Vitalik: EF will cut approximately 40% of its budget this year, shifting towards a long-term endowment model and streamlining operational structure

BlockBeats News, June 23 — Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has declared a budget reduction of approximately 40% this year as part of its financial transformation plan. According to the funding management policy released last year, EF is gradually shifting from a "spending-oriented organization" to an "endowment-based" model, aiming to reduce the annual expenditure ratio from about 15% to approximately 5% after 2030. During this process, the foundation emphasized accepting unavoidable personnel and resource adjustments and acknowledged some loss of capabilities and experience.

In this round of restructuring, EF has laid off about 54 employees, roughly 20% of the overall team. Vitalik stated that many of these departing members may continue to participate in Ethereum ecosystem development in external roles. Meanwhile, the foundation is shifting its strategic focus toward a more "lightweight" protocol governance and development approach, including advancing the "Strawmap" long-term roadmap, covering core protocol upgrades such as consensus mechanisms, privacy technology, account models, and state structures, and pushing Ethereum into its third phase of evolution.

Regarding specific structural adjustments, EF will weaken the "multi-client redundancy priority" model, shifting toward more specialized division of labor and AI-assisted formal verification development methods; the privacy and scalability research team PSE will be reorganized, moving from exploratory R&D to more focused engineering implementation; ecosystem activities like Devcon will also gradually scale down. Additionally, EF will reduce investment in large cross-disciplinary projects in the future, place greater emphasis on protocol security and high-value improvements, and encourage more innovative work to be completed outside the ecosystem. Although the path is more streamlined, Ethereum will continue to strengthen its core positioning as a highly censorship-resistant, long-term stable protocol.