Eight Executives Gone, 54 Jobs Cut: What's Happening at the Ethereum Foundation?

The Ethereum Foundation has made 54 job cuts, about a fifth of its staff, days after the last of eight senior figures left the organisation in five months.

The Switzerland-based non-profit, which funds development of the world's second-largest blockchain, confirmed the redundancies on Tuesday at the end of a months-long reorganisation. The 54 roles account for roughly 20 per cent of the workforce.

In a published statement, the foundation said the new shape leaves it able to concentrate on the work only it is placed to do, and that those leaving would be supported into new roles.

The cuts sit inside a wider reduction in spending. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the foundation is lowering its 2026 budget by about 40 per cent and shifting to an endowment-style model, with annual spending set to fall from roughly 15 per cent of its assets before this year towards about 5 per cent by 2030. He had outlined the same direction in May, describing a smaller, more focused foundation. 'I will not try to pretend that there was not much that is lost,' Buterin wrote of the departing staff.

The job cuts follow months of departures from the foundation's senior ranks. Co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned on 18 June, effective immediately, after returning from a sabbatical, leaving both top posts vacant. Her exit followed that of fellow co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak in February. Board member Bastian Aue, named interim co-executive director earlier this year, now leads the organisation alone.

Wang spent eight years at the foundation and worked on landmark upgrades including The Merge and Dencun. She framed her exit as personal, writing on X that 'this is the right moment for me to step back.'

She was the eighth senior figure to leave since the start of the year. The others include Stańczak, protocol coordinator Tim Beiko, operations lead Josh Stark, and researchers Barnabé Monnot, Carl Beek, Julian Ma, and Trent Van Epps. The scale of the turnover has drawn scrutiny within the Ethereum community over the foundation's governance and direction.

How the New Ethereum Foundation Is Organised

The leaner foundation will run as five clusters covering protocol, access, user, community, and institutional work, supported by separate operations and management groups.

The protocol cluster keeps responsibility for hardening and scaling Ethereum, with work on post-quantum security, on-chain privacy, and a zero-knowledge version of the network, in line with the foundation's stated priorities of censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security. The institutional cluster handles ties with banks, enterprises, governments, and universities. The foundation said it would publish fuller detail on each in the coming weeks.

What the Departing Ethereum Foundation Staff Are Owed

Departing staff will receive severance worth the higher of one month's pay for every year served or the amount required by local law, the same terms given to colleagues who left in recent months. The package also includes help finding a new role in the ecosystem and a small grant towards transition costs such as career coaching.

Many of the 54 are expected to keep working on Ethereum from outside the foundation.

The restructuring runs alongside a revised treasury policy meant to limit the foundation's exposure to short-term market swings. Former coordinator Trent Van Epps has estimated a funding shortfall of about $30 million (£22.6 million) a year for client teams, researchers, and protocol-coordination groups, opening up within three to nine months after a key incentive programme ended in April.

The market reaction was limited. Ether traded at about $1,660 (£1,253) as the announcement landed, without the sell-off a leadership change might once have triggered. Analysts attribute the steadiness to Ethereum's large, decentralised developer base, which they say reduces the impact of any single departure.

The foundation said it would set out more about how its work is changing, and how the wider ecosystem can engage with the new structure, over the coming weeks.