Today, the FE is changing shape, concluding a months-long reorganization process as part of the implementation of the treasury management mandate and policy.
We are emerging from this process with the structure, activities, and people needed to execute the critical tasks ahead of us, but also with 54 fewer colleagues, or approximately 20% of the FE, many of whom will find ways to contribute to Ethereum outside of the FE in the coming weeks.
This article provides a brief introduction to the new structure and details of how we support people who are leaving.
The new structure
The FE now has five clusters with different areas of work – protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer and institutional layer – as well as one cluster focused on operations and another including management and teams directly supporting management work.
Each area of work requires a different approach, is held accountable for different types of results, and has a different internal structure suited to the work at hand. We’ll be sharing a lot more about these in the coming month, so for today we’ll just introduce them at the highest level.
Protocol layer
The protocol cluster carries the legacy and responsibility of the FE to ensure that Ethereum delivers on its fundamental promise of developing self-sovereignty. It does this by laying the foundation for strengthening and scaling the Ethereum protocol itself. Its goal is to ensure that the Ethereum protocol continues to uphold the properties worth defending: censorship and resistance to capture, open source and openness, privacy and security as non-negotiable guarantees of the protocol. The protocol cluster exists to ensure that the main protocol continues to advance without compromising self-sovereignty guarantees. It does not exist to make Ethereum more marketable or focused on short-term interests, nor to facilitate its transformation into another financial rail controlled by intermediaries. Its job is to make Ethereum harder to corrupt or capture, and easier to use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overstep, and middlemen mine. This means shipping forks securely, reducing unnecessary complexity, minimizing trusted dependencies, defending the transaction pipeline against toxic MEVs and privileged order flows, and accelerating and transforming long-term 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 serves or fails individuals who need CROPS properties in practice. The work of this cluster is to make self-sovereignty available, readable and viable through key actions: read the chain, transact, prove, delegate and exit. These actions must be supported for users, and increasingly for agents acting on their behalf, who must be able to read current state, history, and associated data without relying on intermediaries they cannot verify. They should be able to transact privately and without the risk of censorship, with guaranteed transaction results or fail without fees if conditions are not met. As this responsibility shifts to agents, users must maintain control, granting limited authority and revoking it at will, and maintaining custody of their own intentions rather than exposing them to intermediaries. Interfaces, from silicon to frontend, must be verifiable, understandable, and recoverable, regardless of how often someone uses them or the extent of their technical knowledge.
The principle applied by the cluster is the zero option: for each intermediated path, a credible path without an intermediary must exist and remain accessible. Tactically, this means identifying areas where stronger CROPS properties can be applied to current infrastructure and recognizing areas where credible alternatives are needed as economic incentives favor clustering, identification and control.
User layer
The User Layer Cluster keeps EF’s work anchored to users and organizations with vital interests in the self-sovereign use of Ethereum and in extending the tools and standards of such use as widely as possible. This helps the FE understand the most important capabilities, the most severe failure modes, and the tradeoffs that are acceptable to address if necessary. His 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 ensure that protocol and access layer decisions are shaped by real current and potential users, real constraints, and real self-sovereignty measures.
The Community Cluster is responsible for how EF appears in the world, both within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. Its job is to make legible what FE stands for and how it differs materially from zero-sum financial cryptography, compromised body cryptography, and those parts of the non-profit world that run grants, bland, status quo-preserving, and perversely incentivized, and are vulnerable to use for laundering geopolitical interests. The FE is committed to maximizing its community value by maintaining its independence in the face of these and other counterproductive entanglements.
This cluster also builds FE relationships beyond cryptography. Self-sovereignty has natural allies in free and open source, secure, and local software and hardware, in privacy and cryptography research and advocacy, as well as in civil liberty, the decentralized web, and public interest technology, among other areas. This cluster ensures that the overlap between Ethereum and these spaces is fruitful, unforced and of high quality.
Institutional layer
This cluster owns the FE’s work with institutions that shape intermediated institutional paths for end users to interact with Ethereum. This can include financial institutions, whether in consumer payments, insurance or others. This can include non-financial businesses including manufacturing, social, publishing and many others. This may include government requests. These may be universities or other non-profit groups.
In any case, our goal is to prioritize the creation of showcases for efficient integration of Ethereum and cryptographic technologies that maximize the CROPS properties and guarantees available to institutions and users – such as ensuring fair and correct execution, ensuring data portability and more generally the practical ability to exit, protecting the privacy of all stakeholders, proving the authenticity of data, better detecting or even preventing bad behavior, and more. We believe many businesses, governments, and nonprofits will realize that their incentives favor serving users in ways that strengthen their self-sovereignty while maintaining the collateral they need to create value or fulfill their mission, and that Ethereum and crypto technologies can help achieve this. In addition to direct engagement, the Institutional Cluster will pursue these goals by helping to establish and thoughtfully communicate best practices, standards, reference architectures, and educational materials for institutional adoption.
The institutional cluster also works upstream with academics and allied advocacy organizations around the world to ensure that Ethereum is properly understood in both its current form and its potential, and to monitor and respond to policy and regulatory developments that could affect Ethereum’s commitment to self-sovereign use and its core principles of censorship (and capture) resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
People who leave
As part of the change in the structure, activities and expenditure of the FE, we are today parting ways with 54 of our colleagues.
These decisions have been difficult, but they are necessary. We must have the resources and organization to enable us to focus on the critical work that only EF can, and therefore must, carry out in the years to come, without undue disruption from short-term market movements.
To ensure those leaving are well prepared for the transition, we offer a package including severance pay and transition support. Severance pay is the greater of the month of salary per year worked at the EF and the amount prescribed locally by the individual’s jurisdiction. This is the same severance package we have offered to colleagues who have left EF in recent months. Transition support includes help finding a new place to contribute to the ecosystem, as well as a small transition grant to cover individual transition expenses (career coaching and similar).
We are grateful to each of them for the talent, dedication, and time they have dedicated to Ethereum within the EF, and we look forward to continuing to work alongside those of them who find their place elsewhere in the ecosystem.
What comes next
The EF that emerges from this change is simpler and more focused. We will share more in the coming weeks and months about how our work is evolving and how the ecosystem can best engage with the new structure.
