Following community questions about the Ethereum Foundation’s spending, co-founder Vitalik Buterin and spokesperson Josh Stark provided a breakdown of the foundation’s 2023 spending in an Aug. 27 social media post.
Spending on “new institutions”—new organizations or entities that bolster the Ethereum ecosystem— was by far the biggest expense category at 36.5%. Layer-1 (L1) research and development accounted for 24.9% of the Ethereum Foundation’s expenses in 2023.
Stark noted that the L1 expenses included grants to external teams and internal research and development at the Ethereum Foundation, including grants to core Ethereum client Go-Ethereum (Geth), Solidity research and development, Devcon, Ethereum’s Robust Incentives Group, and others.
Breakdown of Ethereum Foundation’s spending for 2023. Source: Vitalik Buterin
Community development was the foundation’s third-largest spending category in 2023, at 12.7%. The remaining 25.9% of the foundation’s capital expenditures were split between applied zero-knowledge work, which captured a significant 10.4%, internal operations, layer-2 research, and the developer platform.
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Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation accused of not caring about decentralized finance
Kain Warwick, a longtime DeFi developer, recently accused Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation of being “anti-DeFi”. The developer claimed that the Foundation spends only a small fraction of its yearly budget on fostering development in the decentralized finance space and wastes a vast majority of its annual budget on “nonsense.”
This prompted Buterin to issue a response highlighting his usage of decentralized exchanges and his long-term focus on sustainable projects. The Ethereum co-founder reiterated his commitment to the decentralized finance sector but qualified his statements by saying that he has no interest in investing in projects with short-term or unsustainable outlooks such as liquidity farming or temporary schemes that rely on issuing new tokens and then dumping them on the market.
Ethereum Foundation and ETH Kipu bring Solidity education to high schools in Argentina
As part of its commitment to fostering growth of the Ethereum ecosystem, the Ethereum Foundation and ETH Kipu hosted a workshop to teach high school students in Buenos Aires, Argentina, about blockchain technology.
ETH Kipu also announced initiatives to introduce internships in the blockchain sector and an online course in the Solidity programming language used to code smart contracts in Ethereum.
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