Ethereum core development could run into a funding crunch within three to nine months, according to former Ethereum Foundation contributor Trent Van Epps. He said the cost of supporting Ethereum’s network of more than 10 client teams, researchers, and coordination groups is about $30 million a year, while the sources covering that budget are shrinking at the same time and no replacement has been announced.
Two major funding sources are narrowing
Van Epps said the Client Incentive Program expired in April 2026 with no successor in place. The program had run for four years and funded client teams through staking rewards. At the same time, the Ethereum Foundation has started carrying out the treasury plan it announced in June 2025, which maps a decline in annual spending from 15% toward a 5% endowment baseline by 2030.
He said the plan will keep sending ripple effects through the ecosystem. Under that approach, the foundation has been changing how it manages reserves, converting ETH into stablecoins for more predictable operating funding and deploying as much as 70,000 ETH into staking to generate sustainable yield. The issue, in his view, is not one isolated budget change. It is the combined pressure from several shifts hitting the same pool of protocol support.
The foundation’s pullback leaves an open gap
The warning is tied to the foundation’s “Subtraction” philosophy, its stated effort to reduce its relative influence so the Ethereum ecosystem can outgrow and outlast it. Van Epps argued that this has clearly signaled the foundation does not want to remain the sole center of power, but no other institution has stepped in to fill the space left behind.
That retreat has overlapped with leadership turnover at the foundation. Earlier this year, co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak departed. This week, Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned as co-executive director and board member, making her the second co-executive director to leave in four months.
Damage may surface later, but at a higher cost
Van Epps also pointed to Vitalik Buterin’s view that the foundation “was not designed to be an eternal steward,” and that the limited scope laid out in Ethereum’s token sale documents had been completed by 2022. He framed the problem as structural rather than temporary: the ecosystem still lacks a durable way to collect and allocate long-term funding for protocol maintenance.
If continuous funding does not hold, he said Ethereum could lose contributors with years of accumulated context, fall behind on issues such as quantum computing and scaling, and eventually weaken mainnet’s reputation for reliability. He warned that once the symptoms become visible in 12 to 18 months, reversing the damage would be harder and more expensive. His call was for new funding mechanisms and new agreements among ecosystem stakeholders before protocol maintenance turns into an unfunded mandate.