Ethereum Foundation disbands Protocol Support team after 5-year run

The Ethereum Foundation disbanded its Protocol Support team on July 10, ending a roughly five-year run assisting core developers with network upgrades and client coordination.

"The EF has always been quite vocal about its principle of subtraction," Matthew Dawson, co-founder of Ethereum Institutional and a former member of the Ethereum Foundation's enterprise engagement team, told CoinDesk in a recent interview, referring to the foundation's strategy of distributing responsibilities to independent organizations.

The Protocol Support team had been responsible for coordinating between Ethereum's diverse client teams, managing upgrade timelines, and providing technical support to developers building on the network. Its dissolution follows the foundation's leadership restructuring, staff reductions, and a strategic shift toward decentralizing responsibilities — a process that has accelerated over the past year.

The disbandment raises questions about who will coordinate Ethereum's technical roadmap going forward, particularly as the network prepares for future upgrades. Independent groups such as Ethereum Institutional and EthLabs have emerged to fill gaps in business development and ecosystem growth, but no organization has yet taken over the Protocol Support team's coordination function.

The Ethereum Foundation has been undergoing a significant reorganization since early 2025. In response to mounting criticism about its governance and effectiveness, the foundation restructured its leadership, reduced staff, and publicly committed to narrowing its mandate to stewarding the core protocol rather than driving business development or ecosystem growth.

That strategy has led to the emergence of independent organizations taking on roles once housed within the foundation. Ethereum Institutional launched last week to guide banks and asset managers through the ecosystem, while EthLabs began supporting ecosystem development in June. Both organizations were created to fill gaps the foundation deliberately left open.

The Protocol Support team's dissolution represents one of the most consequential cuts to date, as it directly affects the network's upgrade coordination capacity. The team had been operational since roughly 2021, helping to shepherd major network upgrades including the Merge in 2022, the Shanghai upgrade in 2023, and the Dencun upgrade in 2024.

Ethereum's native token, ether, traded at $1,799.08 as of Wednesday, up 3.12% over 24 hours, according to CoinDesk data. Bitcoin traded at $64,381.89, up 2.64% over the same period.

The foundation has not announced a replacement for the Protocol Support team's functions. Developers and community members are watching for signals on how upgrade coordination will be managed in the coming months, with the next network upgrade — Pectra — still on the roadmap. The risk of delayed upgrades could weigh on Ethereum's competitive position against other layer-1 blockchains that have accelerated their development timelines.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.