#EthereumFoundationRestructuresForEfficiency

Vitalik Responds to EF Restructuring: Major Sacrifice for the Future

Vitalik Buterin reveals the reasons behind the Ethereum Foundation (EF) budget cut of 40% this year. Through a statement on platform X on Tuesday (6/23), Vitalik explains that this move is part of EF's transition to a long-term endowment-based organization. This financial policy drastically changes the target annual expenditure allocation of EF, from initially spending an average of 15% of remaining assets under management, down to about 5% after 2030.
Vitalik refuses to call this restructuring just normal efficiency, but rather a significant sacrifice due to the loss of brilliant contributors who have built the protocol for nearly a decade. However, this step was taken so that EF remains agile in guiding the third generation of Ethereum through the Strawmap roadmap (consensus upgrades, proof systems, privacy, and account models) in facing the AI and quantum computing era. Some organizational workload is expected to shift outside the EF ecosystem to ensure network development continues smoothly.
To cope with tight budgets, EF implements five tactical adjustments to their operations. These include shifting the multi-client model from redundancy to specialization with the help of AI-assisted formal verification, deactivating the PSE unit to focus ZKP directly on implementation stages, downsizing Devcon to reduce deficits, and cutting projects outside Ethereum while narrowing the scope of institutional collaborations.
In the long term, Vitalik supports a soft lean-and-done approach that mimics Bitcoin's philosophy, which limits the addition of new features after Strawmap is completed to keep the protocol resistant to intervention without incurring large budgets.