Ethereum Foundation Announces Expenditure Situation and Responses to Related Questions

Recently, the funding usage of the Ethereum Foundation has attracted widespread attention from the crypto community. In response to various questions, the Foundation publicly disclosed its official expenditure details at the end of August.

According to the published data, "new institutions" account for the largest proportion of the foundation's expenditures, reaching 36.5%. This category primarily includes funding for various organizations, aimed at long-term strengthening of the Ethereum community. The second largest expenditure item for the foundation is L1 research and development, accounting for 24.9% of total expenditures, which includes funding for external client teams and internal researchers.

Other major expenditures also include community development (12.7%), zero-knowledge applications (10.4%), internal operations (7.7%), developer platform (6.5%), and L2 research and development (1.4%). The foundation also revealed that it has been regularly publishing reports on external expenditures or funded activities over the past four years.

Regarding the foundation's fund management plan, Vitalik stated that the foundation will use 15% of the remaining funds each year, which means that the foundation will exist in the long term, but its influence in the ecosystem will gradually diminish. Foundation member Justin Drake expects that the foundation has about 10 years of operating funds left, but this figure will fluctuate with the ETH price.

Vitalik recently sparked some controversy by selling ETH again. He explained that the sale of $441,000 worth of ETH on September 12 was an automatic order placed in August and stated that this may be the last such transaction. Vitalik emphasized that he has never profited from ETH sales, and all proceeds have been used to fund projects.

In response to the criticism from DeFi developer Kain Warwick, Vitalik reiterated his commitment to the decentralized finance sector but stated that he has no intention of investing in short-term or unsustainable projects. Foundation member Dankrad Feist noted that there is no unified view on DeFi within the foundation, and he personally believes that the most valuable contribution of DeFi on Ethereum is decentralized stablecoins.

Despite the controversy surrounding expenditure issues, the Ethereum Foundation is actively researching multiple technical areas, including zero-knowledge proofs, verifiable delay functions, and maximal extractable value. Foundation members believe that the accumulation of ETH value is crucial to the success of Ethereum and will be achieved through total fees and monetary premium.

Regarding the centralization issues of Layer 2, Vitalik stated that highly decentralized L2 solutions essentially cannot arbitrarily dispose of user funds without reaching a strong consensus. He also proposed the Stage 1+ rollup standard, emphasizing the importance of network security.

Overall, despite some doubts surrounding Ethereum, its fundamentals remain strong. The current biggest challenge is that industry applications are facing bottlenecks, but the low fees of L2 are fostering the emergence of new applications. With the improvement of liquidity in the capital market, the adoption rate of the crypto industry is expected to accelerate, and Ethereum's future remains promising.