The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has finalized its reorganized 7-cluster operating structure, concluding a restructuring effort announced publicly on June 23, 2026. The new framework reduces foundation headcount by roughly 20%, equal to 54 eliminated roles — a cut representing ~20% of the foundation’s pre-restructure staffing levels per the official EF announcement published the same day.
EF’s New Structure Splits Work Into 7 Focused Clusters
The structure divides all foundation work into seven distinct clusters, as outlined in the EF’s June 23, 2026 restructuring announcement. Five are domain-specific teams covering the protocol, access, user, community, and institutional layers, supplemented by a standalone operations cluster and a management support cluster. Each cluster has tailored accountability metrics aligned to its specific stated goals per the same official update.
The user layer cluster acts as the foundation’s internal user research arm, a role formally defined in the June 23 restructuring details. It gathers feedback from real users and real-world use cases to inform protocol and access layer roadmap decisions. Its defined work includes user segmentation, persona development, educational material creation, use-case research, and impact evaluation, with the explicit mandate to avoid operating as a product studio per the official structure announcement.
The community cluster manages the EF’s public positioning and outreach, as laid out in the June 23 restructuring update. It builds relationships with aligned groups in the open source, privacy, and public-interest tech spaces. The institutional layer cluster handles engagement with traditional financial institutions, including consumer payments and insurance providers, as well as non-financial enterprises across manufacturing, social, and publishing industries per the same official announcement.
Protocol Cluster Explicitly Barred From Prioritizing Marketability
The protocol cluster is tasked with advancing Ethereum’s core protocol without compromising its foundational security, censorship resistance, and decentralization guarantees per the EF’s official June 23 structure announcement, core properties outlined in Ethereum’s official security documentation. Its mandate explicitly prohibits prioritizing short-term marketability, institutional adoption ease, or intermediary-friendly changes. Its stated priorities include shipping protocol forks safely, reducing unnecessary complexity and trusted dependencies, and mitigating toxic MEV and privileged orderflow in the transaction pipeline.
For example, its long-horizon research roadmap includes post-quantum cryptography, zkEVM, and L1 privacy upgrades, which will be integrated into active protocol changes to preserve and improve self-sovereignty at scale per the same restructuring update. These protocol changes interact with Ethereum’s staking consensus layer, the mechanism that secures the network via locked ETH stakes from validators as documented in Ethereum’s official staking guide.
Access Layer Mandates Non-Custodial Alternatives For All Intermediated Paths
The access layer cluster is tasked with ensuring Ethereum’s core properties of censorship resistance, privacy, security, openness, and self-sovereignty are usable for non-technical end users per the June 23 EF restructuring announcement. Its core operating principle, the “zero option,” requires that for every intermediary-dependent tool or path, a credible, non-custodial alternative remains accessible and functional.
The cluster’s work covers five core user actions that must be supported without requiring users to trust unverifiable intermediaries: reading the chain, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting as specified in the official structure update. The mandate commits to building these alternatives even when intermediated paths are more commercially viable.
Every interface layer, from underlying hardware silicon to end-user frontends, must be auditable, legible to non-technical users, and recoverable regardless of a user’s technical skill level or how often they interact with the Ethereum network per the same announcement.
20% Headcount Cut Accompanies Reorganization
The new structure is paired with a 20% reduction in EF headcount. A total of 54 staff are departing as part of the restructure, confirmed in the June 23 official announcement.
Bottom line: The EF’s June 23, 2026 announcement formalizes a 7-cluster operating structure with a 54-role (~20%) headcount reduction. The protocol cluster is explicitly barred from prioritizing short-term marketability, institutional adoption ease, or intermediary-friendly changes, while the access layer must maintain a “zero option” of non-custodial alternatives for all intermediary-dependent user paths. The restructuring aligns all foundation work around distinct, non-overlapping cluster mandates tied to Ethereum’s core protocol and user self-sovereignty goals.
