Ethereum Foundation Cuts Staff and Budget as Usage Climbs and Ether Falls

The Ethereum Foundation completed a months-long reorganization this week, eliminating 54 positions, roughly 20 percent of its workforce, and cutting its annual budget by about 40 percent. The Foundation described the change as the final step in a restructuring that began in 2025, reshaping the organization around five areas it labels the protocol, access, user, community, and institutional layers.

The cuts come at an unusual moment. The Foundation says the network it helps maintain is seeing some of its highest levels of user activity, and traditional financial institutions are participating more deeply in on-chain markets. Yet ether has fallen roughly 44 percent so far this year and traded near $1,660 this week, according to CryptoSlate's account of the reorganization. The Foundation is moving from spending about 15 percent of its treasury each year toward a long-term endowment model that targets roughly 5 percent annually after 2030, a shift that ties its operating budget directly to the price of the asset it holds.

The reorganization also included a leadership change. Co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang stepped down after eight years, leaving daily operations under a narrower executive structure. The Foundation framed the discipline as a way to concentrate resources on core protocol work, including the Lean Ethereum roadmap and the next round of layer-2 scaling.

From a sound-money perspective, the episode shows the gap between utility and token-value accrual. Block space is being used, fees are being paid, and institutions are building, while the unit that funds the development is worth far less than a year ago. An organization whose treasury is denominated in a volatile asset must cut precisely when usage is rising, which is the opposite of how a stable funding base would behave.