Ethereum Foundation Cuts 54 Staff and 40% of Its 2026 Budget

The Ethereum Foundation set out the largest restructuring in its history on Tuesday, ending the process with what it called "54 fewer colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF" and a budget for 2026 cut by about 40%. The changes went out in a Foundation post. Its title: "The EF's new structure." Co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned, the ninth senior figure to leave the organization since January. Vitalik Buterin, who has argued for a "lean-and-done" Ethereum focused on security fixes and a limited set of high-impact upgrades, did not present the cuts as costless. "I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost," he said.

From 15% of treasury a year to 5% by 2030

The Foundation framed the reset as a spending trajectory, not a single year of savings. Before 2026 it was drawing down roughly 15% of its treasury assets annually. The stated target: about 5% a year by 2030. Because that target is a share of assets and not a fixed sum, the denominator moves with the market as well as with the budget, and ether traded around 70% below its August 2025 record of $4,953.73 earlier this month. The 40% cut to the 2026 budget is the first step on that path, not the whole of it, and the Foundation has committed to the lower run rate over four more years.

Privacy and Scaling Explorations winds down

The programs being reduced or closed give the clearest picture of the new shape. Privacy and Scaling Explorations, the Foundation's in-house privacy and scaling research group, is being wound down. Devcon, its flagship conference, gets smaller and cheaper. The institutional strategy narrows, and protocol work shifts toward specialized client teams supported by AI-assisted formal verification, the practice of mathematically proving that code matches its specification rather than relying on tests alone. Reporting on the announcement described the research and protocol side being reshaped into five clusters.

54 roles cut, roughly 20% of the Foundation
2026 budget reduced by about 40%
Privacy and Scaling Explorations wound down
Devcon scaled back; institutional strategy narrowed
Nine senior departures since January, including Hsiao-Wei Wang

Nine senior exits, one at the top

Wang's resignation is the most senior of the nine, coming from one of the Foundation's co-executive director roles. The steady loss of senior staff had been prompting debate inside the ecosystem through the first half of the year. CryptoJazz examined that question in May. Tuesday's announcement converts what had looked like individual exits into a deliberate and disclosed contraction. Buterin's comment, made as the plan was published, concedes the cost instead of managing it. CoinDesk reported his position as a preference for an Ethereum that does fewer things and finishes them, with the protocol treated as something to be completed and hardened, not perpetually expanded.

Glamsterdam still owes ePBS and Block-Access Lists

The retrenchment lands while the Foundation still has an unshipped upgrade to coordinate. Glamsterdam's headline features remain enshrined proposer-builder separation, which writes the split between the validators that propose blocks and the parties that build them into the protocol itself, along with Block-Access Lists, which have blocks declare in advance the state they will touch, and a path toward a 200 million gas limit. Mainnet activation has slipped into the second half of 2026, a date that comes from the core developers' published planning. The open question is whether a leaner Foundation with 54 fewer people and five research clusters can hold that schedule, or whether the delivery burden shifts further onto the independent client teams the new structure is designed to lean on.