Author: Ignas, Crypto KOL; Translated by: 0xxz@Golden Finance
The Ethereum Foundation holds $845 million worth of ETH, or 0.25% of the total ETH supply.
According to the latest report from the Ethereum Foundation, the Ethereum Foundation allocated $30 million in the fourth quarter of 2023, while in the third quarter of 2023, they allocated $8.9 million.
Here are some examples of expenses:
Convening conferences around the world to “attract new Ethereum users through foundational lectures and educate developers through technical conferences and workshops.” •
Online course on core concepts and components of zero-knowledge (ZK) systems.
“Email wallets” allow users to send cryptocurrency via email without any action required by the recipient.
“Daimo” ERC-4337 smart contract wallet: stablecoins only, non-custodial, no seed phrase required.
The Ethereum Foundation seems to allocate grants to education and niche (but cool) products that might not receive a lot of venture capital backing.
This could explain their reluctance to fund DeFi protocols, as they would receive external funding from venture capital firms anyway.
However, there is a lack of comprehensive and transparent reporting of total spending. Who is auditing the Ethereum Foundation?
The latest report is for 2021 and shows a total of $48 million in internal spending and external grants and bounties.
The biggest expenses are:
• $21 million for L1 development
• $9.7 million for community development, including grants and education
• $5.1 million for internal operations (salaries, legal fees, etc.)
Therefore, 10% of total expenditures in 2021 are used to pay developer salaries and support the maintenance of the Ethereum Foundation.
I must say that even though Polkadot has faced controversy for its crazy spending, at least the reports are transparent and available.
I kind of expected more transparency in the Ethereum Foundation’s operations and reporting.
Just realized that with the Ethereum Foundation's latest spending of about $100M/year, they will run out of ETH in 8 years.
They need the price to rise or start staking to earn a yield and fund their operations for longer.
