EF Trims 20% of Staff, 40% of Budget — Ethereum Goes on a Lean-and-Done Diet 🥩

The Ethereum Foundation confirmed June 23 that it is parting ways with 54 employees, roughly 20% of its workforce, concluding a months-long reorganization designed to make the non-profit "leaner and more focused." Co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the Foundation will simultaneously cut its annual budget by about 40% as it transitions from spending around 15% of its remaining treasury annually before 2026 to a long-term target of roughly 5% per year after 2030. "I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost," Buterin wrote in a Tuesday blog post, calling the cuts "difficult decisions."

The restructuring follows the March publication of the Foundation's 38-page "Mandate," described by the organization as "part constitution, part manifesto," and the implementation of its treasury management policy. Going forward, the Foundation will operate in five mission-oriented clusters — protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer — supported by two additional clusters handling operations and management. "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," the Foundation wrote in a blog post.

The personnel changes include the departure of co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang, who left her post one week before the restructuring announcement. Wang's exit brings the total number of senior Ethereum Foundation figures to leave since January to nine, following the February departure of her fellow co-director Tomasz Stańczak and the exit of leading researcher Dankrad Feist last year to work on Stripe's stablecoin blockchain, Tempo. Bastian Aue was named interim co-director alongside Wang during the transition.

The Foundation's revised operating plan includes winding down the Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) unit, scaling back Devcon conferences, narrowing its institutional strategy, and shifting toward more specialized client teams supported by AI-assisted formal verification. Buterin reiterated his preference for a "lean-and-done" future for Ethereum once its current roadmap is completed, with protocol development focused primarily on security fixes and limited high-impact upgrades. $ETH traded against these developments as the Foundation telegraphs an endowment-style model aimed at preserving funding for what Buterin described as the protocol's "third iteration" following the Merge.