Vitalik: Ethereum Foundation (EF) will cut around 40% of its budget this year, shifting to a long-term endowment model and streamlined operational structure.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a post announcing that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has cut its annual budget by roughly 40% as part of its fiscal transition plan. Per its previously released fund management policy, EF is gradually shifting from a "spending organization" to an endowment-based model, with the goal of reducing its annual expenditure ratio from around 15% to roughly 5% after 2030. The foundation noted it will accept unavoidable personnel and resource adjustments, acknowledging the loss of some capabilities and experience. In this restructuring, EF has cut about 54 employees, accounting for roughly 20% of its total team. Vitalik added that many of these departing members may still contribute to the Ethereum ecosystem as external participants in the future. Meanwhile, the foundation is pivoting its strategic focus to a more "lightweight" approach to protocol governance and development, including advancing the long-term "Strawmap" roadmap covering core protocol upgrades such as consensus mechanisms, privacy technologies, account models, and state structures, and pushing Ethereum toward its third phase of evolution. In structural adjustments, EF is moving away from its "multi-client redundancy first" model, shifting to development methods centered on specialized division of labor and AI-assisted formal verification. The Privacy and Scaling Exploration (PSE) research team will be restructured, moving from exploratory R&D to focused engineering implementation, while the scale of ecosystem events like Devcon will be gradually reduced. Additionally, EF will reduce investment in large cross-domain projects going forward, placing more emphasis on protocol security and high-value improvements, while encouraging more innovative work to be carried out outside the foundation. Despite the leaner path, Ethereum will continue to reinforce its core positioning as a highly censorship-resistant, long-term stable protocol.