The Ethereum Foundation is eliminating 54 positions, roughly 20 percent of its workforce, as part of a sweeping restructuring that comes amid a wave of senior leadership departures and growing fragmentation within the Ethereum ecosystem.
The cuts were announced in an official blog post and are tied to the foundation’s updated mandate and treasury policy. Management said the new structure would make the organization leaner and more focused, aligning staff with what it called the critical tasks needed to support Ethereum’s long-term development. The foundation did not comment further by publication time.
The layoffs follow a period of significant turnover at the top. Co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak have both stepped down in recent months, and about nine senior figures have left or transitioned out of the organization in the past six months. The exodus has intensified scrutiny of the foundation’s governance model just as Ethereum faces intensifying competition from rival blockchains.
At the same time, a separate initiative called ETHLabs is expanding with backing from Ethereum’s largest corporate stakeholders, including BitMine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming, as well as Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin. ETHLabs aims to accelerate Ethereum’s technical roadmap and institutional adoption, and its emergence highlights a widening split between the foundation’s traditional role and the priorities of corporate ETH holders.
The foundation also plans to reduce its budget by approximately 40 percent and reorganize its work into five operational clusters, including a dedicated institutional layer focused on enterprise engagement, financial infrastructure, and policy coordination. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s other co-founder, endorsed the cuts earlier this week.
Ethereum’s native ether token has underperformed much of the crypto market this year, and the restructuring comes as layer 2 networks continue to draw capital and activity away from the base chain. The foundation emphasized that the moves were designed to keep Ethereum competitive, but the exact impact on development timelines and grant funding remains unclear.
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