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Ethereum Foundation cuts 54 jobs and 40% of 2026 budget in restructure

The Ethereum Foundation laid off 54 staff (~20%) and slashed its 2026 budget 40% on June 23, reorganizing into five layer-clusters under a 5% endowment-spend target by 2030.

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The Ethereum Foundation eliminated 54 positions — roughly 20% of its workforce — and cut its 2026 operating budget by 40% in a structural reset published on the Foundation blog on June 23, 2026 under the title The EF's new structure. The post lays out a permanently leaner foundation reorganized around five domain "layers" plus operations and management groups, ties the change to the March 2026 Mandate and the June 2025 Treasury Management Policy, and moves the EF's long-term spending discipline toward an endowment model targeting roughly 5% of treasury per year by 2030, down from around 15% before this year.

What changed

The Foundation will now operate as five mission clusters — protocol, access, user, community and institutional — with separate operations and management groups handling everything else. The protocol cluster carries the network-upgrade, censorship-resistance and long-horizon research workload (post-quantum, L1 privacy). The access cluster owns the user-side primitives that let a person reach the chain without an intermediary. The user, community and institutional clusters split the work that used to sit under "ecosystem support" between retail UX, contributor coordination, and enterprise/government engagement.

The internal research agenda was also pruned: Vitalik Buterin framed the new focus as "CROPS" — censorship resistance, resilience, openness, privacy, security — in his public note on the cuts. Several teams outside that frame have been wound down, including the in-house ZK research lab.

The math

The numbers the Foundation and Buterin disclosed publicly, with sources linked below:

  • Headcount before: ~270. Positions eliminated: 54. Resulting cut: ~20%.
  • 2026 operating budget: down ~40% versus the prior year.
  • Treasury spend rate: ~15% per year now → target ~5% per year by 2030 ("endowment model").
  • Severance floor for departing staff: at least one month of salary per year of service, plus a retirement payment and access to a career-transition support fund.

The 5% target is the load-bearing number. The Foundation holds the largest single non-exchange ETH treasury on chain; pinning forward spend to a fixed fraction of it converts the EF from a grant-funded organization with a perpetual sell-pressure problem into one whose disbursement scales with the chain's market value.

Leadership exits, and the funding gap that follows

The cuts cap an 18-month run of senior departures. Co-executive directors Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang left earlier in the year (Wang's earlier appointment was covered here), with Bastian Aue holding interim leadership. Multiple secondary outlets count nine senior figures gone since January, including the recent departure of additional researchers tracked by IBTimes UK.

The downstream question is funding flow. The EF historically backstopped client teams, research groups and public-goods aggregators that other treasuries do not. A 40% budget cut and a shift to a 5% endowment burn means less of that money exists, structurally, for the rest of the decade. That is a separate political fight from anything in the operational plan itself.

What to watch

  1. Whether Glamsterdam slips. The protocol cluster now carries the upgrade pipeline with a smaller team. Glamsterdam's final devnet shipped earlier this month; the schedule from here onward is the first real test of the leaner protocol group.
  2. The Lesaege validator-revenue proposal. A protocol-level redirect of 0–10% of staking rewards toward client teams and public goods — covered here — gains weight if the EF's grant pipeline shrinks. Watch for an EIP and for LST-operator positions.
  3. CROPS scope. Research that does not map to censorship resistance, openness, privacy or security is structurally out. The first cohort of grant decisions under the new mandate will show how strictly that filter is applied.
  4. ETH sales from the EF wallet. Buterin signalled lower routine ETH sales under the endowment model. The on-chain footprint of the Foundation's treasury wallet is the easiest verification.

Context

The reorganization is the second leg of the 38-page March 2026 Mandate that followed the June 2025 Treasury Management Policy — a sequence the Foundation has telegraphed for a year. What is new on June 23 is the headcount and budget number behind the rhetoric. The shift mirrors a broader contraction across organizations funded directly out of ETH-denominated treasuries: the Lido DAO and several L2 foundations have run similar discipline exercises this year. The EF, sitting on the largest such treasury, was the most-watched.

Sources:

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