change to the shape of the EF’s structure, activities, and spending, we are parting ways with 54 of our colleagues today.
These decisions were hard, but they are necessary. We must be resourced and organized in a way that allows us to focus on the critical work that only EF can, and therefore must, do in the coming years, without excessive disruption from short-term market movements.
In order to make sure those who are leaving are set up well for the transition we are offering a package comprising severance and transition support. The severance is the higher of one month’s pay per year worked at the EF and the amount locally mandated by the individual’s jurisdiction. This is the same severance we offered to the colleagues who left the EF in the past few months. The transition support includes help finding a new place to contribute in the ecosystem, plus a small transition grant earmarked to cover individual transition expenses (career coaching and similar).
We are grateful to each of them for the talent, dedication, and time they have contributed to Ethereum at the EF, and look forward to continuing to work alongside those of them who find homes elsewhere in the ecosystem.
What comes next
The EF that emerges from this change is leaner and more focused. We will share more in the coming weeks and months about how our work is changing and how the ecosystem can best engage with the new structure.
