Vitalik Buterin Unveils 40% Ethereum Foundation Budget Cut in Push for Leaner Future

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum Foundation will reduce its budget by roughly 40% and shift toward a leaner, endowment-style model, in a restructuring that cuts 54 roles and reshapes how the organisation funds the network’s development.

The Foundation aims to lower its annual spending from about 15% of its treasury assets to around 5% after 2030, a level Buterin said would let it support Ethereum through extended market downturns without relying on short-term token sales or favourable conditions. 

The 54 departures amount to roughly 20% of the workforce and follow a months-long internal review. 

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A Leaner Foundation

The cuts arrive alongside a broader leadership shakeup, including the resignation of co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang, which brought the number of senior departures since January to nine. Remaining work will be organised around five divisions covering Ethereum’s protocol, access, users, community and institutional adoption.

Buterin was candid about the cost. He praised the departing staff as dedicated engineers and researchers, some of whom had worked on Ethereum for nearly a decade, and declined to frame their exits as efficiency gains. “There was much that is lost,” he said.

The reset also redirects technical priorities. The Foundation will favour specialisation over maintaining several client teams mainly for redundancy, lean on AI-assisted formal verification to reduce development resources, and continue zero-knowledge research focused on protocol implementation. 

Its Privacy and Scaling Explorations unit will be wound down as a standalone group, and its Devcon conference will become smaller and less expensive. The Foundation also plans to reduce large external project funding and narrow the scope of its institutional work as it concentrates resources on the core protocol.

Underpinning the changes is a philosophy Buterin described as “soft lean and done,” emphasising security fixes over new features and drawing on Bitcoin’s conservative approach rather than treating Ethereum as an ever-expanding software project. 

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