Ethereum Is Facing A Critical Funding Gap, Says Ex-EF Member | Markets Outlook

Trent Van Epps, a former Ethereum Foundation member who spent five years there before leaving in early 2024, says Ethereum faces a concrete funding gap arriving within three to nine months. He estimates core Ethereum development costs approximately 30 million dollars per year, and the EF's genesis-era treasury, which has historically funded client teams, network upgrades, and the proof-of-work to proof-of-stake transition, is finite and declining in its capacity to cover that need. Protocol Guild, a collective funding mechanism he helped build, has distributed nearly 40 million dollars over four years but he says it is insufficient to close the gap on its own.

Van Epps attributes the shortfall to bear market conditions, EF budget cuts, and the structural difficulty of monetizing public-good software, which he argues should remain freely available and therefore cannot simply be commercialized. He also connects the problem to the EF's long-standing subtraction philosophy, which intentionally pushes power and legitimacy outward into the broader ecosystem. He says that philosophy was set to accelerate significantly in early 2024, which was a contributing factor in his decision to leave.

Despite the funding pressure, Van Epps disputes the narrative that Ethereum is failing. He points to the EVM accounting for approximately 90 percent of total value locked across the broader ecosystem including other chains and layer twos, Ethereum settling the vast majority of stablecoins, and the network carrying unparalleled DeFi liquidity, all against a market cap of roughly 200 billion dollars. His argument is that the underlying network remains dominant even as the institutional and funding structures around it are under strain.

Van Epps identifies three intertwined resources the network produces: the network software itself, the EVM, and ETH the asset. He argues that ETH the asset has suffered from a gap in institutional stewardship, partly because the EF has been cautious about advocating for ETH holders for regulatory reasons. He says the asset specifically needs dedicated institutional attention and a fresh, confident narrative that clearly articulates how the on-chain economy, the EVM, and ETH itself relate to one another. He cites Etherealize, Bitmine, SharpLink, and the newly launched ETH Labs as examples of institutions beginning to serve that function at the interface between Ethereum and traditional finance.

He predicts short-term pain during the transition toward a multipolar, multi-institutional model but views that model as necessary and healthy over the long run. In his view, the EF could operate in a more narrowly circumscribed role five to ten years out, alongside a robust set of complementary institutions that collectively handle what the EF has historically managed alone. He flags the free rider problem as a serious coordination challenge, noting that aligning disparate and potentially competing parties around shared infrastructure funding is difficult and should not be understated.