Behind the 20% layoffs, the Ethereum Foundation launched a new five-layer architecture

作者：CM，陈默 DeFi OG

EF proposes a new architecture, and this is a chance to renew the interpretation of Ethereum's worldview. Crypto is in the midst of a great wave — where is Ethereum heading?

EF laid off 20% of its staff and unveiled a brand-new architecture with five working layers. Compared to the previously loose foundation structure, EF will now clearly define what it should do in the coming years.

The five working layers are

Protocol Layer
Access Layer
User Layer
Community Layer
Institutional Layer

We can understand this as EF's internal division of responsibilities.

1/5 · Protocol Layer

Maintain Ethereum's core attributes, namely the CROPS that Vitalik has been emphasizing: Censorship-resistant / Robust / Open / Private / Secure.

The concrete work is more about underlying technology — such as safely advancing hard forks, reducing trusted dependencies, quantum threat resistance, and resisting toxic MEV. This is EF's baseline mission and the core value of Ethereum, which has always advocated not sacrificing Ethereum's self-sovereign attributes for short-term financialization, institutionalization, or market narratives.

Of course, in the current environment this appears extremely difficult, because from a user perspective, embracing institutions and embracing the market is always hard to fault. In reality, I think decentralization is not an excuse for laziness and avoidance in marketing. If we view Ethereum as a brand-new world and CROPS as the bottom line of world order, then, without stepping beyond that bottom line, actively meeting the needs of all kinds of roles in the new world is what gives that world the reason to exist and allows it to quickly leave the utopia of a geek world – this is absolutely the right thing to do. Of course, this does not necessarily have to be done by EF; EF has repeatedly expressed its position and role. I hope that more organizations will take on this task in the future.

2/5 · Access Layer

The Access Layer focuses on whether users can practically use Ethereum's self-sovereign capabilities. EF mentions several key actions: reading the chain, transacting, proving, authorizing, and exiting. Users — and the agents that will represent users in the future — should be able to perform these operations without relying on unverifiable intermediaries.

There is a very important principle here called zero option, which means that for every intermediated path, there must exist a trustworthy, intermediary-free alternative path, and that path must remain continuously available.

I think this is absolutely crucial. The most direct example: if one day the front end goes down, or some server goes down, you can still interact directly with the contract to manage your funds. If you have ever been stuck once, you will deeply appreciate its meaning.

3/5 · User Layer

The User Layer's task is to ensure that EF's work is built upon the needs of real users and real organizations. It will pay attention to user segmentation and user personas. Its purpose is to connect the Protocol Layer and the Access Layer, so that development can truly reach users, and these decisions actually work rather than being imagined out of thin air and living in their own world.

This is something EF was relatively weak on in the past; many discussions tended to be overly research-oriented or infrastructure-oriented. We can clearly see that Ethereum's past booms — DeFi summer, NFT summer — all essentially came from community innovation. The application side and the technical side had no intersection, let alone any feedback of needs from the application side to the technical side. Ethereum entered an unexpected boom period in such a fractured way.

Some ascribe it to luck, others say it was the inevitable result of Ethereum's technological sedimentation. In fact, the Ethereum ecosystem truly led the on-chain application explosion, and crypto entered a new era. But back then, developers and users didn't have many options, so smart people and smart money gathered on Ethereum.

Today, the situation is very different. L1s and L2s are everywhere and the cost of launching a chain has dropped rapidly. Although Ethereum's largest moat remains security and stability, this value is not easily appreciated by users and developers when competitors have not yet exposed their weaknesses. (I personally agree with the claim that security is the strongest moat of a public chain.)

So the User Layer is the task that EF should value the most. A new world needs to understand what its residents want.

4/5 · Community Layer

Its purpose is to maintain and spread consensus around Ethereum's values. Within the ecosystem, it helps the community understand why Ethereum exists, what it should uphold, and what narratives it should not be led astray by. Outside the ecosystem, it helps EF build connections with adjacent fields such as open source, privacy, civil liberties, and public interest technology.

So what consensus does it need to build? Based on the statements in EF's article and my understanding of Ethereum, I summarize it as the following points:

Not being hijacked by centralized interests
Adhering to technological neutrality, not swayed or influenced by any culture, politics, or other factors
Upholding CROPS-centric values, without sacrificing any of them for short-term commercial gain

The consensus loosening occurring in this cycle is, I believe, the most severe in history. Before, crypto had not yet entered the mainstream, the user base was small, there were no applications, and prices were sluggish — none of these problems made users lose faith that decentralization is the future. In this cycle, however, with the listing of BTC and ETH spot ETFs, the emergence of DAT companies, the US stablecoin bill, and institutions beginning to deploy and develop L1s, all of this has exposed more people to crypto. From this standpoint, it is a huge success. But the side effects are gradually emerging. These effects are not easy to detect, yet they are gradually changing the underlying logic of this market.

For instance, the massive on-chain migration of stablecoins brought TVL, while simultaneously replacing the monetary attributes of BTC and ETH. How long has it been since you heard the term “coin-denominated”? Before USDT was created, exchanges used coin-to-coin trading, mostly with BTC as the base pair. In the DeFi summer era, on-chain LP positions mostly used ETH as the base pair, and NFT summer was priced in ETH. Looking at today, these things are gradually disappearing. The long hand of dollar hegemony has reached onto the blockchain, and DAT companies have packaged crypto into the very thing it once hated most.

Regarding decentralization, the angle of thinking has shifted from opposing traditional finance's opacity, corruption, and inefficiency to pondering whether institutions even need decentralization. Actually, this question doesn’t require much thought — institutions’ need for decentralization is certainly limited, or exists only in certain special scenarios. The word “decentralization” is mentioned less and less often, and even carries a slightly mocking undertone.

Of course, I believe crypto has no reason to reject the needs of institutions; it is permissionless, so both institutions and individual users should be accepted. But if, in order to welcome institutions, we change the underlying consensus of a public chain and alter the consensus founded on decentralization, we cannot define that as wrong, but the final outcome of that move is essentially no different from a second Internet, with a few authoritative institutions controlling network nodes. If the situation continues to develop this way, these chains will quickly become some country’s chain or some institution’s chain. Wouldn’t cutting off Iran’s business on the US chain be effortlessly easy? Here, many people compare neutral and decentralized public chains to the high seas — that seems to make some sense.

5/5 · Institutional Layer

Responsible for EF’s interaction with institutions, but with self-sovereignty as the premise. EF’s description of institutional adoption is not “making it easier for institutions to control users,” but emphasizing using Ethereum and cryptography to create better integration cases.

This formulation is very clear. As we discussed above, those truly universal businesses that continuously serve global users are still best suited to live on the Ethereum public chain, because it will never be disrupted by certain coercive means and factors. An ecosystem with centralized controlling power will, over time, find it harder and harder to achieve this.

One final note: We are in the midst of a great wave and cannot change it. But Bitcoin and Ethereum have endured countless market changes. Whether outside it is dawn or darkness, the next block will be produced as usual.