Ethereum Foundation Unveils Treasury Policy

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) today unveiled its official Treasury Policy, aimed at bolstering financial stability, supporting decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, and preserving the “cypherpunk” ethos.

The EF, which holds nearly $1 billion in its treasury, mostly in Ether (ETH), announced the new policy on its blog earlier today. Outlined in the document is the EF’s plan to balance long-term sustainability with smart spending.

The move comes at a time when Ethereum is under pressure to scale securely while undergoing major changes to its leadership structure and roadmap.

Treasury Plan

The organization, which spearheads and supports Ethereum development, shared plans to gradually lower its annual spending from 15% of its treasury to a goal of 5%. “This policy reflects our conviction that 2025-26 are likely to be pivotal for Ethereum, warranting enhanced focus on critical deliverables,” the blog post reads.

The policy also sets clearer rules for spending and notes that the EF will sell ETH from time to time to have enough cash on hand. It emphasized that “these sales will typically be via fiat off-ramps or onchain swaps for fiat-denominated assets.”

Notably, the EF also shared its vision for keeping privacy at the forefront via a new framework called “DeFiPunk.” The framework highlights the challenges of building cypherpunk DeFi protocols today. “Privacy is particularly important to get right,” the EF stated in the blog post.

To tackle privacy challenges, the EF suggests supporting new DeFi projects working on privacy, helping established ones improve through research and funding, and backing the creation of privacy-focused, decentralized user interfaces (UIs).

Major Reorganization

The outline comes just two days after the EF announced a major internal reorganization to better align with its updated roadmap. That vision focuses on three key goals: scaling Ethereum’s Layer 1 (L1), scaling Layer 2s (L2) through "blobs," and improving the user experience (UX).

As part of the shift, new leadership has been appointed across protocol teams, along with replacing Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi with co-executive directors Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak.

Currently, ETH is changing hands at $2,607, up 44% over the past month.