Leadership exits, a 40% budget reduction and new groups including ETHLabs, Ethereum Institutional and EthSystems mark one of the biggest overhauls in the organization’s 12-year history.
The Ethereum Foundation entered 2026 facing sustained criticism over its execution, governance and technical direction, particularly concerns that Ethereum’s roadmap had emphasized layer-2 scaling at the expense of base-layer improvements. The pressure culminated in a broad organizational reset that included leadership departures, a narrower mandate and the foundation’s largest restructuring to date. In June, the organization cut roughly one-fifth of its workforce, eliminating 54 positions, and reduced its annual operating budget by about 40% to become leaner and more financially sustainable. The changes followed a February leadership shift, when co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak said he would step down after helping oversee an initial restructuring. Weeks later, the foundation published a new mandate built around the CROPS framework — censorship resistance, resilience, openness, privacy and security — recasting itself as a long-term steward rather than Ethereum’s main builder or coordinator. Over the following months, nine senior leaders, researchers and executives left, one of the largest stretches of turnover in the foundation’s 12-year history. Co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang then resigned in June, accelerating the transition. At the same time, new institutions began taking on functions that had often sat with the foundation. ETHLabs launched with backing from several of the ecosystem’s largest $ETH treasury companies to push protocol research, coordination and product development. Ethereum Institutional followed in July with a focus on enterprises, asset managers and nonprofits adopting Ethereum, while EthSystems emerged as a for-profit infrastructure company centered on confidential transactions for financial institutions using Ethereum. Together, the moves point to a more distributed Ethereum support structure, even as the foundation argues the upheaval reflects renewal rather than decline.