Ethereum News: Trent van Epps, former Ethereum Foundation ecosystem development lead and co-organizer of the Protocol Guild, warned in a June 26 CoinDesk Markets Outlook interview with Jennifer Sanasi that the development of the underlying Ethereum protocol requires approximately $30 million per year to remain healthy, a number that current funding mechanisms are largely unable to cover, with no alternative infrastructure yet to fill the gap.
This is not just a budget deficit. It is a structural test of whether the deliberate decentralization of governance authority in Ethereum can transcend the deterioration of the funding lines that this authority was supposed to replace.
Subtraction Strategy: The intentional decline of EF and what it leaves behind
Van Epps left the Ethereum Foundation after its leadership committed to accelerating the rollout strategy, a philosophy aimed at deliberately reducing EF’s central role and pushing legitimacy to the broader ecosystem.
Is Ethereum facing a funding crisis?@trent_vanepps joins @jinnsanasi In markets’ expectations for ETH’s $30 million funding gap and what comes next.
00:00 – Trent van Epps joins the market forecast
00:57 – Why did Trent leave the Ethereum Foundation?
01:55 – What is subtraction and why… pic.twitter.com/bgv7hYnzmo— CoinDesk (@CoinDesk) June 25, 2026
Operationally, this means cutting annual treasury expenses from about 15% of holdings annually to a baseline of 5% by 2030. The fund has also reduced its workforce by about 20% and has seen ten senior figures depart in about six months, including its second co-manager in four months, a pace of regulatory change that has amplified ETH governance questions across the ecosystem, as detailed in our coverage Parallel restructuring of EF and transformation of treasury management.
The most immediate pressure point is the April 2026 expiration of the Customer Incentive Program (CIP), a four-year EF-funded program that provides vesting-linked ETH rewards to implementation and customer compliance teams, including Geth, Erigon, and Lighthouse maintainers, conditional on mainnet reliability. The Community Investment Program was formulated from the beginning as temporary support while permanent alternatives were developed. These alternatives have not been achieved on a sufficient scale.
The protocol guild’s record is against structural deficiency
Van Eps co-founded the Protocol Guild as a crowdfunding mechanism that directs donated tokens to active Ethereum L1 contributors through long-term vesting, without giving donors control over the protocol’s priorities.
Major contributors include Lido, Uniswap and ENS. Since its launch, the Protocol Guild has distributed roughly $40 million to core Ethereum developers over roughly four years, averaging roughly $10 million per year against a stated need of $30 million per year, leaving a structural shortfall that Van Epps estimates at about $20 million per year.
“The level of funding needed for core development is relatively stable. I estimate around 30 million per year… We have distributed close to 40 million dollars to many of these core developers, but this takes more than 4 years and is ultimately not enough,” Van Eps said in his report. CoinDesk Interview.
He described the primary obstacle as a free-rider problem: DeFi protocols, stablecoin issuers, and layer-2 networks extract significant economic value from the shared Ethereum infrastructure while facing no mechanism to force them to contribute to its maintenance.
Today, the European Fund is changing shape, concluding a months-long reorganization as part of the implementation of its mandate and treasury management policy.
We emerged from this process with the structure, activities and people needed to deliver on the critical things…
— Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn) June 23, 2026
The analytical question is no longer whether EF’s propositional philosophy is directionally correct; Rather, it is whether Van Epps’s 3-9 month window will produce solid organizations or a slow cycle of attrition for developers.
The risks he identifies are tangible: loss of key maintainers, reduced customer diversity, slower response to bugs, and delays in roadmap work including quantum resistance upgrades, a technical scale that underscores the complexity of maintaining core development across more than a dozen customers and research teams, as described in The size of Ethereum’s ongoing technical development commitments.
Ethereum News: Van Epps’ case for the multipolar future of finance
Despite the warnings, Van Eps described Ethereum’s competitive situation as permanent. He argued that Ethereum’s progress in decentralized finance, stablecoin settlement volume, and EVM adoption represent network effects that remain difficult for competitors to replicate, and that the $30 million annual figure is trivial compared to Ethereum’s roughly $200 billion market cap and trillions in annual stablecoin settlement.
Van Epps envisions a governance structure over the next decade, with EF operating in a narrower research and coordination role alongside several independent institutions handling commercialization, infrastructure financing, and ecosystem growth, a vision that Vitalik Buterin similarly articulated, describing EF as “not designed to be an eternal steward.”
He also called for a clearer narrative linking ETH as an asset to the network’s expanding on-chain economy, arguing that strong advocacy around ETH’s value accumulation is a prerequisite for attracting institutional sponsorship that would replace CIP-style support.
We believe the next visible indicator of the success of this transformation will not be a governance announcement, but rather the customer team roster, specifically, whether the developers who built and maintain the Ethereum implementation layer are still doing so twelve months from now.
Disclaimer: Coinspeaker is committed to providing unbiased and transparent reporting. This article aims to provide accurate and timely information but should not be considered financial or investment advice. Since market conditions can change rapidly, we encourage you to verify the information yourself and consult with a professional before making any decisions based on this content.
Neil is a professional cryptocurrency content writer with years of experience. He has written for numerous cryptocurrency websites to report breaking news, and has been hired by all kinds of cryptocurrency projects, to create content that will increase their exposure and attract more potential investors.
