The Ethereum Foundation laid off 54 employees, representing one-fifth of its workforce, before co-founder Vitalik Buterin presented a major network overhaul named Lean Ethereum. The staff reduction coincides with ether standing 60 percent below its summer 2025 peak.
Consensus layer redesign
The proposed restructuring addresses structural complexity across the network, which currently runs on 300,000 lines of code compared with 15,000 lines running Bitcoin. Justin Drake initially proposed rewriting the consensus layer from scratch at Devcon in Bangkok in November 2024.
The Lean Ethereum plan targets a reduction in the validator entry requirement from the current 32 ETH to 1 ETH. Under an operating setting designated as beast mode, the network targets a transaction throughput of 10,000 transactions per second. Separately, five senior researchers left the Ethereum Foundation to launch their own lab.
Quantum vulnerability findings
On March 30, Google Quantum AI published a paper co-authored by Justin Drake regarding cryptocurrency vulnerability to quantum computing. The study estimated that breaking Ethereum cryptography would require 500,000 qubits of quantum computing power. That lowered a previous estimate of 9,000,000 qubits.
The research identified 17 percent of ETH as potentially vulnerable to quantum computing attack. The findings added technical impetus to the redesign discussions led by Buterin and Drake.
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Source: Ethereum Foundation
