Thirty million dollars a year. That's the number Trenton Van Epps put on the cost of keeping Ethereum's core development running. And according to the former Ethereum Foundation contributor, the network doesn't have a clean plan to cover it past the next three to nine months.
Van Epps laid out the case in a blog post on Thursday, June 19. His framing was deliberately unsensational: not a collapse, but a "slow-burning funding crisis," drawn from conversations with people actually writing the protocol's code. Two things pushed him to publish now. The Foundation has been trimming its spending. And the Client Incentive Program, which helped bankroll the teams maintaining Ethereum's execution and consensus clients, expired in April. Take both away and you're left with a gap nobody has formally filled, as Cointelegraph reported.
Worth flagging: that $30 million figure is Van Epps's estimate, sourced to his own reporting among contributors. Cointelegraph said it couldn't verify the number independently and asked the Foundation to comment. So treat it as a credible insider's read, not an audited line item.
The leadership thinning out
The post landed on a pointed day. The same day Van Epps published, co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang said she would leave her role. By Cointelegraph's count, that brings the Foundation's layoffs and departures to roughly 19 this year. That's a lot of institutional memory out the door in twelve months, and it lends weight to the argument that the organization is reshaping itself rather than simply tightening its belt.
Vitalik Buterin has been candid about why. In a post on X dated May 24, the co-founder pointed out that the Foundation controls only about 0.16% of all Ether in existence, a sliver next to the treasuries some rival blockchain foundations sit on. His point was structural. The Foundation was built to do a defined job, mostly shipping the core software and steering the network through its big roadmap milestones, work he considers largely done as of 2022.
From there, the strategy shift. Buterin wrote that the EF now favors "longevity over breadth," which in plain terms means selling less ETH and stretching what it has. Admirable discipline. It also means the Foundation is explicitly stepping back from being the funder of last resort for everything Ethereum needs. That's precisely the vacuum Van Epps is worried about.
Where the treasury moves point
Follow the on-chain trail and the picture sharpens. Across late April and early May the Foundation pulled two tranches out of staking, first 17,000 ETH, then a larger 21,270 ETH worth roughly $50 million at the time. The withdrawals came after its staked balance had climbed toward 70,000 ETH. On May 1 it also did an over-the-counter sale of 10,000 ETH to Bitmine, currently the largest corporate holder of the asset. Arkham, the analytics shop, read the unstaking as the Foundation freeing up cash for development work.
Here's what makes the sequence interesting. Back in June 2025, the Foundation said it would lean into staking to generate yield for protocol funding, partly to dodge the community blowback that earlier outright ETH sales had triggered. Staking returns, not fire sales. A year on, it's unstaking and selling again. Call it a recalibration under pressure rather than a contradiction, but it does suggest the staking-yield model alone wasn't throwing off enough to cover the bills.
And the bills aren't getting easier to pay. ETH was trading around $1,702 when the story broke, down a couple of percent on the day and well off the levels that would make a 0.16% supply stake feel comfortable. A funding gap denominated in dollars gets wider when the asset backing it loses value. It's the same problem any operator faces with a reserve tank that springs a slow leak while the inflow drops: the Foundation's restraint on selling looks prudent in a bull market and constraining in a bear one.
The real question Van Epps raises isn't whether the Foundation survives. It's who pays for the unglamorous work, maintaining clients, fixing bugs, shipping upgrades, if the Foundation steps back and no replacement plumbing exists. Protocol guilds, staking-derived public goods funding, direct grants from large holders like Bitmine: candidates exist, none are locked in.
Watch the next quarter. If a new funding structure for client teams gets announced before autumn, Van Epps's warning ages into a useful prod. If it doesn't, the slow burn keeps burning, and some of those 19 departures start to look less like restructuring and more like an early signal.
Nobody mans the pumps for free.