Earlier, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Etherium, commented on the topic of expenses of the Ethereum Foundation organisation. In particular, at the end of August, he published a graph with the company’s spending in 2023.

Expenses of the Ethereum Foundation organisation

Apparently, most of the funds among other categories go to “new institutions”. As the developer noted at the time, this means allocating funds for the Nomic Foundation, Decentralisation Research Center, L2BEAT and similar platforms, which allows for the development of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

What will be in the report from EF?

Analyst Justin Drake, under the pseudonym bobthesponge1, stated during a question and answer session (AMA) on the r/ethereum subreddit that the Ethereum Foundation is preparing to publish a financial report similar to the one released in April 2022.

Drake reported that he is still “not well versed in the situation.” In total, the organisation spends about $100 million a year and holds about $650 million worth of digital assets on its main wallet.

This information was confirmed by the cryptocurrency’s creator Vitalik Buterin in a separate comment. Here is his rejoinder on the topic, as quoted by The Block.

The current rough budget strategy is to spend 15 per cent of our remaining money each year. This implies a default path where EF will last forever, but will get smaller and smaller over time as a share of the ecosystem.

Etherium creator Vitalik Buterin

After a series of unexplained large ETH transactions from Ethereum Foundation wallets, a lot of negative comments and speculations have emerged in the crypto community. To recap, just last month Ethereum Foundation transferred 35,000 ETH worth $94.07 million to the Kraken exchange. With this in mind, the team was asked to clarify the situation, and the representatives of the organisation clearly heeded this request.

Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi has already explained that the organisation is actively reallocating its budget. Therefore, all transactions should not be perceived as altcoin sales.

Hourly chart of the Etherium ETH exchange rate on the Binance exchange

Nevertheless, from the promises of specific individuals in the Ethereum Foundation management, the ETH price does not get better. By the end of the week, it fell again, dropping to a local low at $2,150.

Trading history over the past two years has shown that Etherium was by no means a better bet for investors compared to Bitcoin and other popular digital assets.

In particular, ETH has lagged behind BTC in terms of returns by an average of 44 percent since its transition to the new Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm on September 15, 2022, which primarily involved the abandonment of activity by miners with graphics cards, but also created the conditions for further scaling of what is happening in the blockchain.

The relevant data was shared by CryptoQuant analysts. Here’s their quote.

Next week will mark two years since Efirium moved to PoS in a procedure known as a Merger. Since then, ETH has lagged behind Bitcoin in terms of returns by 44 per cent.

Changes in the exchange rate of Etherium against Bitcoin

Experts added that ETH continues to lag behind Bitcoin even after altcoin-based spot exchange traded funds (ETFs) were approved in the US on 23 July 2024.

And Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency that Etherium can’t compete with on the aforementioned metric. Analysts continue.

Since the Merger, Efirium has also fallen short of altcoins like Solana and BNB in terms of profitability. It lags behind at 53 per cent and 18 per cent respectively.

ETH could also fall further relative to Bitcoin, analysts said.

Efirium could fall further in a trading pair with Bitcoin as its price is still above the undervalued zone on the chart. We estimate that for ETH to enter it, it needs to fall by about 50 per cent in a trading pair with Bitcoin.

Efirium creator Vitalik Buterin

Analysts believe that a key reason for the altcoin’s low returns could be weak network activity. As an example, total transaction fees on the Etherium network continue to decline compared to Bitcoin.

CryptoQuant’s published report also states that such a decline is predominantly due to a decrease in transaction fees in this blockchain after the Dencun update. In addition, the number of transactions in the Eth network in relation to Bitcoin has fallen to one of the lowest levels since July 2020, meaning that user activity is now lagging behind.

It’s worth noting that the cryptocurrency market crash last night wiped out any ETH gains since the beginning of the year. As of today, the coin is 0.17 percent above the January 1, 2024 result. At the same time, closer to the night, the indicator was down by 2.34 percent, that is, it went into negative territory in this timeframe.

The current rate of Efirium almost corresponds to the price from 1 January 2024

An additional reason for the ETH drawdown is the active withdrawal of funds from spot ETFs on this cryptocurrency in the United States. For example, at the end of Friday, such instruments recorded a net outflow of $6 million, which was the fourth consecutive minus indicator.


The actions of Ethereum Foundation representatives were a reaction to the criticism, the reason for which turned out to be large-scale operations with ETH without explanation. It seems that now the blockchain community will get answers as to how exactly the giant of this ecosystem spends money, and what areas are considered priorities here. Accordingly, the community will be able to better understand what is going on with one of the main representatives of the Eth niche.