The Ethereum Foundation is cutting 20% of its staff: a strategic restructuring for long-term sustainability
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has officially announced a major restructuring, resulting in a reduction of 54 employees — approximately 20% of the total workforce. The decision is the outcome of a months-long internal review aimed at aligning the organization's operations with its previously stated strategy.
Scale of the Reductions
The EF leadership confirmed the cuts in an official blog post. Roughly one-fifth of the team is leaving the organization. As foundation representatives note, this will allow them to focus on key long-term objectives rather than spreading resources across secondary areas.
Reasons for the Reforms: Strategy and Treasury Management Policy
The changes implement provisions of the EF Mandate, published on March 13, 2026, and the Treasury Management Policy from June 4, 2025. According to the latter, annual operating expenses must now constitute 15% of the foundation's reserves, with a long-term target of reducing them to a baseline level of 5%. This is a tough but necessary measure to ensure financial stability in a volatile market.
"After this reform, the foundation now has the structure, processes, and team needed to address key challenges," representatives of the organization note.
The EF has transitioned to a structure with seven clusters, which has increased transparency of responsibility in core areas of work. The focus is now on protocol security, censorship resistance, and ensuring user sovereignty — precisely the aspects that are critically important for the future of Ethereum as a decentralized platform.
Employees affected by the layoffs will receive severance pay calculated as one month's salary for each year of service (or the minimum established in the country, if higher), along with job placement support and assistance with transitioning within the ecosystem.
Now that the foundation will have a more compact team, independent groups and commercial participants will begin to play a significantly larger role. Investors should monitor new reports on reserves and the progress of key tasks under the updated mandate.
Expert Opinion: This decision is a sign of maturity for the Ethereum Foundation. Cutting 20% of the workforce while simultaneously strengthening financial discipline (reducing expenses to 5% of reserves) shows that the foundation is preparing for the long game, not short-term speculation. For the market, this is a positive signal: the EF is becoming more efficient and less dependent on external factors. However, investors should closely watch how the new structure affects the speed of developing key updates — for example, the implementation of sharding or improvements in scalability.