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

Bài viết này có khoảng 3253 từ, đọc toàn bộ bài viết mất khoảng 5 phút

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？

Tóm tắt AI

Mở rộng

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 disbanded. Previously, Wang Xiaowei, the Ethereum Foundation's Co-Executive Director, who was seen as "one of the representative figures of the EF's organizational reform," also formally resigned. As of now, at least 8 senior personnel have left the Ethereum Foundation this year.

On the flip side of these organizational and personnel changes, we see non-profit independent institutions like ETHLabs and Ethereum Institutional carving out roles and functionally replacing the Ethereum Foundation. Simultaneously, the EF security team recently achieved technical progress, such as using AI agents for red team testing on 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 challenges following its internal reforms. Related to this is the impending fragmentation that the Ethereum leadership body is now directly facing.

The Ethereum Foundation Enters an Era of Decline: Rivals Rise, Talent Drains, and AI Disruption

For a long time, the Ethereum Foundation (hereafter referred to as EF) has been criticized for its rigid structure, decision-making by a few, 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 went so far as to "sell his last ETH position" to express his dissatisfaction with the EF, calling on the Ethereum community to build the ecosystem in their own way.

Now, the official disbandment of the EF's Protocol Support Team is like a thunderbolt, fully exposing the internal conflicts and fragmentation crisis within the EF organization to everyone. Notably, this round of organizational change is distinctly different from the restructuring 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 leadership positions.

When the Leader of the Ethereum Ecosystem Cuts Its Losses: The Full Story of the EF's Mass Layoffs

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

In this lengthy article of several thousand words, the EF categorized the new organizational structure into the Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institution Layer, subsequently stating that "this organizational restructuring will result in 54 layoffs, accounting for 20% of the EF's members." What's more disheartening is the statement at the beginning of the announcement: "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, which has historically presented itself as a research organization and ecological leader with an academic air, has for the first time revealed a cold side to its organizational management.

Diagram of the EF's New Architecture

Dissolution of the EF Protocol Support Department Marks a Key Divide in EF's Fragmentation

It's worth noting that the EF Protocol Support Department's work focused on infrastructure development, primarily responsible for coordinating the Ethereum protocol development process, including organizing and facilitating core developer meetings, tracking Ethereum network upgrades, supporting EIP advancement, and running the Ethereum protocol. Now, its main functions have been assigned to the Protocol Layer of the EF.

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

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, officially debuted.

This organization's core concept is "The Institutional Application Plan for Ethereum," dedicated to promoting the institutionalization and institution-grade application of Ethereum, its secondary nodes, applications, and the entire ecosystem. At the same time, the organization emphasizes its collaboration with Ethlabs, Etherealize, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, handling institutional demand alignment and explaining Ethereum's value proposition to banks; Ethlabs focuses on translating these demands into technical products. As a non-profit independent entity, Ethereum Institutional will provide free consulting on Ethereum application 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, Solutions Architecture, and Technical Project Managers in the coming weeks.

Thus, 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 an imperfect close to the "internal organizational reform" initiated by Vitalik last year. Beyond the organizational fragmentation and the loss of top-tier talent like Co-Executive Director Wang Xiaowei, the EF also faces the impact of AI technology.

An Era of AI Offense and Defense Begins, EF Security Team Tests 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 software relied upon by the Ethereum ecosystem, searching for vulnerabilities in crypto systems, protocol code, and smart contracts.

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

The researchers stated that the AI agents were organized into specialized roles like Recon, Hunt, Patch, and Verify, used to find potential attack paths, reproduce failures, and verify their applicability to production code. The EF stated that AI hasn't replaced security researchers, but has changed the working method, enabling the team to cover far more ground than manual review, albeit requiring researchers to make more cautious judgments on a large number of seemingly credible conclusions.

Considering the news of the official launch of the GPT 5.6 model today, the future security maintenance of the Ethereum protocol may be jointly handled by AI models and EF security researchers. Moreover, although the EF now states that "AI hasn't replaced researchers," as AI models continue to develop and evolve, the EF security team and even the entire organization's 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 functional performance.

Summary: The EF's Organizational Reform Concludes a Phase; Could It Become an Ecosystem Mascot Next?

In January 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 forward the EF's organizational reform. By May this year, after over a year of organizational innovation, Vitalik changed his tune, stating that "The Ethereum Foundation should not be the center of the ETH ecosystem; it will shift towards a small, long-termist path."

It must be said that with ETH having grown into an asset with a market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars, the EF, an official ecosystem organization established for nearly 10 years, has reached an awkward position where "it's hard for a big ship to turn around." No wonder Vitalik previously stated: "I will no longer write regular blog posts. I've decided to try writing some sci-fi about the theme of decentralized governance."

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

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

Perhaps, in the near future, playing the role of an "ecosystem mascot" might be more suitable for the EF.