The Ethereum Foundation said on Feb. 23 that it has created a new DeFi team under its App Relations division, naming Charles St. Louis as DeFi Protocol Specialist and Ivan (ivangbi) as DeFi Coordinator. In the same announcement, the foundation framed its DeFi push around the idea of “DeFipunk,” a financial system that it says could exist only on Ethereum. At the same time, on-chain data shows Vitalik Buterin has sold a total of 10,723 ETH since Feb. 2 for roughly $21.74 million.
New hires bring protocol and ecosystem experience
According to the foundation’s blog post, St. Louis previously founded DELV, formerly Element Finance, and worked on fixed-rate yield products. Before that, he was involved in the DAI stablecoin system and helped shape MakerDAO governance. Ivan is a co-founder of Gearbox Protocol and also started the LobsterDAO community in 2018. The appointments place veteran DeFi builders in roles focused on protocol expertise and ecosystem coordination.
The team’s remit goes beyond project outreach. The foundation said it will work on developer relations, security, decentralization standards, privacy infrastructure, shared risk frameworks, disclosure formats, and research publications aimed at both mechanism design and onboarding.
DeFipunk centers on permissionless access and privacy
The foundation described DeFipunk as more than a marginal upgrade to traditional finance. Its definition points to a native on-chain financial system built around five principles: permissionless access, censorship resistance, privacy first, self-custody, and open source code. In practical terms, that means users should be able to access protocols without approval, retain direct control of assets, and rely on systems whose code can be audited, combined, and forked.
Ivan said the framework aims to balance cypherpunk values with market growth. The foundation also said the new team will work closely with the Privacy Cluster that was reorganized last year, treating privacy as infrastructure rather than an optional feature. The rollout is expected to start with crypto payments before moving into more complex trading and lending use cases.
Security, standards, and research are key workstreams
The roadmap outlined by the foundation is fairly specific. It includes interface risk, oracle design, upgrade mechanisms, and multisig vulnerabilities, along with broader efforts to promote open, auditable, and composable code standards. It also pointed to longer-range areas of exploration, including futarchy-based DAO governance, privacy-preserving undercollateralized lending using ZK reputation systems, and AI-enhanced market solutions designed to hedge future spending risk.
Those themes line up with the foundation’s earlier dAI team roadmap for 2026, which identified ERC-8004 and x402 as important building blocks for decentralized AI agents.
On-chain data shows steady ETH sales by Vitalik
While the foundation was laying out its DeFi agenda, market attention also turned to Buterin’s wallet activity. Data tracked by Onchain Lens shows he sold 3,765 ETH over the past 2.5 days for about $7.08 million. Since Feb. 2, the total has reached 10,723 ETH, worth around $21.74 million, at an average sale price of about $2,027.
On-chain records indicate the transactions were mainly routed through Cow Protocol. ETH was converted into WETH and then swapped into the GHO stablecoin in batches of roughly 70 ETH per trade, a structure that appears designed to reduce the impact of a single large sale. Even so, the pace and scale of the sales have drawn attention across the community.
Foundation expansion and founder selling happen at the same time
The contrast is hard to miss. The Ethereum Foundation is expanding its DeFi effort through new staffing, standards work, and privacy-focused infrastructure, while one of Ethereum’s co-founders has been reducing ETH holdings over the same period. The source material notes that Buterin has previously said ETH sales were not for personal gain and were used to fund public goods and research.
Even with that context, the overlap between a fresh DeFi push and continued token sales has become a focal point for observers, especially with ETH already down more than 20% at the start of the year. For now, attention is fixed on two questions: whether the new DeFi team can deliver visible results, and whether Buterin’s selling will continue.