以太坊基金会已死，以太坊多元化组织当立

Wenser

Odaily资深作者

@wenser2010

2026-07-10 08:29

บทความนี้มีประมาณ 3253 คำ การอ่านทั้งหมดใช้เวลาประมาณ 5 นาที

旧时代的船只无法抵达新大陆，还是连环冲击下的绝处逢生？

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核心观点：以太坊基金会（EF）正经历内部组织分裂与人才流失危机，继裁员54人后，协议支持团队解散，至少8名高级人员离职。与此同时，Ethlabs、Ethereum Institutional等独立非盈利机构崛起，部分承担EF职能，EF未来或退居“生态吉祥物”角色。
关键要素：
1. EF于6月23日发布新架构，裁员54人（占20%成员），协议支持部门正式解散，被视为“EF成立以来最大规模裁员”。
2. 5名前EF研究员创立非营利研发实验室Ethlabs，获Joe Lubin、Consensys等支持，旨在推动以太坊成为全球经济结算层。
3. 由前EF成员创立的Ethereum Institutional于7月1日亮相，专注推动以太坊的机构级应用，与Ethlabs等协作服务银行需求。
4. 前EF联合执行董事王肖薇辞职，年内至少8名高级人员离职，人才流失加剧组织动荡。
5. EF安全团队部署AI代理对以太坊进行红队测试，发现漏洞（如CVE-2026-34219），AI改变安全研究方式但暂未取代人员。
6. Ethlabs成员指出，ETH在五年未能突破5000美元后仍缺乏清晰价值叙事，生态发展面临困境。

Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Wenser (@wenser 2010 )

Last night, the Ethereum Foundation Protocol Support Team officially announced that the team has been formally dissolved. Prior to this, Wang Xiaowei, the co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation who was seen as a representative figure 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 the organizational and personnel changes are the encroachment and functional replacement of the Ethereum Foundation by non-profit independent entities such as ETHLabs and Ethereum Institutional. It also marks technological progress, such as the EF Security Team recently using AI agent red-teaming to test the ETH network and discovering real vulnerabilities.

As ETH prices face wave after wave of industry scrutiny, what lies ahead for the Ethereum Foundation is a set of increasingly complex and diverse contradictions and tests following internal reforms. Related to this is the fragmentation that the Ethereum leadership structure is currently confronting.

The Ethereum Foundation Enters an Era of Decline: Numerous Rivals Emerge, Talent Exodus, and the AI Transformation

The Ethereum Foundation (hereinafter referred to as EF) has long faced criticism for its rigid system, decision-making by a minority, organizational value, and sell-offs that impact market sentiment. Criticism of the EF within the Ethereum community has also been particularly intense. Not long ago, Bankless founder David Hoffman even expressed his dissatisfaction with the EF by “selling off his last ETH position” and called 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 internal conflicts and fragmentation crisis within the EF organization to everyone. Notably, this round of organizational change is markedly different from the changes initiated by Ethereum founder Vitalik last year—this is a thorough purge of personnel, also seen as the largest round of layoffs since the EF's establishment, rather than previous changes limited to some senior leadership.

When the Leading Entity of the Ethereum Ecosystem Chooses to Cut Losses: The Full Story of the EF Layoffs

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

In this lengthy article spanning thousands of words, the EF differentiated the new organizational structure into the protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer. It subsequently explained that “this organizational restructuring resulted in 54 layoffs, accounting for 20% of EF members.” A somewhat chilling detail was mentioned at the beginning of the announcement: “Through this process, we have obtained 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, which has always presented itself as a research organization and ecological leader with an academic ethos, has for the first time revealed a cold side to its organizational management.

Diagram of the EF New Architecture

Dissolution of EF Protocol Support Marks a Key Indicator of EF Organizational Fragmentation

It is worth noting that the work of the EF Protocol Support Department was focused on infrastructure building, 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 section of the EF.

On the same day the EF announced its new architecture, Ethlabs, a non-profit research and development laboratory co-founded by five former EF researchers, was officially launched. The organization aims to drive Ethereum towards becoming the settlement layer of 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 firm SNZ, and a range of other investment institutions, Ethereum ecosystem projects, independent individuals, and EF foundation members.

List of Ethlabs Community Participants (Source: Official Account)

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

This organization operates under the concept of “Ethereum's Institutional Application Plan,” dedicated to promoting the institutionalization and enterprise-grade application of Ethereum, its Layer 2 nodes, applications, and the entire ecosystem. Simultaneously, the organization emphasizes its collaboration with Ethlabs, Etherealize, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, responsible for connecting institutional needs and explaining Ethereum's value proposition to banks; Ethlabs focuses on translating these needs into technological products. As an independent non-profit entity, Ethereum Institutional will provide free consulting services related to Ethereum applications for banks and asset management firms.

A week later, Ethereum Institutional announced the launch of its core team recruitment, focusing over the coming weeks on hiring for institutional business development (Institutional GTM), marketing and community operations, as well as technical roles like solutions architect and technical project lead.

Since then, the EF layoff saga has formally concluded with the emergence of two major non-profit independent organizations and the dissolution of the Protocol Support Department, drawing an imperfect conclusion to the “internal organizational reform” spearheaded by Vitalik last year. Besides the organizational fragmentation and the loss of high-level talent like co-executive director Wang Xiaowei, the EF is also facing the impact of AI technology.

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

Yesterday, researchers from the EF Protocol Security Team stated in a blog post that they have deployed a series of AI agents to test 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 libp2p gossipsub, the 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 are organized into specialized roles such as reconnaissance, hunting, fixing, and validation, used to find potential attack paths, reproduce faults, and verify applicability to production code. The EF indicated that AI is not replacing security researchers but changing the working methods, allowing the team to cover far more scope than manual review, although it requires researchers to exercise more careful judgment on large volumes of seemingly plausible conclusions.

Considering the news that the GPT 5.6 model was officially launched today, the future security maintenance of the Ethereum protocol may be jointly handled by AI models and EF security researchers. Moreover, although the EF currently mentions that “AI has not replaced researchers,” with the continuous development and evolution of AI models, the number of personnel in the EF security team and even the entire organization may further shrink in the future. In other words, the EF will also face the test of AI models on its organizational structure and its own functional execution.

Summary: The End of a Phase in EF Organizational Reform – Will it Become an Ecosystem Mascot?

In January of last year, we conducted a systematic analysis of the EF's organizational reform 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 change. By May of this year, after over a year of organizational innovation, Vitalik had shifted his tone, stating that “the Ethereum Foundation should not be the center of the ETH ecosystem and will shift towards a small, long-term oriented path.”

It must be said that now that ETH has grown into an asset with a market cap of hundreds of billions, the EF, an official ecosystem organization established for nearly a decade, has found itself in the awkward position of “a large ship being hard to turn.” It's no wonder that Vitalik previously remarked – “I will no longer write regular blog posts. I have decided to try writing some sci-fi novels on the theme of decentralized governance.”

As former EF researcher and Ethlabs member Ansgar Dietrichs said on a podcast earlier this month, “After failing to break through $5,000 in five years, 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 prices higher.” Future mass adoption and institutional investment may only be hoped for from organizations like ETHlabs, Ethereum Institutional, and Etherealize.

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