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The EF’s new structure<br>Posted by Ethereum Foundation Management on June 23, 2026<br>Organizational

Today, the EF is changing shape, concluding a months-long process of reorganization as part of the implementation of the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy.

We come out of this process with the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead of us, but also with 54 fewer colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom will be finding ways to contribute to Ethereum from outside the EF in the coming weeks.

This post provides a brief introduction to the new structure and details on how we are supporting the people who are leaving.

The new structure

The EF now has five clusters with different domains of work – protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer – as well as a cluster focused on operations and one comprising management and teams directly supporting management work.

Each domain of work requires a different approach, is held accountable for different kinds of results, and has a different internal structure tailored to the work that needs to be done. We will share much more about these in the coming month, so for today we will stick to introducing them at the highest level.

Protocol Layer

The protocol cluster carries the EF’s legacy and responsibility for ensuring that Ethereum delivers on its foundational promise of scaling self-sovereignty. It does so by laying the groundwork for hardening and scaling the Ethereum protocol itself. Its objective is to ensure that the Ethereum protocol continues to enforce the properties which make it worth defending: censorship and capture resistance, open source and openness, privacy and security as non-negotiable protocol guarantees.<br>The protocol cluster exists to make sure the core protocol continues to advance without compromising on self-sovereignty guarantees. It does not exist to make Ethereum more marketable or focused on short-term interests, or to make it easier to turn into another financial rail controlled by intermediaries. Its work is to make Ethereum harder to corrupt or capture, and easier to rely on when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, and intermediaries extract. This means shipping forks safely, reducing unnecessary complexity, minimizing trusted dependencies, defending the transaction pipeline against toxic MEV and privileged orderflow, and accelerating and turning long-horizon research such as post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy into protocol changes that preserve and improve self-sovereignty at scale.

Access Layer

The access layer is where Ethereum either serves or fails individuals who need CROPS properties in practice. This cluster’s job is to make self-sovereignty available, legible and survivable across key actions: reading the chain, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting. These actions must be supported for users, and increasingly for the agents acting on their behalf, who must be able to read current state, history, and related data without depending on intermediaries they can’t verify. They should be able to transact privately and without risk of censorship, with transaction outcomes that are either guaranteed or fail cost-free if conditions are not met. As more of this moves to agents, users have to stay in control, granting bounded authority and revoking it at will, and keeping custody of their own intents rather than exposing them to intermediaries. The interfaces, from silicon to frontend, must be verifiable, understandable and recoverable, regardless of how often someone uses them or how deep their technical knowledge goes.

The principle the cluster applies is the zero option: for every intermediated path, a credible intermediary-free path must exist and stay accessible. Tactically this means identifying where stronger CROPS properties can be applied to current infrastructure, and acknowledging where credible alternatives are necessary because economic incentives favor aggregation, identification and control.

User Layer

The user layer cluster keeps EF work grounded in the users and organizations with vital interests in self-sovereign use of Ethereum, and in extending the tools and norms of such use as widely as possible. It helps the EF understand the capabilities that matter most, the failure modes that are most serious, and the tradeoffs that are acceptable to settle on where necessary.<br>Its work includes user segments, personas, educational materials, use-case research, and impact evaluation. The goal is not for the EF to become a product studio, but to make sure Protocol and Access Layer decisions are shaped by real current and potential users, real constraints, and real measures of self-sovereignty.

Community Layer

The community cluster owns how the EF shows up in the world, both within and beyond the Ethereum...