The Ethereum Foundation executed a structural overhaul Tuesday that slashed its staff by roughly 20% and is planning to cut annual spending from 15% of treasury assets to around 5% by 2030. The layoffs affect 54 people. Departing staff will receive the higher of one month's pay per year worked or local minimum requirements, plus transition support including career coaching.
The reorganization bundles the Foundation's work into five clusters: protocol, access, user, community, and institutional layers. Vitalik Buterin framed the shift as necessary to preserve runway for Ethereum's long-term roadmap without getting whipsawed by short-term volatility in the treasury. Spending at 15% per year would exhaust assets in roughly seven years; dropping to 5% extends that horizon significantly and insulates sustained funding for protocol research from market swings.
Three concrete changes follow from the reset. The Privacy and Scaling Explorations unit is winding down. Future Devcon conferences will shrink in scope and cost. The Foundation's institutional strategy will narrow. To sustain protocol research with fewer staff, the Foundation plans to rely more heavily on AI-assisted formal verification.
The cuts arrive as the Foundation grapples with an exodus of senior leaders. Co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak stepped down in February, followed by co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang earlier this month. That brings total senior departures since January to nine. Bastian Aue, a board member, has moved into an expanded interim operational role. The churn has fed sustained community scrutiny about who is steering Ethereum's long-term direction as the protocol faces sustained competitive pressure from Solana and other chains.
Separately, a new non-profit called ETHLabs announced this week as an independent vehicle to accelerate Ethereum's technical roadmap. The effort is backed by Ethereum treasury companies BitMine and SharpLink, and co-founder Joseph Lubin. It signals some confidence that Ethereum's infrastructure work will continue, albeit through a parallel structure rather than solely through the restructured Foundation itself.