(2024 Ethereum Foundation Report) summarizes the foundation's core values, funding strategies, and its support for the long-term development of the Ethereum ecosystem, emphasizing its role in promoting Ethereum innovation and expansion through funding support and teamwork.
Author: Ethereum Foundation
Translation: Blockchain in Plain Language
(2024 Ethereum Foundation Report) Fresh off the press. This article summarizes the key points of this report. In this article, you will learn about the latest developments of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), recent work achievements, as well as funders, emerging organizations, and the latest policies in the Ethereum ecosystem.
1. Ethereum Foundation (EF)
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a nonprofit organization that supports the Ethereum ecosystem. We are part of a larger community comprised of many organizations, individuals, and companies that collectively fund protocol development, expand the community, and advocate for Ethereum.
We are at the forefront of a new type of organization: one that supports the blockchain ecosystem without controlling it. This model is constantly evolving. Every day, we are learning and exploring what EF should become to support the long-term development of Ethereum.
The internal organization of the Ethereum Foundation consists of multiple independent teams. We believe that a structure composed of small autonomous teams is the most effective way to get work done. New teams typically grow organically based on new needs in the ecosystem, often by forking existing teams.
The Ethereum Foundation's team contributes to various areas of the Ethereum ecosystem. Some teams are responsible for building software or exploring the forefront of the Ethereum roadmap. Other teams help nurture the developer and user ecosystem globally. Some teams are dedicated to education and advocacy, showcasing the practicality and potential of Ethereum to the world.
Over the past decade, the Ethereum Foundation has experienced the ups and downs of Ethereum's brief history.
This process has taught us many valuable lessons. Over time, three core concepts have gradually formed, helping us guide the foundation's development and influence our decisions.
These are our three core values: long-term thinking, simplicity, and value first.
2. Ethereum Foundation Teams
The Ethereum Foundation consists of multiple teams covering a wide range of areas, dedicated to promoting the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Some teams focus on important Ethereum infrastructure construction, while others research and guide the Ethereum roadmap or assist in coordinating the ecosystem's work.
The Ethereum Foundation supports important work in the ecosystem through funding. The forms of funding are diverse and vary in amount, with many Ethereum Foundation teams involved in the approval and evaluation of funding. The Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) regularly reports on funding activities.
Expenditure Categories Description
This category includes all R&D work related to mainnet upgrades, Geth, internal security research, cryptography R&D, economic modeling, and mechanism design, aimed at achieving long-term research on the Ethereum community roadmap, as well as funding for external execution and consensus layer clients. This category also includes many other funding opportunities for external parties, covering areas from network stress testing to external research on specialized cryptography.
L1 R&D
This category includes internal teams contributing to L2 R&D, as well as projects providing funding to external parties to improve the L2 ecosystem. This funding includes educational resources, blockchain explorers, developer tools, security audits, and more, covering multiple supports for external projects.
L2 R&D
This category includes funding provided to the Privacy and Scaling Explorations teams (pse.dev), which are involved in projects such as MACI, Anon Aadhaar, and TLS Notary. This category also includes various funding covering ZK developer tools, ZK ceremony design UX, and ZK application concept validation.
Application ZK R&D
This category includes all work related to improving the Ethereum developer platform. This includes project support for development libraries such as Solidity, Remix, Ethers.js, and Web3.js, as well as support for the Python ecosystem.
Developer Platform
This category includes various work supporting different segments of the Ethereum community. This work covers interactions with the core protocol community (such as supporting the staking community), the Next Billion team, Devcon and Devconnect, as well as support for Ethereum.org and other educational resources. It also includes funding for local and regional Ethereum communities and events around the world.
Community Development
This category includes various daily expenses that support all teams within the foundation. This includes all costs related to internal and external legal, accounting, and financial services, as well as subscription and service provider expenses across the organization, covering data services, operational tools, and technical infrastructure. It also includes all costs related to individual investments in our financial management strategy, as well as the salaries of all operational and administrative personnel.
Internal Operations
This category includes funding provided to support new institutions in the Ethereum ecosystem. In 2022 and 2023, the foundation provided funding to organizations including Nomic Foundation, 0xPARC, and L2BEAT.
In the past two years, the foundation has focused on nurturing and supporting many emerging organizations that are now driving the Ethereum ecosystem forward, such as Argot Collective, Geodework, L2BEAT, Nomic Foundation, and 0xPARC. We are very proud to work alongside them.
Ethereum is a vast global project that encompasses a wide range of diverse work, involving every layer of the Ethereum ecosystem and regions around the world.
Today, many individuals and organizations contribute to this work. However, there is still much work to be done, especially in supporting and maintaining public goods. Relying on just a few organizations to complete most of the work poses a risk to the ecosystem.
3. Ethereum Foundation Treasury
As of October 31, 2024, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has a financial reserve of approximately $970.2 million, of which $788.7 million is in cryptocurrency and $181.5 million is in non-crypto assets and investments.
The vast majority (99.45%) of our cryptocurrency assets are held in ETH. These ETH represent 0.26% of the total ETH supply as of October 31, 2024.
We chose to hold the majority of the treasury's assets in ETH. EF believes in the potential of Ethereum, and our ETH holdings represent this long-term belief.
At the same time, the goal of the EF treasury is to fund important public goods for the Ethereum ecosystem, ensuring that this goal is met for many years to come.
To achieve this goal, we must follow a conservative treasury management policy to ensure that there are sufficient resources even during years of market downturns. This requires regularly selling ETH to ensure there are enough reserves for the coming years and gradually increasing fiat reserves during bull markets to support spending in bear markets.
4. Ecosystem Faces Challenges
Ethereum Ecosystem
In 2024, the Ethereum ecosystem received billions in funding, sourced from the foundation, organizations, and DAOs' treasuries.
This chart shows the total value in the project treasury, including liquid funds available for project use and funds still in the vesting period. All non-EF data comes from Deep DAO (deepdao.io/organizations), with data as of October 17, 2024.
The treasury of most projects is primarily composed of the project's native tokens. This means that the total value of the project treasury is much higher than the total value that can be immediately deployed in fiat currency. If a project attempts to sell a significant portion of its treasury, it could have a huge impact on the project's token price.
In contrast, this chart shows the depth of resources available to the Ethereum ecosystem in the long term. Even a small portion of this capital gradually invested over the next decade will provide important resources for the growth and maintenance of the Ethereum ecosystem.
In 2022 and 2023, various organizations within the Ethereum ecosystem invested over $497 million to support various projects within the community.
5. Summary
We are proud to see that, just like the R&D process of Ethereum, the funding support for the entire ecosystem has now become a collective effort. This collaboration helps developers within the Ethereum ecosystem discover more innovative pathways.
Additionally, the Ethereum Foundation has established a conflict of interest policy to ensure the fairness of all our work. We hope this can be an important step towards enhancing the integrity of the entire ecosystem.
At the Ethereum Foundation, we firmly believe in the concept of the 'infinite garden'—an ecosystem built on shared values, long-term thinking, and distributed growth, capable of thriving in the long run. As a community, we can collectively ensure that Ethereum is always built by everyone and for everyone, so let us continue to build the future together!
Click the link to view the full report: https://ethereum.foundation/report-2024.pdf.
Article link: https://www.hellobtc.com/kp/du/11/5522.html
Source: https://ethereum.foundation/report-2024.pdf