以太坊基金會已死，以太坊多元組織當立

Wenser

Odaily资深作者

@wenser2010

2026-07-10 08:29

本文約3253字，閱讀全文需要約5分鐘

舊時代的船隻無法抵達新大陸，還是連環衝擊下的絕處逢生？

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核心觀點：以太坊基金會（EF）正經歷內部組織分裂與人才流失危機，繼裁員54人後，協議支援團隊解散，至少8名高級人員離職。與此同時，Ethlabs、Ethereum Institutional等獨立非營利機構崛起，部分承擔EF職能，EF未來或退居「生態吉祥物」角色。
關鍵要素：
1. EF於6月23日發布新架構，裁員54人（占20%成員），協議支援部門正式解散，被視為「EF成立以來最大規模裁員」。
2. 5名前EF研究員創立非營利研發實驗室Ethlabs，獲Joe Lubin、Consensys等支持，旨在推動以太坊成為全球經濟結算層。
3. 由前EF成員創立的Ethereum Institutional於7月1日亮相，專注推動以太坊的機構級應用，與Ethlabs等協作服務銀行需求。
4. 前EF聯合執行董事王肖薇辭職，年內至少8名高級人員離職，人才流失加劇組織動盪。
5. EF安全團隊部署AI代理對以太坊進行紅隊測試，發現漏洞（如CVE-2026-34219），AI改變安全研究方式但暫未取代人員。
6. Ethlabs成員指出，ETH在五年未能突破5000美元後仍缺乏清晰價值敘事，生態發展面臨困境。

Original｜Odaily Planet Daily（@OdailyChina）

Author｜Wenser（@wenser 2010 ）

Last night, the Ethereum Foundation Protocol Support Team officially announced that the team has been dissolved. Earlier, 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 these organizational and personnel changes lies the fragmentation and functional replacement of the Ethereum Foundation by non-profit independent organizations like ETHLabs and Ethereum Institutional. It also coincides with recent technical progress, such as the Ethereum Foundation's security team using AI agents for red-team testing on the ETH network, discovering real vulnerabilities.

As ETH's price faces wave after wave of industry scrutiny, the Ethereum Foundation is confronted with increasingly complex and diverse contradictions and tests following its internal reforms. Relatedly, this marks the fragmentation leadership structure that Ethereum's governing body is now directly facing.

The Ethereum Foundation Enters an Era of Decline: Rivals Emerge, Brain Drain, and the AI Upheaval

The Ethereum Foundation (hereinafter referred to as EF) has long been criticized for its rigid system, decision-making by a minority, organizational value, and selling actions that affect market sentiment. Criticism within the Ethereum community towards the EF has been particularly intense. Not long ago, Bankless founder David Hoffman even went so far as to "sell off 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 formal dissolution of the EF Protocol Support Team has, like a thunderbolt, completely exposed the internal conflicts and fragmentation crisis within the EF organization to everyone. Notably, this round of organizational change is particularly different from the one initiated last year by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin—this is a thorough personnel purge, also seen as "the largest round of layoffs since the EF's founding," rather than previous changes in some top leadership.

When the Leader of the Ethereum Ecosystem Chooses to Cut Its Losses: The Inside Story of the EF Layoffs

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

In this lengthy, thousand-word article, the EF differentiated its new organizational structure into the Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institution Layer. It subsequently explained that "this organizational restructuring laid off 54 people, accounting for 20% of the EF's members." What was slightly disheartening was the opening statement: "Through this process, we have gained the structure, activities, and people needed to perform the critical tasks ahead." In other words, the laid-off personnel and departments were considered obsolete, unnecessary, and of no value.

It must be said that the EF, which has historically presented itself as a research organization, ecological leader, and quite academic in nature, has for the first time revealed the冷酷 side of organizational management.

EF New Architecture Diagram

Dissolution of the EF Protocol Support Department Marks a Key Sign of EF Organizational Fragmentation

It is worth mentioning that the EF Protocol Support Department's work focused on 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. Its main functions have now been transferred 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 announced. The organization aims to promote Ethereum as the settlement layer for the global economy. It received support from Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin (Chairman of Sharplink, Founder of Consensys), 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.

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 launched.

The organization's main 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. At the same time, the organization emphasizes its collaboration with Ethlabs, Etherealize, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. It is responsible for connecting institutional needs and explaining Ethereum's value proposition to banks, while Ethlabs focuses on translating those needs into technical products. As a non-profit independent institution, Ethereum Institutional will provide free consulting services related to Ethereum applications for banks and asset management companies.

A week later, Ethereum Institutional announced the launch of its core team recruitment, focusing over the coming weeks on hiring for roles in Institutional Go-To-Market (GTM), Marketing & Community Operations, as well as technical positions like Solutions Architect and Technical Project Lead.

Thus, the EF layoffs controversy concluded with the emergence of two major non-profit independent organizations and the official dissolution of the Protocol Support Department, drawing an imperfect conclusion to the "internal organizational reform" initiated by Vitalik last year. Apart from organizational fragmentation and the loss of senior talents like co-executive director Wang Xiaowei, the EF also faces the impact of AI technology.

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 the software underlying the Ethereum ecosystem, searching for vulnerabilities in cryptographic systems, protocol code, and smart contracts.

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

The researchers stated that the AI agents were organized into specialized roles like reconnaissance, hunting, patching, and validation, used to find potential attack paths, reproduce failures, and verify their applicability to production code. The EF stated that AI does not replace security researchers but changes the way they work, enabling the team to cover far more ground than manual review alone. However, it requires researchers to exercise more cautious judgment on a large number of seemingly plausible conclusions.

Considering today's news of the official launch of the GPT-5.6 model, the future maintenance of Ethereum protocol security might be jointly handled by AI models and EF security researchers. Moreover, although the EF currently states that "AI does not replace researchers," as AI models continue to develop and evolve, the personnel in the EF security team, and even across the entire organization, may shrink further. In other words, the EF will face a test from AI models regarding its organizational structure and functional execution ability.

Summary: A Phased Conclusion to EF Organizational Reform; Will It Become an Ecosystem Mascot?

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

It must be admitted that with ETH having grown into an asset with a market cap exceeding hundreds of billions, the EF, an official ecosystem organization established nearly 10 years ago, has found itself in the awkward position of "a big ship being hard to turn." This might explain why Vitalik previously stated, "I will stop writing regular blog posts and decided to try writing some sci-fi novels on the topic of decentralized governance."

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

Currently, it seems difficult for the EF to bear 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 not-too-distant future, playing the role of an "ecosystem mascot" might be more suitable for the EF.