Updated on:12/28/2025 05:31 PM 
The Ethereum Foundation has announced a significant organizational restructuring, merging its protocol research and development units under a unified initiative named 'Protocol' on June 2. This strategic consolidation aims to streamline Ethereum's development process and accelerate progress on critical technical priorities.
The new Protocol initiative will concentrate resources on three primary technical objectives: enhancing base layer scalability, increasing blob capacity for layer-2 networks, and improving overall user experience across the Ethereum ecosystem.
Protocol will coordinate code developers, researchers, and project managers toward a unified roadmap that treats these three priorities as the key metrics for resource allocation and team composition.
Tim Beiko and Ansgar Dietrichs will lead efforts focused on base layer scaling, while Alex Stokes and Francesco D'Amato will oversee layer-2 throughput optimization and blob design. Meanwhile, Barnabé Monnot and Josh Rudolf will direct projects aimed at enhancing user experience. Dankrad Feist will serve as an advisor across all three technical tracks.
The foundation has positioned this restructuring as a direct response to rapid advancements in zkEVM rollups, more robust layer-2 solutions, and growing demand for Ethereum as a primary settlement layer. By consolidating development teams, Protocol intends to accelerate the transition from theoretical research to practical implementation and create more effective feedback loops between client development, cryptographic research, and interface design.
The Protocol initiative operates with a more lean team structure. The Ethereum Foundation confirmed that several researchers and engineers departed during this reorganization, with the foundation actively encouraging other Ethereum ecosystem companies to recruit these talented professionals.
Team leads now bear direct responsibility for code quality and peer review processes, with expectations to demonstrate measurable progress on the three priority areas during regular development checkpoints.
The new organizational structure also transforms Ethereum's internal governance framework. Protocol will revise meeting schedules and introduce new platforms for community input regarding hard fork timing, security assessments, and blob pricing mechanisms.
Foundation leadership emphasized that the restructuring aims to translate on-chain data signals and developer community feedback into concrete protocol releases without unnecessary delays or deviations from the core development vision.
Protocol is currently recruiting for key positions including a user experience lead and a performance engineering lead, while also welcoming applications from professionals with expertise in kernel-level development or advanced cryptographic techniques.
Looking ahead, the Protocol team plans to organize collaborative workshops with external client development teams and layer-2 solution builders to refine execution layer modifications and enhance blob compression techniques in preparation for the next scheduled network upgrade.
The Protocol initiative has commenced operations under this new organizational framework immediately, with all teams working toward the shared objectives of creating a more scalable, efficient, and user-friendly Ethereum ecosystem.
