What is the Ethereum Foundation (2025)? The wisdom behind the second largest crypto asset.

2025 Update: The Evolution of the Ethereum Foundation

The Ethereum Foundation underwent significant structural changes in 2025, including a reorganization in June that streamlined the research team and renamed the “Protocol Research and Development” team to simply “Protocol.” This restructured team focuses on three strategic goals: scaling the Ethereum base layer, expanding blobspace data storage for rollups, and enhancing user experience.

In March 2025, the foundation officially separated the board and executive functions, appointing Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak as co-executive directors, while Vitalik Buterin remained on the board to oversee the long-term vision.

Financially, the foundation has implemented a new treasury policy that caps operational costs at 15% of treasury assets. As of October 2024, treasury assets are approximately $970.2 million. Over 81% of the assets are in Ether, demonstrating the foundation’s ongoing commitment to the ecosystem.

The “Trillion Dollar Security Plan” in May 2025 aims to enhance cybersecurity, allowing billions of users to securely hold over $1000 in assets on-chain. This plan coincides with the successful Pectra upgrade, which implemented three EIPs and helped ETH reach a peak of $2400 within 30 days on May 9.

The foundation’s activities are not without criticism. Community members have questioned its practice of selling ETH for operating funds, including well-known figures such as Eric Conner and Anthony Sassano, co-authors of EIP-1559, who have suggested alternative methods such as staking or utilizing DeFi mechanisms to generate sustainable funding while maintaining consistency with the ecosystem.

Through these changes, the Ethereum Foundation continues to adapt and evolve in its mission to maximize the real-world value and impact of Ethereum.

An article explaining what the Ethereum Foundation is.

What is the Ethereum Foundation? The Ethereum Foundation is the world’s most famous crypto organization, aimed at promoting the development and application of the Ethereum network.

Origin of the Ethereum Foundation: The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization established in July 2014 in Switzerland. It was founded by two key figures behind the Ethereum blockchain—Gavin Wood and the world-renowned Vitalik Buterin. The foundation’s primary goal was to create a central entity to manage the funds accumulated in Bitcoin to develop a new type of blockchain; at that time, they had already raised over 18 million dollars, which was unprecedented at the time.

The philosophy and past controversies of the Ethereum Foundation: The main goal of the foundation is to maximize the real value of Ethereum for people and financial inclusion. Vitalik Buterin has consistently advocated this philosophy throughout his career. Due to Ethereum’s decentralized principles, there is dissatisfaction among people with the highly centralized organization of its core decision-makers. Developers believe this concern is very valid and have made a decision; the foundation will follow the “Bazar” development model, which is similar to open-source research and independent implementation found in software like Linux and third-party Android.

Other initiatives of the Ethereum Foundation: The first initiative related to the Ethereum project by the foundation is DEVGrants, which compensates developers for their contributions. Ethereum is also the first company to establish a “bug bounty” encryption program. Recently, last year, the foundation announced a partnership with Reddit, which is its first crypto organization and well-known social media. The underlying idea is that the two organizations can help each other to expand and develop new projects for their respective communities.

Keywords: What is the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, second largest Crypto Asset, Ethereum network, Ethereum blockchain, Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum DeFi, smart contracts, Ethereum development, decentralized autonomous organization

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There is no dispute among the crypto community regarding the importance of the Ethereum network to the digital asset ecosystem. Whether it’s creating decentralized financial services using DeFi, unique tokens with NFTs, virtual worlds in the metaverse, or through smart contracts, Ethereum has rapidly become the center of innovation in recent years.

Although we are accustomed to viewing Ethereum as the second largest sector of the crypto market, following Bitcoin, its history is actually much closer than it appears—and it all started with the Ethereum Foundation.

In this article, we will introduce the definition of the Ethereum Foundation; its origins, the philosophy of non-profit organizations, and other projects that the foundation is involved in besides Ethereum.

What is the Ethereum Foundation?

The Ethereum Foundation is the most famous crypto assets organization in the world, aimed at promoting the development and application of the Ethereum network. We refer to it as the most well-known “publicly recognized” foundation because more people have heard of the alias Satoshi Nakatomo, but we do not know who he, she, or they are.

The Ethereum Foundation also promotes the technologies being created within the Ethereum ecosystem, regardless of whether the foundation is involved. By actively collaborating with community members and second-layer developers, the organization enhances the global visibility of ETH and Ethereum. It also seeks to engage in investments and partnerships with traditional finance (TradFi) companies to bolster the legitimacy of Ethereum worldwide.

To achieve these goals, the Ethereum Foundation is built on a series of sustainable mechanisms that align with its development philosophy, which ensure that its founders and contributors will be immortalized - more content will be presented soon, but first, let’s take a look at how the organization was formed.

The origin of the Ethereum Foundation

The original Ethereum team. Source of the image: Token Economy

The Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization established in July 2014 in Switzerland. It was co-founded by two key figures behind the Ethereum blockchain—Gavin Wood and the world-renowned Vitalik Buterin—along with a group of talented developers who dedicated their skills and ideas to create incredible new things. One of the developers is Charlie Hoskinson, who is now the founder of Cardano (ADA).

The foundation’s first goal was established more than a year before its blockchain; it was created as a centralized entity responsible for managing the funds accumulated in Bitcoin to develop the Ethereum blockchain; at that time, it had already raised over 18 million dollars through crowdfunding. Now, there are numerous new crypto projects and initial coin offerings (ICOs), which may not sound like much, but in 2014, this amount was completely unheard of.

Due to the complete lack of regulations for crypto projects and labs at that time, the foundation, as a technology research lab, had to comply with Swiss policies to avoid becoming a victim of fines and tax violations.

After a lot of bureaucratic procedures and headaches, the Ethereum Foundation held its first public crowdfunding event. In November 2014, the Foundation hosted Devcon-0, which was the first large event attended by people from around the world interested in Ethereum development. Since then, the project’s scale has seen new growth and has garnered global support, leading up to the launch of the ETH Crypto Assets and blockchain in 2015.

Currently, the Ethereum Foundation is primarily managed by Executive Director Aya Myaguchi and Vitalik Buterin.

The philosophy and past controversies of the Ethereum Foundation

According to several official documents and white papers related to the group, the main purpose of the foundation is to maximize the real value of Ethereum for people and financial inclusion. Vitalik Buterin has consistently advocated this philosophy throughout his career. Whenever a new project seems to gain hype and attraction based solely on cash profits rather than actual application, Buterin quickly criticizes these models. His recent criticisms revolved around the collapse of Terra’s LUNA and the UST stablecoin. While Buterin acknowledges the value of algorithmic stablecoins in the world, he stated that the collapse of the dollar-pegged ones was merely due to the attempt to achieve ‘unrealistic returns.’

Although the foundation is the first publicly known crypto organization associated with the second largest project in the ecosystem, it has sparked a significant controversy. Essentially, the key point of the Ethereum blockchain and its subsequent technologies is to promote financial services and financial inclusion on a decentralized basis; there is no central entity acting as a carrier of control features and development. However, how can this be achieved when the core of Ethereum is combined with very clear decision-makers (Myahuchi and Buterin)?

Developers believe this issue is very reasonable and have made a decision; the foundation will follow the “Bazar” development model, which is similar to the open-source research and autonomous implementation of software like Linux and third-party Android. Through the “Bazar” model, contributors outside the foundation can independently suggest upgrades and develop new operational modes for blockchain features. It has been operating this way for several years and has become a pillar of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Other initiatives of the Ethereum Foundation

The first initiative related to the Ethereum project by the foundation is DEVGrants, which was proposed at a time when people were complaining about the centralized operation and management of Ethereum. Through DEVGrants, developers with solid ideas for updates and new frameworks can receive compensation for their contributions in the form of ETH, which is also one of the foundations of DAOs.

The Ethereum Foundation is also the world’s first crypto organization to create a “bug bounty” program, in which white hat hackers (non-criminals) can receive compensation in the form of ETH or BTC for discovering errors in the blockchain, as long as they notify the official team.

In early 2018, Vitalik Buterin announced through an official article that the Ethereum Foundation was working on two additional projects to further fund independent developers in their efforts to address the major issue of blockchain scalability on the road to Ethereum 2.0 (this issue still exists today and has not been resolved).

Recently, that is, last year, the foundation announced a partnership with Reddit, marking its first collaboration between a crypto organization and a well-known social media platform. The underlying idea is that through this collaboration, the two organizations can help each other to expand and develop new projects for their respective communities.