EF Drops 54 Staffers and 40% of Its Budget — Ethereum Goes on a Diet 🍴

The Ethereum Foundation confirmed on June 23, 2026, that it has parted ways with 54 employees, roughly 20% of its workforce, concluding a months-long reorganization tied to the rollout of its 38-page "Mandate" document and a new treasury management policy. The Foundation said on X that it emerges from the 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."

The restructuring organizes the non-profit into five operational clusters — protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer — supported by separate operations and management units. According to a Foundation blog post, "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 protocol layer will focus on scaling and hardening Ethereum mainnet, while the access layer will handle transacting, reading, and delegating on-chain.

The layoffs coincide with a roughly 40% budget reduction announced the same day by co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who said the Foundation is moving from spending around 15% of its remaining treasury annually before 2026 to a long-term target of roughly 5% per year after 2030. Buterin wrote that he "respect[s] my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost," describing the cuts as "difficult decisions" that include the departure of experienced engineers. He also outlined a wind-down of the Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) unit, smaller and less costly Devcon conferences, a narrower institutional strategy, and a shift toward more specialized client teams supported by AI-assisted formal verification.

The personnel changes follow a wave of senior departures that began in January. Co-director Hsiao-Wei Wang stepped away on June 16, 2026, marking the ninth senior EF figure to exit this year, after her fellow co-director Tomasz Stańczak left in February and leading researcher Dankrad Feist departed last year to work on Stripe's stablecoin blockchain, Tempo. Bastian Aue was named interim co-director alongside Wang following Stańczak's exit. Buterin said the reorganization is intended to preserve funding for what he called Ethereum's "third iteration" roadmap after the Merge, and reiterated his preference for a "lean-and-done" future focused on security fixes and limited high-impact upgrades rather than continual feature expansion. $ETH traded near $1,650 as the workforce reduction was announced.