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Ethereum Foundation disbands Protocol Support team as five-cluster reorg lands

The EF Protocol Support account announced its own dissolution on July 9, absorbing the team that ran All Core Devs into the new Protocol Layer cluster from the June 23 restructure.

by 4 min read
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The Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Support team announced its own dissolution on July 9, 2026 via its official X account, in a single-line message ending with a Vulcan salute. The move implements, at the operational level, the five-cluster reorganization the foundation set out in its June 23 "The EF's new structure" blog post. The team had spent roughly three years running the plumbing of Ethereum's core-developer process: All Core Devs coordination, breakout calls, fork-readiness tracking, the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship, and the Forkcast upgrade-tracking site. The foundation has not detailed publicly which units of the new Protocol Layer cluster will absorb which of those workstreams, and the future of Forkcast has not been stated.

What happened

The Protocol Support account posted on July 9 that the team was dissolved. Former team lead William Morriss confirmed on X that his EF role ended with the change; longstanding contributor Mario Havel confirmed he is staying at the foundation in a different capacity. The dissolution follows the June 23 structure blog under which the foundation eliminated 54 positions — roughly 20% of a workforce of about 270 — and reorganized what remained into five domain clusters:

  • Protocol Layer — hardening and scaling the base protocol
  • Access Layer — non-custodial, non-intermediated access to Ethereum
  • User Layer — user research, education, ecosystem feedback loops
  • Community Layer — public engagement, open-source and privacy communities
  • Institutional Layer — enterprises, governments, universities, financial institutions

An operations cluster and a management cluster round out the structure. The Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team was dissolved as an independent unit in the same reorganization.

Mechanism — what Protocol Support actually did

Protocol Support was created in 2023 to be the operational connective tissue between the Foundation's protocol researchers, the several independent client teams, and the wider developer community. In practice that meant:

  • Running All Core Devs. Scheduling and facilitating the biweekly ACD-Execution and ACD-Consensus calls where EIP inclusion, fork scoping and mainnet activation dates are settled.
  • Fork readiness tracking. Maintaining the checklist of client-team compatibility work, testnet activations, and upgrade dependencies before each hard fork (most recently Osaka).
  • Ethereum Protocol Fellowship. Recruiting, mentoring, and integrating new core developers into client teams and research groups.
  • Forkcast. A public-facing site that tracks the state of Ethereum upgrades, proposed EIPs, testnet launches and mainnet activation plans, at forkcast.org.

None of those activities disappear from the roadmap. What is being restructured is who inside the EF handles them, and whether — as several of the outgoing team's members have observed — the coordination role is one that a slimmer foundation intends to keep in-house at all, versus letting client teams and community groups take on more of it.

Impact and open questions

- Head count cut on Jun 23, 2026    : 54 positions (~20% of ~270)
- Clusters in the new structure     : 5 (Protocol, Access, User, Community, Institutional)
- Protocol Support team disbanded   : Jul 9, 2026 (announced via team X account)
- Announced 2026 budget cut         : ~40% (Vitalik Buterin, per prior remarks)
- Target treasury drawdown          : from ~15% to ~5% of endowment by 2030
  • All Core Devs coordination. The next hard fork (Osaka) is already scoped, but subsequent forks depend on someone facilitating the ACD cadence. Client teams (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth on execution; Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, Lodestar, Grandine on consensus) can in principle self-coordinate, but Protocol Support has been the standing scribe and scheduler for the past three years.
  • Forkcast. The site has been a rare piece of ecosystem-facing infrastructure for tracking upgrade state. It is unclear which cluster inherits it or whether it will migrate to a community-run steward.
  • Ethereum Protocol Fellowship. The pipeline for new core contributors was one of Protocol Support's most cited outputs. No successor unit has been publicly named.
  • Senior departures. Nine senior figures have exited the foundation during the reorganization window, including both co-executive directors (Tomasz Stańczak in February, Hsiao-Wei Wang in June) and protocol team leads Tim Beiko and Barnabé Monnot.

What to watch

  1. Which cluster picks up ACD coordination and Forkcast — the first two ACD calls after July 9 will show whether the handoff is planned or ad hoc.
  2. Whether the Protocol Fellowship recruits a new 2026-2027 cohort and under whose banner.
  3. A follow-up EF blog post from Protocol Layer clarifying the internal division of what used to be Protocol Support's remit.
  4. Client-team statements, particularly from the smaller consensus clients that leaned most on the coordination scaffolding.

Context

The Foundation is compressing on multiple fronts at once. Vitalik Buterin's target — cutting annual treasury drawdown from around 15% to 5% by 2030 — implies a smaller in-house EF with more work happening in Ethereum-adjacent labs and community organizations. The June 23 restructure and this month's Protocol Support dissolution are the operational side of that shift. The next test is the run-up to the fork after Osaka: an Ethereum protocol whose core-developer process is entirely community-run has been talked about for years; this is the first quarter in which it is being tried in practice.

Sources: Ethereum Foundation — "The EF's new structure" (June 23, 2026) · crypto.news · CoinCentral · Decrypt on the June 23 restructure.

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