By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 23rd, 2024
The Ethereum Foundation discloses its expenditure and spendings over the last year, a majority of which has gone for research and development work.
The Ethereum Foundation has published its 2021 financial report disclosing its assets under management. As per the report, the Ethereum Foundation holds assets worth $1.6 billion of which it holds $1.3 billion worth of Ether (ETH).
Additionally, it holds $300 million in non-crypto investments and another $11 million in crypto assets. Well, it is clear that 80% of its holdings are in ETH. But from the total ETH supply, the Ethereum Foundation owns 0.3%.
The Ethereum Foundation noted that even during the multi-year crypto market downturns, it allocates a “conservative treasury immune to the changes in the price of ethereum”. Furthermore, the foundation also announces donations and grant spending on its blog.
Ethereum Foundation director Aya Mayaguchi said that as the network matures, they continue to support third-party allocators. She wrote:
“We also believe that more decentralized funding is important for the future of the Ethereum ecosystem. We continuously try to allocate resources to third parties that we believe can make better decisions than us within certain domains. It is exciting to see more and more groups becoming involved in deciding how the EF should allocate resources”.
She also said that there’s a lot of non-financial work that the community members behind the Ethereum Foundation do behind the scenes. “The support and coordination of conversations related to core protocol development, connecting EF Fellows’ projects from emerging economies with the rest of the Ethereum community, and coordinating with educational groups and efforts are just a few examples,” added Mayaguchi.
Ethereum Foundation Spending and Development
Last year, the Ethereum foundation spent a total of $48 million on several research-oriented and developmental tasks. Of which, the Layer-one research and development accounted for a total of $21.8 million. This includes external grants for network stress testing as well Ethereum mainnet upgrades.
Similarly, the L2 research and development cost $1.9 million. Other expenses undertaken by the Ethereum Foundation include Applied ZK Research: Development – $3.6 million; developer platform accounted for $5.9 million; internal operations and support accounted for $5.1 million; Community development accounted for $9.7 million.
Additionally, the report suggests that the Ethereum Foundation gave away a total of $19.6 million in grants via its Ecosystem Support Program.
One of the most-awaited developments currently is the Ethereum Merge. This involves a transition to the Ethereum 2.0 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network. Speaking of this development, Tim Beiko, an Ethereum core developer, said:
“It won’t be June, but likely in the few months after. No firm date yet, but we’re definitely in the final chapter of [proof of work] on Ethereum.”
Read other crypto news on our website.