The Etherwood Foundation is promoting a larger contraction. The company disclosed that the Foundation would reduce its budget by about 40 per cent this year and move from a business model to a more streamlined “donor-type” structure. The co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, stated that the goal was to reduce annual expenditure to approximately 5 per cent of Treasury assets after 2030.
On the same day the adjustment was issued, the Foundation confirmed a 20 per cent reduction. At the same time, Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director, has separated. Since January of this year, nine senior members of the Ether Fountain Foundation have left, indicating that the core institution is still in the process of being restructured.
Target for expenditure reduced to 5 per cent
Buterin writes in his blog that the annual expenditure of the Foundation until 2026 is approximately 15 per cent of the remaining treasury assets. In the coming years, this proportion will be gradually reduced to about 5 per cent after 2030.
He acknowledged that the contraction had been accompanied by difficult decisions and had meant that some of the senior engineers who had been involved in the development of the Ether Workshop had left. The Foundation hopes to retain financial support for the follow-up road map for Etheraf while reducing costs.
Synchronize multiple projects
According to the disclosures, the Foundation will phase out the Privacy and Scaling Applications (PSE) sector, reduce the related layout of institutional cooperation and make the Devcon General Assembly smaller and less costly.
At the technical level, the Foundation also plans to shift more work to more specialized client teams and to introduce AI-assisted formalization certification to reduce some development and audit costs.
The road map is becoming conservative
Buterin also reiterated his preference for the Etheraf to enter a “simplified and stable” phase after the completion of the current road map. According to him, the development of the agreement would then be more focused on security repairs and a few high-impact upgrades, rather than continuing to expand new functions.
This means that the future role of the ISF may move further from large-scale expansion to long-term maintenance. For the market, the contraction of the budget is compounded by high-level mobility, reflecting the redistribution of resources and the tightening of non-core expenditures by the Taifung core organization.
Additional information:This budget adjustment was disclosed on the same day as the reduction in staff, and the departure of the co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang has also increased the number of top-level departures from the Foundation since January to 9.