Today, EF is undergoing a transformation, completing a months-long reorganization process as part of the implementation of its mandate and financial management policies.
We emerge from this process with the structures, activities, and people needed to execute the important work before us, but we also include 54 colleagues, or approximately 20% of EF, many of whom will find ways to contribute to Ethereum outside of EF in the coming weeks.
This post provides a brief introduction to the new structure and details of how we will support those leaving.
new structure
EF now has five clusters with different operational domains: protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and authority layer, as well as a cluster focused on operations and a cluster comprised of management and teams that directly support administrative tasks.
Each area of work requires a different approach, is accountable for different kinds of results, and has a different internal structure tailored to the work that needs to be done. I’ll be sharing more about this next month, so today I’ll just focus on introducing it at the highest level.
protocol layer
The Protocol Cluster embodies EF’s legacy and responsibility to ensure that Ethereum delivers on its fundamental promise of expanding self-sovereignty. It does this by laying the foundation for strengthening and expanding the Ethereum protocol itself. The purpose is to ensure that the Ethereum protocol continues to strengthen its properties worth defending: censorship and capture resistance, open source and openness, privacy, and security as non-negotiable protocol guarantees. Protocol clusters exist to allow core protocols to continue to evolve without compromising self-sovereignty guarantees. There is nothing that would make Ethereum more marketable, more focused on short-term profits, or easier to turn into yet another financial railroad controlled by intermediaries. The job is to make Ethereum harder to compromise or capture, making it easier for counterparties to fail, censor the platform, governments to overreach, and intermediaries to rely on for extraction. This means transporting forks securely, reducing unnecessary complexity, minimizing trusted dependencies, protecting trading pipelines from harmful MEVs and privileged order flows, accelerating long-term research such as post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy, and transitioning to protocol changes that preserve and enhance self-sovereignty at scale.
access layer
The access layer is where Ethereum makes or fails to provide services to individuals who actually need CROPS properties. The mission of this cluster is to make self-sovereignty usable, readable, and survivable across key operations such as chain reads, transactions, proofs, delegation, and termination. These tasks need to be supported for users, and increasingly on behalf of agents, who need to be able to read current state, history, and related data without relying on unresolvable intermediaries. They should be able to trade privately, without risk of censorship, and have guaranteed or failed trade results without cost if conditions are not met. As more of this moves to agents, users will need to grant limited permissions, revoke them at will, and maintain control while managing their own intentions rather than being exposed to intermediaries. From silicon to front-end, interfaces must be verifiable, understandable, and recoverable, no matter how often someone uses them or how deep their technical knowledge is.
The principle that the cluster applies is zero options. That is, for all intermediate paths, a trusted intermediary path must exist and remain accessible. Tactically, this means identifying where stronger CROPS properties can be applied to current infrastructure and acknowledging where trusted alternatives are needed because economic incentives favor aggregation, identification, and control.
user layer
The User Tier Cluster is based on users and organizations with a critical stake in the sovereign use of Ethereum, sustaining the work of EF and expanding the tools and standards for such use as broadly as possible. This helps EF understand which features are most critical, which failure modes are most critical, and which trade-offs can be addressed, if necessary. Work includes user segments, personas, training materials, use case studies, and impact assessments. The goal is not for EF to be a product studio, but to ensure that protocol and access layer decisions are shaped by real current and potential users, real constraints, and real self-sovereignty measures.
Community clusters own how EF appears to the world, both inside and outside the Ethereum ecosystem. The mission is to make clear what EF stands for and how it differs substantively from the monotonous status quo and perverse incentive granting and grant management parts of the non-profit world that are vulnerable to zero-sum financial cryptocurrencies, corporate corrupted cryptocurrencies, and the laundering of geopolitical interests. EF is committed to maximizing community value by maintaining independence from these and other unproductive entanglements.
This cluster also builds EF’s relationships beyond cryptography. Self-sovereignty has natural allies in many areas: free and open source, secure, local-first software and hardware, privacy and encryption research and advocacy, civil liberties, the decentralized web, and public interest technology. This cluster works to ensure that the overlap between Ethereum and its space is beneficial, unenforced, and of high quality.
institutional hierarchy
This cluster owns the work of institutions and EFs that institutionally form a middle path for end users to interact with Ethereum. This may include financial institutions such as consumer payments and insurance. This may include non-financial businesses, including manufacturing, social, publishing, and many other industries. This may include government applications. This may include universities or other non-profit organizations.
In all cases, our goal is to create an effective integrated showcase of Ethereum and crypto technologies that maximizes the CROPS properties and guarantees provided to both institutions and users (e.g. ensuring fair and correct execution, ensuring data portability and more generally practical termination capabilities, protecting the privacy of all actors, proving data authenticity, better detecting or preventing wrongdoing, etc.). We believe that many businesses, governments, and non-profits will realize that they prefer incentives to serve their users in ways that enhance their sovereignty while maintaining the guarantees they need to create value or accomplish their missions, and that Ethereum and cryptography can be a part of making that happen. In addition to direct participation, the institutional cluster will pursue this objective by helping to establish and thoughtfully communicate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and training materials for institutional adoption.
The institutional cluster also works with academics and allied advocacy organizations around the world to ensure that Ethereum is properly understood in both its current form and potential, and to track and respond to policy and regulatory developments that may impact Ethereum’s commitment to the use of its own sovereignty and its core principles of censorship (and capture) resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
people leaving
As part of changes to EF’s structure, activities and spending patterns, we are today parting ways with 54 colleagues.
This decision was difficult, but necessary. We need to free up and organize our resources so that we can focus on the important work that only EF can do and therefore must do over the next few years, without undue disruption from short-term market movements.
To ensure that those leaving are well prepared for the transition, we are offering a package of retirement and transition support. Severance pay is the higher of one month’s salary for each year worked at EF or the amount prescribed locally in the individual’s jurisdiction. This is the same severance package we have offered to colleagues who have left EF in the past few months. Transition support includes help finding a new place to contribute to the ecosystem and small transition grants designated to cover individual transition costs (career coaching and similar).
We thank each of you at EF for the talent, dedication, and time you have contributed to Ethereum and look forward to continuing to collaborate with those who find a home elsewhere in the ecosystem.
What comes next?
The resulting EF due to these changes is more concise and focused. We will be sharing more information in the coming weeks and months about how our work will change and how the ecosystem can best participate in the new structure.