The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has axed 54 employees, or "roughly 20% of the EF."
The non-profit framed the workforce reduction as the conclusion of a "months-long process of reorganization as part of the implementation of the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy."
Concurrently, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed that the Foundation is "decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions."
According to Buterin, the reduction aligns with a broader strategy where "the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year."
"More like Bitcoin"
Buterin has stated that he would not minimize the impact of the staffing cuts.
"Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight," Buterin wrote. "I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people."
Buterin expressed support for a fundamentally leaner protocol structure that limits continuous feature bloat. "In the longer term, I personally favor a 'soft lean-and-done' approach to Ethereum," Buterin stated. He explained that once the current technical roadmap is finalized, the network should "generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol."
According to Buterin, this conservative structural approach will allow Ethereum to remain securely "capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets," advising the ecosystem to "learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin."
U.Today Editorial Team
Dan Burgin
