Ethereum Foundation reveals spending: Where does $100 million go every year?

Note: In the early morning of August 24, the Ethereum Foundation transferred 35,000 ETH to Kraken. In response to netizens’ questions about financial disclosure, Aya Miyaguchi, executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, revealed that “the Ethereum Foundation has an annual budget of about $100 million and will gradually sell the transferred 35,000 ETH in a planned manner.” This has aroused netizens’ concern about the transparency of the Ethereum Foundation.

Josh Stark, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, briefly disclosed the expenditure of the Ethereum Foundation in a tweet on August 27, translated by xiaozou from Golden Finance.

as follows:

EF (Ethereum Foundation) spending has been a topic of conversation lately, and here are some thoughts and answers to a few important questions we’ve seen.

First, we are working on a new EF report covering 2022 and 2023, which we hope to publish before Devcon SEA .

Here’s a preview of spending information from the upcoming report.

Note: Ethereum founder Vitalik said in his reply that the key information is in the picture above, and the “New Institutions” category basically means Nomic Foundation, The DRC, L2beat, 0xPARC, etc.

These charts capture both internal and external spending. For example, “L1 R&D” includes both funding for external client teams and internal EF researchers. In both years, internal spending accounted for about 38% and external spending accounted for about 62%.

Internal expenditure

EF teams covered by internal expenses include but are not limited to:

- Geth (geth.ethereum.org)

- Privacy & Scaling Explorations (PSE) (pse.dev)

- Solidity (soliditylang.org)

- Cryptography Research (crypto.ethereum.org/team)

- Robust Incentives Group (rig.ethereum.org)

- Devcon (devcon.org)

- Ethereum.org

- Next Billion (nxbn.ethereum.foundation)

All of these teams are publicly available about their work, and they share information about their activities on their websites, githubs, and social channels. If you want to know what EF is working on, follow the EF team!

External expenditure

Regarding external spending, over the past 4 years we have regularly published reports on EF funding activity on blog.ethereum.org.

Our funding team (EF Ecosystem Support Program) has also published statistics from recent years in a prominent position on its website homepage (esp.ethereum.foundation).

In the chart I shared above, the largest new category is “New Institutions.” A key goal of EF is to help build new organizations that can support and strengthen the Ethereum ecosystem in the long run.

This category involves funding for:

- Nomic Foundation (@NomicFoundation)

- Decentralization Research Center (@TheDRC_)

- L2Beat (@l2beat)

- 0xPARC Foundation (@0xPARC)

- and other Ethereum-related and adjacent organizations