Ethereum Foundation lays off employees to hit ‘new level of focus’

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While Andreessen Horowitz proclaims the end of crypto’s “foundation era,” the most important foundation in the business is in the midst of a, well, foundational shakeup.

Earlier this year, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak replaced Aya Miyaguchi as the Ethereum Foundation’s executive directors (the latter assumed a new role as the organisation’s president).

Now, the single largest team within the foundation has undergone a substantial restructuring, shedding more than a dozen employees in the process.

In a blog post on Monday, the Ethereum Foundation said its Protocol Research & Development arm would continue under a new name: Protocol.

At the same time, its headcount will drop from more than 110 employees to fewer than 100, according to organisation charts shared before and after the restructuring.

This is the team that works on Ethereum itself. The foundation also has an operations team as well as teams that research privacy-enhancing technology and support software developers building applications atop Ethereum.

The streamlining is the latest in a series of moves meant to address the belief that Ethereum’s love affair with decentralisation has come at a cost, to wit: the focus and efficiency that comes with decisive, top-down leadership.

Earlier this year, the Ether cryptocurrency languished while Bitcoin and Solana hit all-time highs.

Critics blasted Ethereum co-founder and foundation board member Vitalik Buterin for the foundation’s seemingly hands-off approach to Ethereum development and called for Miyaguchi’s ouster.

While Buterin insists Miyaguchi’s transition from executive director to president began long before critics’ frustration boiled over, the new co-EDs wasted no time signaling they had heard the criticism and would lead accordingly.

In April, they said they had three priorities for the next year: making Ethereum more performant, ensuring layer 2 blockchains remain affordable, and improving user experience.

As I wrote at the time, that was a bit of a pivot for an organisation that had long believed the road to mass adoption ran through layer 2 blockchains alone.

Monday’s changes were all about delivering on that pivot, senior EF employees wrote.

“We encourage every team in Protocol to consider how their work is supporting our execution of these strategic initiatives,” the blog post reads.

“Critical to our execution is the presence of leaders in our group whom the community trusts. We are being more explicit in assigning leaders to accelerate our strategic initiatives in order to increase accountability.”

Not everyone was pleased.

Ethereum developer Péter Szilágyi — who appears to have left the foundation amid the restructuring — said “this is where the word ‘decentralised’ was quietly, forever removed from #Ethereum’s roadmap.”

Others were less concerned that a more assertive foundation would compromise Ethereum’s decentralisation.

“I applaud strong leadership that facilitates decentralization to actually happen instead of the kumbaya of the past that couldn’t even get a basic website done to convey what Ethereum is even about,” Sebastian Bürgel, a vice president at Gnosis DAO, said.