Searching for the Ethereum Foundation's Remaining Cash

The Ethereum Foundation announced a new organizational structure on June 23, concluding a months-long reorganization that cut 54 people, roughly 20 percent of its workforce. More than a dozen and possibly close to two dozen prominent figures departed around the same period, with analyst David Taylor attributing many exits to the new mandate and lean structure being implemented by Vitalik and other board members. The EF offered severance of one month's pay per year worked plus locally mandated amounts to the 54 formally downsized individuals, and the same terms were offered to colleagues who left in prior months, raising questions about whether earlier departures were truly voluntary.

The new structure reorganizes the EF into five clusters: protocol layer, access layer, user layer, community layer, and institutional layer. The access layer is organized around the acronym CROPS, standing for censorship resistance, capture resistance, open source, privacy, and security. Taylor characterizes the overall restructuring as a return to cypherpunk maximalism and a refocus on layer one scaling given how the layer two roadmap has played out. The institutional layer signals EF awareness that the current market is an institutional bull cycle, with a goal of onboarding institutions while prioritizing Ethereum integrations that maximize CROPS properties for both institutions and users.

Some individuals who departed the EF ended up at ETH Labs, a new nonprofit R&D organization whose stated mission is making Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy. ETH Labs is funded by Bitmine, Joe Lubin and SharpLink, and a growing list of community members including people from the Ethereum Foundation. ETH Labs describes itself as independent but frames Ethereum as a shared project and positions itself as one node in a larger network of stewards.

The Ethereum Foundation is registered in Zug, Switzerland and was established in mid-2014. For its first eight years it had no formalized financial disclosures, leaving observers to track only on-chain wallets. The EF sold 70,000 ETH near the 2017 market top and sold 20,000 ETH the day after the November 2021 all-time high. In March 2022 the EF held approximately 356,000 ETH valued at roughly 1.3 billion dollars in crypto assets alongside approximately 302 million dollars in non-crypto assets, for a total treasury of approximately 1.6 billion dollars. By October 2024 ETH holdings had fallen to approximately 313,000 ETH valued at 788.7 million dollars and non-crypto assets had declined to approximately 181.5 million dollars, representing a total treasury decline of roughly 500 million dollars over that period.

Taylor's own on-chain analysis using Arkham data estimates current EF crypto holdings at approximately 470 to 471 million dollars, broken down as roughly 210.4 million dollars in liquid crypto, approximately 100 million dollars in a Gnosis Safe multisig, approximately 137 million dollars deposited in Aave, and approximately 27.1 million dollars in ETH staked to the Beacon Chain. This represents a roughly 35 to 40 percent decline from the October 2024 disclosed figure of nearly 789 million dollars in crypto assets. Taylor explicitly notes this is his own estimate, may contain errors, and does not capture non-crypto holdings, and he invites the EF to release more accurate disclosures if the figures are wrong.

Over approximately ten years of on-chain history the EF has sent over 2 billion dollars worth of ETH and crypto to exchanges, though it is unknown whether those transfers were sold or retained as exchange-held cash, meaning the true treasury could be materially larger than visible on-chain data suggests. The EF releases quarterly blog posts disclosing grant totals and recipients but does not itemize grants to the dollar. A treasury policy introduced in June of last year formalized internal financial reporting to the board and management, but those reports remain entirely internal. ESP grant allocations have averaged between 5 and 10 million dollars per quarter since Q1 2022, with two spikes of up to 30 million dollars occurring in Q4 2023 and Q1 2025.

Taylor argues that a smaller EF deploying its remaining treasury toward cypherpunk goals represents Ethereum's strongest differentiation from competing chains, and that the steady grant disbursements suggest the organization is functioning as a nonprofit as described despite the lack of granular public disclosure.