Original|Odaily Planet Daily
Author|Wenser
Last night, the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Support Team officially announced its dissolution. Previously, Xiaowei Wang, the Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, seen as 'one of the representatives of EF's organizational reform,' has also formally resigned. So far this year, at least 8 senior personnel have left the Ethereum Foundation.
On the other side of organizational and personnel changes are the fragmentation and functional substitution of the Ethereum Foundation's role by non-profit independent organizations like ETHLabs and Ethereum Institutional; it's also about technical progress, such as the recent use of AI agent red teaming by the Ethereum Foundation's security team to test the ETH network and discover real vulnerabilities.
While ETH's price faces waves of industry scrutiny, what lies before the Ethereum Foundation are more complex and diverse contradictions and tests following its internal reforms. Related to this is the divisive upheaval that Ethereum's leading body is now directly confronting.
The Ethereum Foundation Enters an Era of Decline: Rise of Multiple Players, Brain Drain, and the AI Shift
The Ethereum Foundation (hereafter referred to as EF) has long been criticized for its rigid system, minority decision-making, organizational value, and actions like sales that affect market sentiment. Criticism within the Ethereum community towards EF has been particularly fierce. Not long ago, Bankless founder David Hoffman even went so far as to 'sell his final ETH holdings' to express dissatisfaction with EF and called on the Ethereum community to engage in ecosystem building in its own way.
Now, the official dissolution of EF's Protocol Support Team is like a bolt of lightning, fully exposing the internal conflicts and crisis of division within the EF organization to everyone. It is worth noting that this round of organizational changes is particularly different from the organizational changes initiated by Ethereum founder Vitalik last year—this is a thorough personnel purge, also seen as 'the largest round of layoffs in EF's history,' rather than the previous partial leadership changes.
When Ethereum's Leading Force Chooses to Sever the Tail to Survive: The Story of EF's Major Layoffs
Everything starts with the official announcement 'New EF Structure' formally released by EF on June 23.
In this lengthy article spanning thousands of words, EF categorized the new organizational structure into Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer, and later stated that 'this organizational restructuring resulted in 54 layoffs, accounting for 20% of EF's membership.' Even more disheartening was the announcement's opening mention: 'Through this process, we have gained the structure, activities, and personnel required to execute the critical tasks we will soon face.' In other words, the laid-off personnel and departments were deemed obsolete, unnecessary, and without value.
It must be said that EF, which has always presented itself as a research-focused, ecological leader with a scholarly demeanor, has for the first time revealed the冷酷 (Note: kept as '冷酷' for tone, English equivalent could be 'ruthless' or 'cold') side of its organizational management.
Diagram of EF's New Structure
Dissolution of EF's Protocol Support Department Marks a Significant Sign of EF's Organizational Split
It's worth mentioning that the work of EF's Protocol Support Department leaned towards infrastructure construction, primarily responsible for coordinating the Ethereum protocol development process, including organizing and coordinating core developer meetings, tracking Ethereum network upgrades, supporting EIP progression, and operating the Ethereum protocol. Now, its main functions have been allocated to EF's Protocol Layer section.
On the same day EF announced its new structure, Ethlabs, a non-profit research and development laboratory co-founded by 5 former EF researchers, was officially announced. This organization aims to promote Ethereum as the settlement layer for the global economy and has received support from a series of investment institutions, Ethereum ecosystem projects, independent individuals, and EF foundation members, including Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin (Sharplink Chairman, Consensys founder), ETH treasury company BitMine (Tom Lee's Ethereum treasury company), Sharplink, and crypto investment firm SNZ.
ETHLabs Community Participant List (Source: Official Account)
On July 1st, Ethereum Institutional, co-founded by former EF members David Walsh, Marius Smith, and Matthew Dawson, officially debuted.
This organization's main concept is 'Ethereum's Institutional Finance Application Plan,' dedicated to promoting the institutionalization and institutional-grade application of Ethereum, its secondary nodes, applications, and the entire ecosystem. Simultaneously, the organization emphasized its collaboration with Ethlabs, Etherealize, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, responsible for connecting institutional needs and explaining Ethereum's value proposition to banks; Ethlabs focuses on translating related needs into technical products. As a non-profit independent institution, Ethereum Institutional will provide free consultation related to Ethereum applications for banks and asset management companies.
A week later, Ethereum Institutional announced the start of core team recruitment, with a focus in the coming weeks on hiring for roles in Institutional Business Development (Institutional GTM), Marketing & Community Operations, as well as technical positions like Solutions Architect and Technical Project Lead.
Thus, the EF layoff turmoil officially concluded with the emergence of two major non-profit independent organizations and the dissolution of the protocol support department, also drawing an imperfect conclusion to the 'internal organizational changes' personally driven by Vitalik last year. Beyond organizational-level fragmentation and the loss of high-level talent like Executive Director Xiaowei Wang, EF also faces the impact of AI technology.
The Era of AI Offense and Defense Begins, EF Security Team Upgrades Testing
Yesterday, researchers from the EF Protocol Security Team stated in a blog post that they had deployed a series of AI agents to test the software relied upon by the Ethereum ecosystem, searching for vulnerabilities in cryptographic systems, protocol code, and smart contracts.
Vulnerabilities discovered by the AI agents include a remotely triggerable panic issue in the libp2p gossipsub point-to-point layer used by Ethereum consensus clients. This issue has been fixed and disclosed on GitHub as CVE-2026-34219.
The researchers stated that the AI agents were organized into specialized roles such as reconnaissance, search, gap-filling, and verification, used to find potential attack paths, reproduce faults, and verify their applicability to production code. EF indicated that AI has not replaced security researchers but has changed the way work is done, enabling the team to cover a far greater scope than manual review, though it requires researchers to exercise more cautious judgment on a large number of seemingly credible conclusions.
Considering today's news of the official launch of the GPT 5.6 model, the future maintenance of Ethereum protocol security may be jointly handled by AI models and EF security researchers. Moreover, although EF currently mentions that 'AI has not replaced researchers,' with the continuous development and evolution of AI models, personnel within the EF security team and even the entire organization may further decrease in the future. In other words, EF will also face the test of AI models on its organizational structure and the execution of its own functions.
Summary: EF Organizational Reforms Reach a Stage Conclusion, May Become an Ecological Mascot in the Future?
In January of last year, we provided a systematic analysis of EF's organizational reforms in the article 'Vitalik Fires the First Shot of 'Reform,' Where is the Ethereum Foundation Heading?' At that time, Vitalik was still ambitiously and forcefully pushing for EF's organizational change; in May this year, after more than a year of organizational innovation, Vitalik's tone shifted instead, stating that 'the Ethereum Foundation should not be the center of the ETH ecosystem and will shift towards a smaller, long-termist path.'
It must be said, after ETH has grown into a multi-hundred-billion dollar asset, the EF, this official ecological organization established nearly a decade ago, has also entered the awkward predicament of 'a large ship is hard to turn.' No wonder Vitalik previously even stated—'no longer writing regular blog posts, deciding to try writing some science fiction on the theme of decentralized governance.'
As former EF researcher and Ethlabs member Ansgar Dietrichs said earlier this month in a podcast, 'After five years of failing to break through $5,000, ETH still lacks a clear value narrative.'
Currently, it appears that EF can hardly shoulder the banner of 'revitalizing the Ethereum ecosystem and driving ETH price breakthroughs.' Future large-scale adoption and institutional-grade investment may now only rest on the hopes of organizations like ETHlabs, Ethereum Institutional, and Etherealize.
Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, playing the role of an 'ecological mascot' is more suitable for EF.
