Vitalik: Ethereum Foundation (EF) to Cut This Year’s Budget by ~40%, Shift to Long-Term Endowment Model and Streamlined Operational Structure

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a statement noting that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a roughly 40% budget cut this year as part of its financial transition plan. Per last year’s released fund management policy, EF is gradually shifting from a "spending organization" to an endowment-based model, with the goal of reducing its annual expenditure ratio from the previous ~15% to around 5% after 2030. The foundation emphasized it will accept inevitable staff and resource adjustments, acknowledging some loss of capabilities and expertise. In this restructuring, EF has cut approximately 54 employees, accounting for roughly 20% of its total team. Vitalik added that many of these departing members may still participate in the Ethereum ecosystem externally in the future. Meanwhile, the foundation is refocusing its strategy on a more "lightweight" path for protocol governance and development, including advancing the long-term "Strawmap" roadmap covering core protocol upgrades such as consensus mechanisms, privacy technology, account models, and state structures, and pushing Ethereum toward its third phase of evolution. In specific structural adjustments, EF will downplay its "multi-client redundancy first" model, shifting to development approaches based more on specialized division of labor and AI-assisted formal verification; the Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) research team will be restructured from exploratory R&D to more focused engineering implementation; and the scale of ecosystem events like Devcon will also be gradually reduced. Additionally, EF will reduce investment in large cross-domain projects, place more emphasis on protocol security and high-value improvements, and encourage more innovation to be driven by external ecosystem participants. Despite the leaner path, Ethereum will continue to strengthen its core positioning as a highly censorship-resistant, long-term stable protocol.