The Ethereum Foundation is dead, long live the Ethereum pluralistic organization

Wenser

Odaily资深作者

@wenser2010

2026-07-10 08:29

This article is about 3253 words, reading the full article takes about 5 minutes

The ships of the old era cannot reach the new world. Is this a narrow escape amidst a cascade of shocks?

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Core Thesis: The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is currently experiencing internal organizational fragmentation and a talent exodus. Following the layoff of 54 personnel and the dissolution of the Protocol Support Team, at least eight senior members have departed. Meanwhile, independent non-profit organizations like Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional are emerging, partially assuming EF's functions. The EF's future role may be relegated to that of an "ecosystem mascot."
Key Elements:
1. On June 23, the EF released a new structure, laying off 54 people (20% of its members) and formally dissolving the Protocol Support department, marking what is considered "the largest layoff since the EF's founding."
2. Five former EF researchers founded Ethlabs, a non-profit R&D laboratory supported by Joe Lubin, Consensys, and others, with the goal of advancing Ethereum as the global economy's settlement layer.
3. Ethereum Institutional, founded by former EF members, launched on July 1st. It focuses on promoting institutional-grade applications for Ethereum, collaborating with groups like Ethlabs to serve banking needs.
4. Former EF Co-Executive Director Xiao-Wei Wang resigned. At least eight senior personnel have left the organization this year, with talent attrition exacerbating organizational instability.
5. The EF security team deployed an AI agent to conduct red-teaming tests on Ethereum, discovering vulnerabilities (e.g., CVE-2026-34219). AI is changing the nature of security research but has not yet replaced personnel.
6. An Ethlabs member pointed out that after five years of failing to break the $5,000 mark, ETH still lacks a clear value narrative, and the ecosystem's development faces difficulties.

Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Wenser (@wenser 2010 )

Last night, the Ethereum Foundation Protocol Support Team officially announced its formal dissolution. Previously, Wang Xiaowei, the co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, who was considered "one of the representative figures of the EF organizational reform," also formally resigned. As of now, at least 8 senior personnel have left the Ethereum Foundation this year.

On the other side of organizational and personnel changes lies the fragmentation of the Ethereum Foundation's functions and their replacement by non-profit independent institutions like ETHLabs and Ethereum Institutional. It also marks technical progress, such as the EF security team recently using AI agents for red-teaming the ETH network and discovering real vulnerabilities.

As ETH's price faces wave after wave of industry scrutiny, the Ethereum Foundation is confronted with more complex and diverse contradictions and tests following internal reforms. Related to this is the fission situation the Ethereum leadership structure is directly facing.

The Ethereum Foundation Enters an Era of Decline: Rising Powers, Talent Exodus, and AI Upheaval

For a long time, the Ethereum Foundation (hereinafter referred to as EF) has faced criticism for its rigid structure, decision-making by a minority, organizational value, and sell-offs that impact market sentiment. Criticism of the EF from within the Ethereum community has been particularly intense. Not long ago, Bankless co-founder David Hoffman even went so far as to "sell his last ETH position" to express dissatisfaction with the EF, calling on the Ethereum community to build the ecosystem in their own way.

Now, the formal dissolution of the EF Protocol Support Team has, like a thunderbolt, fully exposed the contradictions and fission crisis within the EF organization to everyone. Notably, this round of organizational changes is distinctly different from last year's changes initiated by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin — this is a thorough and clean personnel purge, also seen as the "largest round of layoffs since the EF's founding," rather than just changes in some leadership positions as before.

When the Leader of the Ethereum Ecosystem Chooses to Cut Losses: The Full Story of the EF Mass Layoffs

It all started with the official announcement of the "EF New Architecture" officially released by the EF on June 23.

In this lengthy article of thousands of words, the EF distinguished the new organizational structure into protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer, and subsequently stated that "this organizational restructuring resulted in 54 layoffs, representing 20% of EF's membership." What's slightly more chilling is that the beginning of the announcement mentioned: "Through this process, we have gained the structure, activities, and personnel needed to execute the critical tasks ahead." In other words, the laid-off personnel and departments were considered obsolete, unnecessary, and without value.

It must be said that the EF, historically presenting itself with an academic temperament as a research organization and ecosystem leader, has for the first time revealed the ruthless side of its organizational management.

EF New Architecture Diagram

Dissolution of the EF Protocol Support Department: A Key Marker of EF Organizational Fission

It is worth noting that the work of the EF Protocol Support Department leaned towards infrastructure construction, primarily responsible for coordinating the Ethereum protocol development process, including organizing and coordinating core developer meetings, tracking Ethereum network upgrades, supporting EIP advancement, and running the Ethereum protocol. Now, its main functions have been allocated to the protocol layer part of the EF.

On the same day the EF announced its new architecture, Ethlabs, a non-profit research and development laboratory co-founded by 5 former EF researchers, was officially launched. This organization aims to promote Ethereum as the settlement layer for the global economy and has received support from Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin (Chairman of Sharplink, Founder of Consensys), the ETH treasury company BitMine (Tom Lee's Ethereum treasury company), Sharplink, crypto investment institution SNZ, and a series of investment institutions, Ethereum ecosystem projects, independent individuals, and EF foundation members.

ETHLabs Community Participant List (Source: Official Account)

On July 1, Ethereum Institutional, co-founded by former EF members David Walsh, Marius Smith, and Matthew Dawson, officially debuted.

This organization's core concept is the "Ethereum Institutional Application Plan," dedicated to promoting the institutionalization and institutional-grade application of Ethereum, its Layer 2 nodes, applications, and the entire ecosystem. Concurrently, the organization emphasizes that it collaborates with Ethlabs, Etherealize, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, handling institutional demand alignment and explaining Ethereum's value proposition to banks; Ethlabs focuses on translating those demands into technological products. As an independent non-profit institution, Ethereum Institutional will provide free Ethereum application-related consulting for banks and asset management companies.

A week later, Ethereum Institutional announced the launch of core team recruitment, focusing on hiring for technical roles such as Institutional GTM, Marketing & Community Operations, as well as Solutions Architecture and Technical Project Leads in the coming weeks.

Since then, the EF layoff saga has officially concluded with the emergence of two major non-profit independent organizations and the dissolution of the Protocol Support Department, drawing a less-than-perfect end to the "internal organizational reform" personally driven by Vitalik last year. Besides organizational fragmentation and the brain drain of high-level talents like co-executive director Wang Xiaowei, the EF also faces the impact of AI technology.

The Era of AI Offense and Defense Begins: EF Security Team Testing Upgrade

Yesterday, researchers from the EF Protocol Security Team stated in a blog post that they have deployed a series of AI agents to test the software relied upon by the Ethereum ecosystem, searching for vulnerabilities in cryptographic systems, protocol code, and smart contracts.

The vulnerabilities discovered by the AI agents include a remotely triggerable panic issue in the libp2p gossipsub peer-to-peer layer used by Ethereum consensus clients. This issue has been fixed and disclosed on Github as CVE-2026-34219.

Researchers stated that the AI agents were organized into specialized roles such as reconnaissance, hunting, patching, and validation, used to find potential attack paths, reproduce faults, and verify their applicability to production code. The EF stated that AI has not replaced security researchers, but has changed the working method, enabling the team to cover far more scope than manual review, requiring researchers to make more cautious judgments on a large number of seemingly plausible conclusions.

Combined with today's news of the official launch of the GPT 5.6 model, future security maintenance of the Ethereum protocol may be jointly handled by AI models and EF security researchers. Furthermore, although the EF now mentions that "AI has not replaced researchers," with the continuous development and evolution of AI models, the EF security team, and even the entire organizational personnel, may be further reduced. In other words, the EF will also face the test of AI models on its organizational structure and its own function fulfillment.

Summary: EF Organizational Reform Concludes a Phase; Will It Become an Ecosystem Mascot?

In January last year, we systematically analyzed the organizational reform of the EF in the article "Vitalik Fires the First Shot of 'Reform', Where is the Ethereum Foundation Heading?". At that time, Vitalik was ambitiously pushing for EF organizational reform. By May of this year, after over a year of organizational renovation, Vitalik changed his tune, stating that "The Ethereum Foundation should not be the center of the ETH ecosystem and will shift to a small, long-termist route".

It must be said that after ETH has grown into an asset with a market cap of hundreds of billions, the EF, an official ecosystem organization established for nearly 10 years, has also entered the awkward situation of "a large ship being hard to turn," no wonder Vitalik previously stated — "I will no longer write regular blog posts and have decided to try writing some science fiction about the theme of decentralized governance."

As former EF researcher and Ethlabs member Ansgar Dietrichs said earlier this month on a podcast, "After five years of failing to break through $5,000, ETH still lacks a clear value narrative."

Currently, it seems difficult for the EF to carry the banner of "revitalizing the Ethereum ecosystem and driving ETH price breakthroughs." Future large-scale adoption and institutional investment may have to rely on organizations like ETHlabs, Ethereum Institutional, and Etherealize.

Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, playing the role of an "ecosystem mascot" might be more suitable for the EF.