From “One Foundation” to “Multi-Node Governance”: Is Ethereum Undergoing a Silent Power Restructuring?

In the past two weeks, an unprecedented transformation has been underway at the organizational level of Ethereum.

• On June 22, 2026, five former Ethereum Foundation core researchers announced the establishment of Ethlabs, an independent non-profit research and development laboratory;
• A day later, the EF unveiled its new organizational structure, confirming it would end its partnership with 54 employees — approximately 20% of the foundation's total staff;
• On July 1, another independent non-profit organization, Ethereum Institutional, officially launched, taking over the institutional partnership work previously handled by the EF's market development team;

Viewed separately, these events are easily summarized into a familiar pessimistic narrative: the foundation faces a financial crisis, core talent is departing, and the ecosystem is plunging into turmoil.

The market is indeed rife with such rhetoric.

However, placing them on the same timeline reveals a more complete picture: Ethereum is consciously reducing its reliance on a single foundation, gradually dispersing the various functions previously centralized within the EF across multiple independent, specialized ecosystem nodes.

Ethereum seems finally to be attempting to answer a long-standing question: When a decentralized network gradually becomes global infrastructure, what form should the organization driving its development take?

1. Why is the EF 'Actively Shrinking'?

To be fair, interpreting this series of changes within a traditional business context would indeed easily lead most users to misunderstand, as in the narrative of traditional tech companies, layoffs almost invariably signal revenue pressure, business contraction, or strategic failure.

But the Ethereum Foundation is not an ordinary company.

It has no shareholders in the traditional sense, does not target market share or quarterly profits, and does not 'actually own' the Ethereum network. In a sense, the EF is more akin to a protocol guardian, with its primary responsibility being to support core protocol research and development, fund public goods, coordinate ecosystem resources, and safeguard the principles that should not be easily compromised during Ethereum's development.

This also means the EF has always faced an inherent tension.

On one hand, Ethereum requires long-term commitment to protocol development, organizational upgrades, and public goods construction. On the other hand, if research, funding, talent, and decision-making become increasingly concentrated within the foundation, the EF itself becomes Ethereum's biggest centralization risk.

Therefore, the EF has long adhered to a 'subtraction' organizational philosophy. According to the EF's interpretation, a healthy Ethereum ecosystem should not rely on an ever-expanding foundation but should be maintained by a large number of independent organizations and contributors. Thus, the foundation's success should ultimately manifest as its relative influence gradually declining, rather than growing indefinitely.

This thinking is not a spur-of-the-moment decision. In its treasury policy announced in 2025, the EF had already explicitly stated its intention to gradually narrow its scope of responsibilities, planning to reduce annual operational expenditure over the next five years, ultimately moving towards a longer-term, more sustainable foundation model.

As we mentioned a few months ago, the EF indeed experienced a rather awkward period starting in 2025. The EF was once at the center of a public opinion storm, with community criticism rising, and some even calling for a so-called 'wartime CEO' to drive change. Eventually, a series of internal power struggles became public, forcing the highest-level power restructuring since the EF's establishment:

• At the beginning of 2025, Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi was promoted to President, with Vitalik Buterin promising a leadership restructuring;
• Subsequently, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak were appointed as Co-Executive Directors;
• Additionally, a new marketing narrative agency, Etherealize, led by former researcher Danny Ryan, was established;
• Meanwhile, the EF further restructured its board, clarifying its cypherpunk value orientation;
• By mid-year, the foundation also reorganized its research department, consolidating teams and making personnel adjustments to ensure focus on core protocol priorities;

It turns out this combination of moves significantly hardened Ethereum's execution capability. The Pectra upgrade was officially activated on May 7, 2025. Less than seven months later, on December 3, the Fusaka upgrade successfully landed on the mainnet. The EF, in its subsequent annual summary, called 2025 one of the most productive years for the Ethereum protocol layer. These two major upgrades also moved the often-discussed goal of 'accelerating the hard fork cadence' closer to reality. (For further reading: Ethereum 2026: Decoding the EF's Latest Protocol Roadmap, Entering the Era of 'Engineering Upgrades'?).

Therefore, from this perspective, the layoffs in June 2026 seem more like the first time this long-term strategy has been presented to the outside world in the most intuitive way.

Following the adjustment, the EF's work is divided into five main clusters: Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer, plus operations, management, and related support teams. The EF explains that cutting approximately 20% of its staff is to concentrate organization and resources on 'work that only the EF can and must do'.

This is also an organization proactively shrinking its boundaries. To whom will it delegate some of its responsibilities?

2. How to View Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional?

If we need an analogy, my understanding is that this change superficially resembles the 'Partition of Jin' in ancient China: the talent, R&D, and institutional functions originally concentrated within the EF are beginning to disperse across different organizations.

However, from a practical relational perspective, it is closer to a functional separation than a division of power. That is, the EF, Ethlabs, and Ethereum Institutional do not have a parent-subsidiary or superior-subordinate relationship typical of traditional corporate systems; instead, they function like three differently positioned yet interconnected nodes within Ethereum's governance network.

First, Ethlabs.

Although it was announced the day before the EF's layoff plan by five former Ethereum Foundation researchers — founding members include Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma, all significant figures who have respectively contributed to research on Ethereum's finality, scalability, data availability, the EVM, and protocol economics — Ethlabs explicitly defines itself as an independent non-profit R&D lab serving Ethereum and ETH. Its mission is encapsulated in a single statement: 'Making Ethereum the settlement layer for the global economy.'

In Ethlabs' narrative, Ethereum should not just be a blockchain for issuing tokens and running applications, but should become the neutral settlement infrastructure used by digital assets, stablecoins, on-chain markets, institutions, and AI Agents.

This mission dictates a key difference between Ethlabs and the EF:

• The EF's core task is to ensure Ethereum does not sacrifice censorship resistance, privacy, and user sovereignty for short-term adoption and commercial gain. Its official organizational documentation even explicitly states that the protocol team's responsibility is not to make Ethereum easier to market or to transform it into a financial track controlled by intermediaries.
• Ethlabs is different. It can more explicitly discuss growth, ETH value capture, institutional demands, and real-world adoption.

In other words, Ethlabs positions itself between two worlds. On one side are wallets, applications, Layer 2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, and real users; on the other side are Ethereum's core protocol, researchers, and core developers. It aims to proactively translate the real needs of the former into protocol research, shared standards, infrastructure, and deployable products.

This also helps us better understand Ethereum Institutional's positioning. If Ethlabs takes over the 'translation of R&D into growth' after the EF's divestment, then Ethereum Institutional takes over the 'commercial and compliance promotion' that the EF previously shouldered alone.

Simply put, this non-profit directly inherits the institutional partnership work that the EF's market development team had been conducting for over a year, positioning itself as the 'neutral front door' for traditional institutions entering the Ethereum ecosystem. It aims to answer a question Ethereum has long struggled to answer: When a bank or asset manager wants to deploy a product on Ethereum, who exactly should they contact?

This question has become increasingly urgent over the past few years.

As is well known, ecosystems like Solana have clearer foundations, business development teams, and institutional partnership channels. With well-compensated and highly aggressive business teams, they have been continuously making inroads among global financial institutions. Ethereum, due to its emphasis on decentralization and trusted neutrality, has long lacked a unified external interface.

There is a deep-seated contradiction here. Neutrality is an advantage in technology and governance, but in a real-world business environment, neutrality also implies 'no clear point of contact'. When an institution like BlackRock wants to deploy on Ethereum, it expects to have a dedicated team on the other end for continuous engagement, not a foundation that maintains a stance of absolute neutrality, reluctant to cater to Wall Street and sovereign wealth funds like a traditional company.

Ethereum Institutional is designed to resolve this very contradiction. No single entity can represent Ethereum, but institutions still need a counterparty capable of continuous communication.

Therefore, incubated with funding from Bitmine, Sharplink, and Joe Lubin, and led by seasoned professionals like former BlackRock veteran Joseph Chalom, its positioning will undoubtedly be a significant advantage, enabling direct outreach to banks, asset managers, custodians, market infrastructure providers, fintech firms, and sovereign institutions.

According to the information it released, Ethereum Institutional primarily covers five areas of work, mainly helping people understand Ethereum, articulate requirements, and translate these needs into realizable on-chain projects:

• Institutional Education & Communication: Helping traditional financial institutions understand Ethereum's technical architecture, governance model, and ecosystem status;
• Institutional Market Intelligence: Tracking and analyzing trends, barriers, and best practices for institutional adoption of Ethereum;
• ETH & Ethereum Ecosystem Promotion: Articulating Ethereum's value proposition to the traditional financial world;
• Industry Requirements & Standards Research: Translating institutions' practical needs into standard proposals and product requirements;
• Institutional Events & Relationship Networks: Continuously building relationships in financial hubs like New York, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore;

Consequently, a clearer division of labor within Ethereum begins to emerge: the EF is responsible for protocol values and public goods, Ethlabs for translating R&D into growth, Ethereum Institutional for institutional adoption, while wallet, application, and infrastructure teams handle the final products and user experience.

This also means Ethereum governance is shifting from the previously somewhat ambiguous 'EF coordinates everything' towards a more modular structure.

3. From 'EF Driving Ethereum' to 'Ecosystem Collectively Guarding Ethereum'

In the past, although Ethereum's governance structure was highly open, many key responsibilities naturally converged on the EF, which could be summarized as the rather vague 'EF coordinates everything'.

When protocol development encountered problems, people looked to the EF. When the market narrative lagged, people criticized the EF. When ETH underperformed, institutional adoption was slow, or user experience failed to improve, the outside world often placed the blame on the EF.

This is inherently contradictory. Ethereum aspires to be a decentralized network independent of any single organization, yet the entire ecosystem has long been accustomed to viewing the EF as the ultimate responsible party.

Now, a more modular structure is taking shape. Each key function has a corresponding independent organization to assume it. These organizations are no longer in a superior-subordinate relationship but are interconnected through shared protocol goals and ecosystem interests.

Of course, this does not mean Ethereum has found a perfect new governance model. On the contrary, the real test has only just begun.

As different functions are dispersed across independent organizations, Ethereum faces higher coordination costs. It must also prevent different teams from working in silos, duplicating research, allowing funding sources to influence technical direction, or institutional adoption gradually overwhelming the interests of ordinary users.

But from another perspective, this uncertainty itself is the price that must be paid for decentralization. A truly decentralized protocol should not forever depend on any single expanding foundation, nor should it lose its ability to continue developing because a few core members leave.

The key to judging whether this transformation is successful is not how many people remain at the EF, but whether:

• The core protocol can continue to upgrade stably;
• Research talent, upon leaving the EF, remains within the Ethereum ecosystem;
• Independent organizations can maintain collaboration and mutual checks and balances;
• Institutional adoption can expand without sacrificing openness and user sovereignty;
• Wallets and applications can translate underlying progress into products that ordinary users can actually utilize;

If these goals can be achieved, the decline of the EF's influence might instead prove that Ethereum is becoming more mature.

At that point, Ethereum will no longer be a sapling needing constant support from the foundation, but will become an ecosystem sustained jointly by the foundation, research institutions, developers, wallets, applications, enterprises, and users.

Just like Ethereum's own decentralized network architecture, its governance structure, in 2026, has finally also become distributed.

We have always believed that this is not the end of a crisis, but a new beginning for a more resilient and vibrant Ethereum ecosystem.