Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Wenser (@wenser 2010 )
Last night, the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Support Team officially announced its dissolution. Prior to this, Wang Xiaowei, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, who was seen as "one of the representative figures of the EF's organizational reform," had also officially resigned. So far this year, at least 8 senior personnel have left the Ethereum Foundation.
Alongside the organizational and personnel changes, there is the functional replacement and encroachment on the Ethereum Foundation's role by non-profit independent organizations such as ETHLabs and Ethereum Institutional; there is also the technical progress, like the EF's security team recently using AI agents for red team testing of the ETH network and discovering real vulnerabilities.
As ETH's price faces wave after wave of industry scrutiny, what lies before the Ethereum Foundation are the more complex and diverse contradictions and tests following its internal reform. Related to this is the divisive transformation that the leading body of Ethereum is directly confronting.
The Ethereum Foundation Enters an Era of Decline: The Rise of Multiple Contenders, Talent Drain, and the AI Transformation
The Ethereum Foundation (hereinafter referred to as EF) has long been criticized for its rigid structure, decision-making by a few, organizational value, and actions affecting market sentiment through token sales. Criticism of the EF within the Ethereum community is particularly fierce. Not long ago, Bankless founder David Hoffman even went so far as to "sell his final ETH holdings" to express his dissatisfaction with the EF, urging the Ethereum community to build the ecosystem in their own way.
Now, the formal dissolution of the EF's Protocol Support Team is like a thunderclap, fully exposing the internal contradictions and crisis of division within the EF organization to everyone. It is noteworthy 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 since the EF's establishment,' not merely changes among some leadership personnel as before.
When the Ethereum Ecosystem Leader Chooses to Sever Its Tail to Survive: The Course of EF's Major Layoffs
It all begins with the official announcement "New EF Structure" officially released by the EF on June 23.
In this lengthy article spanning thousands of words, the EF distinguished its new organizational structure into layers: Protocol, Access, User, Community, and Institutional. It later explained that "this organizational restructuring involves laying off 54 people, representing 20% of EF's membership." What feels even more disheartening is that the announcement begins by stating: "Through this process, we have obtained the structure, activities, and personnel necessary to execute the critical tasks we will soon face." In other words, the laid-off personnel and departments are considered obsolete, unnecessary, and without value.
It must be said that the EF, which has always presented itself as a research-oriented organization and an ecosystem leader with a scholarly demeanor, has for the first time revealed a冷酷 aspect of its organizational management.
Schematic diagram of the new EF structure
The Dissolution of the EF Protocol Support Department Becomes a Significant Marker of EF's Organizational Split
It is worth mentioning that the work of the EF 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, running the Ethereum protocol, etc. Now, its main functions have been allocated to the Protocol layer part of the EF.
Coinciding with the day the EF announced its new structure, Ethlabs, a non-profit R&D lab 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 members, including Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin (Chairman of Sharplink, founder of Consensys), ETH treasury company BitMine (Ethereum treasury company under Tom Lee), Sharplink, and crypto investment firm SNZ.
List of ETHLabs community participants (Source: Official account)
On July 1st, Ethereum Institutional, co-founded by former EF members David Walsh, Marius Smith, and Matthew Dawson, was officially unveiled.
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 layers, applications, and the entire ecosystem. Simultaneously, the organization emphasizes its collaboration with Ethlabs, Etherealize, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, responsible for institutional demand对接 and explaining Ethereum's value proposition to banks; Ethlabs focuses on translating related demands into technical products. As a non-profit independent institution, Ethereum Institutional will provide free consulting related to Ethereum applications for banks and asset management companies.
A week later, Ethereum Institutional announced the commencement of core team recruitment, focusing in the coming weeks on hiring for roles such as Institutional Business Development (Institutional GTM), Marketing & Community Operations, and technical positions like Solutions Architect, Technical Project Lead.
Thus, the EF layoff turmoil formally concluded with the emergence of two major non-profit independent organizations and the dissolution of the Protocol Support Department, also drawing an imperfect full stop to the "internal organizational transformation" personally pushed by Vitalik last year. Beyond the organizational-level split and the loss of top talent like Executive Director Wang Xiaowei, the EF also faces the impact of AI technology.
The Era of AI Attack and Defense Begins, Upgrades in EF Security Team Testing
Yesterday, researchers from the EF Protocol Security Team stated in a blog post that they have deployed a series of AI agents to test software dependencies within 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 peer-to-peer layer used by Ethereum consensus clients. This issue has been fixed and disclosed on Github as CVE-2026-34219.
Researchers stated that the AI agents were organized into specialized roles such as reconnaissance, searching, gap filling, and verification to find potential attack paths, reproduce failures, and verify their applicability to production code. The EF stated that AI has not replaced security researchers but has changed the way of working, enabling the team to cover a far greater scope than manual review, but requiring researchers to exercise more cautious judgment over 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 will likely be jointly handled by AI models and EF security researchers. Moreover, although the EF currently mentions that "AI has not replaced researchers," with the continuous development and evolution of AI models, personnel in the EF security team and even across the entire organizational structure may be further reduced in the future. In other words, the EF will also face the test of AI models on its organizational structure and the fulfillment of its functions.
Summary: The EF Organizational Reform Phase Concludes, Might It Become an Ecosystem Mascot in the Future?
In January of last year, we systematically analyzed the EF's organizational reform in the article "Vitalik Fires the First Shot of 'Reform', Where is the Ethereum Foundation Heading?" Back then, Vitalik was still ambitiously and forcefully pushing for EF organizational reform; in May of this year, after more than a year of organizational renewal, Vitalik surprisingly changed his tune, stating that "the Ethereum Foundation should not be the center of the ETH ecosystem and will shift towards a smaller, long-termist approach."
It must be said that as ETH has grown into an asset worth hundreds of billions, the EF, this official ecosystem organization established for nearly a decade, has also entered the awkward position of being "a large ship hard to turn." No wonder Vitalik previously declared—"will no longer write regular blog posts and has decided to try writing some science fiction on the topic 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 seems the EF can hardly shoulder the banner of "revitalizing the Ethereum ecosystem and driving a breakthrough in ETH's price." Future large-scale adoption and institutional-grade investment may have to be hoped for from organizations like ETHlabs, Ethereum Institutional, and Etherealize.
Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, playing the role of an "ecosystem mascot" would be more suitable for the EF.
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