Ethereum Foundation Just Disbanded the Team Behind Its Biggest Upgrades

The Ethereum Foundation has shut down its Protocol Support team, the internal group that spent five years quietly coordinating some of the network’s biggest upgrades, including The Merge, Dencun and Pectra. If you hold ETH, this isn’t a red alert, but it is a sign of real turbulence inside the organisation that steers Ethereum’s technical direction — and that’s worth understanding.

The team announced its own closure on social media, writing simply, “the EF Protocol Support team has been dissolved 🖖,” according to a post from the @EFprotocol account on July 9, 2026. Former team lead William Morriss confirmed the closure also ended his time at the foundation, while another member, Mario Havel, is staying on in a different role.

What this team actually did for your ETH

Launched in 2021, Protocol Support acted as the glue between Ethereum’s client developers, researchers, proposal authors and infrastructure operators. Think of it as the group making sure that when Ethereum changes its rules, everyone building on top of it — wallets, exchanges, staking services — actually knows what’s happening and when.

Concretely, the team ran the “All Core Developers” conferences where upgrade decisions get hashed out, and it shepherded Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) from initial idea through testing to live deployment. It coordinated the Berlin, London and Arrow Glacier upgrades early on, then managed the run-up to The Merge — Ethereum’s 2022 move away from energy-intensive mining — before overseeing the Shapella, Dencun and Pectra upgrades that followed.

The team also built Forkcast, a tracking tool developers used to follow proposal status and testnet readiness, and ran the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship, a mentorship program designed to train the next generation of core contributors.

Part of a bigger shake-up, not a one-off

This closure isn’t happening in isolation. On June 23, the Ethereum Foundation disclosed a staff reduction of 54 positions and reorganised itself into new divisions covering protocol, access, user, community and institutional work. Protocol Support is one of several centralized teams eliminated in that shake-up.

The foundation says a newly created “Protocol Layer” division will absorb some of Protocol Support’s upgrade-coordination duties, while other new teams will pick up developer education, community outreach and EIP assistance. However, the foundation hasn’t yet spelled out exactly who handles what going forward, which leaves a gap in clarity for developers who relied on the old team’s playbook.

Why it matters if you hold ETH

For everyday holders, Ethereum’s code doesn’t stop working because an internal team gets restructured — the blockchain itself keeps running exactly as before. But the people and processes behind future upgrades are exactly what determine how smoothly changes like Pectra’s successor get planned, tested and rolled out without surprises or delays.

A period of reshuffling at the Ethereum Foundation means it’s worth watching whether upgrade timelines slip or communication with the wider developer community gets rockier in the months ahead. None of that is a reason to panic about your ETH holdings today, but it’s a reminder that even the biggest blockchains depend on real organisations with real budgets, layoffs and internal politics — not just code running on autopilot.

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