Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin recently revealed on X that he earns approximately $139,000 annually as a member of the Ethereum Foundation (EF).
This disclosure comes after an escalating conversation on social media over the Ethereum Foundation’s funding allocation. Stakeholders’ worries about the gas fees received by the nonprofit organization, which is committed to the development of Ethereum’s ecosystem, spurred these talks.
Despite his significant ETH holdings, which as of June 2024 brought his net worth near to $1 billion. Notably, Buterin stated that, since around 2018, he hasn’t traded any Ether for personal benefit.
Buterin and another EF member Josh Stark responded to these worries by offering a preliminary rundown of the Foundation’s budgetary aims. They said that a comprehensive study will be made available before Devcon SEA, a big four-day event that is scheduled to happen in Bangkok, Thailand in November 2024.
Preliminary data provided by Buterin and Stark indicates that in 2023, the Ethereum Foundation devoted 36.5% of its resources to helping “New Institutions.” This represents a significant rise from 23.8% in 2022 and demonstrates the Foundation’s increasing dedication to projects related to Ethereum.
These projects include funding for institutions that are essential to Ethereum’s long-term goals, such as the 0xPARC Foundation, the Decentralized Research Center, the layer-2 analytics company L2Beat, and the Nomic Foundation.
The second-largest allocation of EF’s resources was directed toward layer-1 research and development. This includes Ethereum mainnet on-chain testing and updates, including the Dencun update from earlier in 2024.
Stark further mentioned that in the first quarter of 2024, the EF distributed approximately $11.4 million to external teams and awarded many awards to internal teams like Geth.
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