Ethereum Foundation Structure: How EF Is Organized
Learn how the Ethereum Foundation is structured, from its Swiss legal foundation and board to the five operational clusters reshaping the organization in 2026.
Key takeaways
- The Ethereum Foundation is a Swiss nonprofit (Stiftung), not a company, not a DAO, and not a governing authority over the Ethereum protocol.
- The board acts as a strategic oversight body, setting vision and ensuring alignment with EF's core values, while the management team handles day-to-day execution.
- EF's role is shifting from central operator to one of many guardians – a deliberate move toward a more distributed Ethereum development ecosystem.
- Ethereum governance is separate from EF governance. Protocol decisions follow a community-driven EIP process that the Foundation participates in but does not control.
The Ethereum Foundation structure refers to the internal organizational framework that defines how EF makes decisions, allocates responsibilities, and coordinates its work. As a Swiss nonprofit, EF is organized into distinct governance and operational layers, each with defined roles, accountability, and scope.
That structure has changed significantly in recent years, and understanding the current setup requires looking at both who leads the Foundation and how its teams are organized.
What Is the Ethereum Foundation?
| Quick answer: The Ethereum Foundation is a nonprofit organization registered in Zug, Switzerland, under Swiss foundation law (Stiftung). Its stated purpose is to support Ethereum and related technologies for the long-term benefit of the ecosystem. |
A few things set it apart from a typical tech organization:
- It doesn't "own" Ethereum: The protocol is open-source. EF is one organization among many that contributes to its development.
- No shareholders or profit motive: EF is structured to serve a public mission, not generate returns.
- Funded primarily by ETH: The Foundation holds ETH acquired through Ethereum's 2014 presale, which it sells periodically to fund operations. It has never staked this ETH due to concerns around regulatory risk and neutrality.
EF's funding scope spans research, developer tooling, grants, protocol work, and community events, though the scope of what EF does directly has narrowed significantly since 2025.
The Ethereum Foundation's Governance Layer: Board & Management
| At a glance: EF's decision-making is divided into two layers: a board that governs at the strategic level, and a management team that runs operations. These are not the same thing, and confusing them leads to misunderstanding how EF actually works. |
The Board: "Security Council" of the EF
The board is the foundation's highest authority, but its role is oversight, not day-to-day management.
EF describes its board as functioning like a "security council". It protects the core values and mission of the organization, ensures legal compliance as a Swiss foundation, and is responsible for selecting Executive Director(s). It sets strategic vision but does not run operations.
As of mid-2026, the board has three members:
Member | Role |
| Vitalik Buterin | Co-founder of Ethereum; board member |
| Aya Miyaguchi | President; sets EF's vision alongside other board members, manages key external relationships |
| Patrick Storchenegger | Swiss counsel; handles legal and compliance matters as the Swiss representative |
Earlier in 2025, Hsiao-Wei Wang also served on the board as Co-Executive Director, bridging board and management. She stepped down in June 2026, leaving the board at its current three-member composition.
Executive Leadership: Co-EDs and the Management Team
Below the board sits the management layer, which handles strategic execution, team leadership, and operational direction.
In early 2025, EF made an unconventional decision: appointing two Co-Executive Directors simultaneously rather than a single ED. Hsiao-Wei Wang (a core Ethereum researcher) and Tomasz Stańczak (founder of Nethermind) were formally named Co-EDs in March 2025, taking effect March 17, 2025.
The two were meant to complement each other:
- Wang serving as a bridge between the board and management
- Stańczak bringing technical community credibility and ecosystem perspective
Both have since departed:
- Stańczak left in February 2026
- Wang stepped down in June 2026
As of now, Bastian Aue is serving in an interim leadership role while EF works through its broader restructuring. A permanent replacement has not yet been announced.
The Five-Cluster Structure Of The EF (2026 Restructure)
| At a glance: On June 23, 2026, EF announced the conclusion of a months-long reorganization, emerging with a new five-cluster operational model. The reorganization also included cutting 54 staff (roughly 20% of its workforce) and reducing the 2026 operating budget by approximately 40%. |
The five clusters each carry a distinct domain of work, with their own internal structure and accountability framework:
Protocol Layer
Focus: Hardening and scaling the Ethereum base protocol.
This cluster carries EF's core technical responsibility, ensuring Ethereum remains censorship-resistant, open-source, private, and secure. Long-horizon work includes post-quantum security, zkEVM development, and L1 privacy research.
Notably, EF's official mandate states the Protocol cluster "does not exist to make Ethereum more marketable or focused on short-term interests." It's explicitly positioned as a long-term, values-driven function, not a product team.
One significant change: the Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) unit, EF's in-house applied cryptography lab, was shut down as part of this restructuring.
Access Layer
Focus: Making Ethereum's core technologies (CROPS – Censorship-resistant, Open-source, Private, and Secure) accessible to users and AI agents.
This cluster builds the tools and infrastructure that allow people, and increasingly, AI agents, to transact and delegate on-chain without depending on intermediaries. Think of it as the layer between the base protocol and the people who use it.
User Layer
Focus: Empirical research on how Ethereum is actually used.
Rather than theorizing about how the network should work, this cluster studies how it does work in practice. Its findings feed back into protocol decision-making, grounding technical roadmap discussions in real usage data.
Community Layer
Focus: EF's external presence and positioning.
This cluster manages how EF presents itself to the broader world, including relationships with allied movements in open-source software, privacy advocacy, cryptography research, and civil liberties. It handles IRL events, communications, and community engagement.
Institutional Layer
Focus: Ethereum's engagement with institutions.
This cluster is EF's interface with financial institutions, enterprises, governments, universities, and nonprofits that are exploring or deploying Ethereum. It also works with academics and advocacy organizations on policy and regulatory issues that could affect Ethereum's core properties.
Beyond the five domain clusters, EF also maintains two supporting clusters: one focused on operations and another on management and teams directly supporting leadership. These are the organizational infrastructure that keeps everything else running.
Read the five-cluster model carefully, and one detail stands out: EF chose to put in writing that its Protocol cluster 'does not exist to make Ethereum more marketable.' That's a deliberate boundary. Most organizations under financial pressure and community scrutiny move toward commercialization to justify their existence. EF is moving the other direction, drawing a hard line between work that serves long-term protocol resilience and work that serves short-term optics. Whether that line holds under continued pressure is worth watching closely.
– BytebyByte, CryptoThreads
Why Did the Ethereum Foundation Restructure in 2026?
| Quick answer: The restructuring was the outcome of compounding pressures that had been building for over a year, including community criticism, leadership turnover, and a strategic rethink of what EF should actually be. |
1. Community pressure came first.
For much of 2024 and into 2025, the Ethereum community grew vocal about EF's perceived lack of transparency, slow decision-making, and unclear technical priorities. There were open calls for new leadership and a more competitive strategic posture.
2. Leadership overhaul followed.
Vitalik Buterin signaled major changes in January 2025. The Co-ED structure was introduced, Aya Miyaguchi moved from Executive Director to President, and new management co-stewards were named. But by early-to-mid 2026, most of those figures had departed, including both Co-EDs, Protocol team leads Tim Beiko and Barnabé Monnot, and several senior researchers.
3. The financial rationale was structural.
EF's 2026 Mandate and Treasury Management Policy set out a long-term goal: reduce annual spending from approximately 15% of treasury assets down to roughly 5% by 2030. This "endowment model" is designed to make EF financially sustainable indefinitely, independent of short-term ETH price movements.
The 40% budget cut and 54 layoffs in June 2026 were the concrete implementation of that policy.
4. One open risk
Former core contributor Trent Van Epps warned in June 2026 that Ethereum's core development ecosystem could face a structural funding gap within three to nine months, as client incentive programs expire and EF's budget contracts simultaneously.
Ethereum Foundation vs. Ethereum Governance: Not the Same Thing
EF has significant influence over Ethereum's development, but it does not govern the protocol. These are meaningfully different things.
Ethereum Foundation | Ethereum Governance | |
| What it is | A Swiss nonprofit organization | A community-driven decision process |
| Who controls it | Board and management team | No single entity – open to all |
| How decisions are made | Internal leadership | EIP process: rough consensus across researchers, client teams, and developers |
| Can it change the protocol? | No unilateral authority | Changes require broad ecosystem agreement |
| EF's role in it | Participates – sometimes heavily | One voice among many |
EF's 2026 Mandate makes this distinction explicit: the Foundation now describes itself as "one of many guardians" rather than Ethereum's primary steward. Independent organizations like Ethlabs (June 2026) and Ethereum Institutional (July 2026) are already absorbing functions that previously sat inside EF.
Sources and Further Reading
- Ethereum Foundation – "EF's New Structure" https://blog.ethereum.org/2026/06/23/ef-structure
- Ethereum Foundation – "EF's Management and Board Structure" https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/04/28/ef-mgmt-board
- Ethereum Foundation – "EF Organization Chart" https://ethereum.foundation/people
- ETH Daily – "Ethereum Foundation Leadership: The Complete Tracker" https://ethdaily.io/ef-leadership-tracker
- Gate Learn – "Understanding the Ethereum Foundation: Structure, Funding & Future" https://www.gate.com/learn/articles/understanding-the-ethereum-foundation/6987
- The Block – "Vitalik and New Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Directors Outline Updated Board Structure" https://www.theblock.co/post/352217/vitalik-new-ethereum-foundation-executive-directors-updated-board-cypherpunk
FAQs About Ethereum Foundation Structure
No. Ethereum is a decentralized protocol running across thousands of independent nodes globally. EF has no technical authority to shut it down, and neither does any other single entity.
