Trenton Van Epps, who put in five years at the Ethereum Foundation before leaving the organization in April 2026, has warned of a looming funding crisis in protocol development. By his estimate, the money shortage will hit the ecosystem within the next three to nine months. He traces the root of the problem to the foundation's own strategy, which in recent years has deliberately scaled back its own role.
"Keeping Ethereum development going costs around $30 M a year. That money supports the teams that build and maintain more than ten of the network's clients, along with those running research and coordination. Meanwhile, the funding sources are narrowing, and the ecosystem lost two of them almost at the same time," he wrote.
The Causes of the Crisis
Back in June 2025, the foundation approved a spending-reduction plan to avoid running out of money: treasury outlays are being cut from 15% a year down to 5% by 2030. For ten years the foundation poured money into getting the ecosystem off the ground, and at one point it nearly ran itself down to zero.
The second blow came with the end of the four-year Client Incentive Program, which paid client teams through staking. It shut down in April 2026, and nothing came along to replace it.
Van Epps reads this not as a one-off failure but as a symptom of a structural illness — a problem in how the ecosystem fundamentally raises and distributes money.
"Without a steady inflow of funds, you lose the people who have spent years building up critical context, work on scaling and quantum-threat defense slows down, and the network's reputation as a reliable system starts to slip," the developer said.
The symptoms, he predicts, will surface within a year to a year and a half, and treating them by that point will turn out to be more expensive.
A Strategy That Backfired
At the heart of it lies a concept the foundation's board and leadership call "subtraction." The idea is to deliberately weaken the foundation's own influence so that value gets created out in the wider ecosystem, allowing the network to outgrow its creator and learn to manage without it. In its March 2026 mandate, the foundation openly named reducing its own weight over time as a goal.
Van Epps himself respects the concept but sees a flaw in it. Legitimacy, he says, stubbornly pulls toward a single center — and so far no other structure matches the full set of things the foundation has: a brand with a history longer than ten years, a connection to Vitalik Buterin, the status of a neutral nonprofit that took on the ICO funds, the rights to ethereum.org, the @ethereum account, the logos, and the Devcon conferences.
"It all hinges on resources, and the treasury is the thing melting away fastest," the expert added.
A Time for New Institutions
The foundation, Van Epps is convinced, will not be Ethereum's chief steward for the coming decade. He draws on a recent post by Buterin, who pointed out that the foundation was created to handle a specific scope of work laid out in the token-sale documents — and that work was already wrapped up back in 2022.
From there, the developer argues, the ecosystem will have to renegotiate who is responsible for what.
"The network needs clear and accountable ways to bring in money, and getting Ethereum in front of a broad audience needs to become a goal in its own right, not an afterthought — right now the foundation's mandate keeps it on the back burner," Van Epps concluded.