Ethereum’s core protocol development could hit a serious funding wall within the next three to nine months, according to a detailed warning published by former Ethereum Foundation contributor Trent Van Epps. The warning arrives at what may be the worst possible time, with the network’s largest upgrade since the Merge now in its final testing stages and nearly a dozen senior researchers already out the door this year.
Van Epps, who spent five years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF) coordinating core development and building Protocol Guild, laid out his concerns in an article titled “Succession After Subtraction” published on June 18.Â
He estimates that Ethereum’s core development ecosystem requires roughly $30 million annually across research, client maintenance, and coordination efforts. That number, he argues, is modest relative to what it produces, but it is now under threat from multiple directions at once.
Two funding pillars crumbling simultaneously
The first problem is the Ethereum Foundation’s own treasury trajectory. The Foundation announced a treasury policy in June 2025 to reduce its annual spending from 15% of its assets down to a 5% endowment-level baseline by 2030.
While this “glide path” is designed to keep the organization solvent over the long term, the practical effect is a tightening of the funding spigot that has historically kept a significant portion of Ethereum’s core contributors employed.
The second, more immediate blow is the expiration of the Client Incentive Program (CIP). The CIP was launched in 2021 to support client diversity and long-term maintenance of Ethereum’s core software. Under the program, eligible client teams including Geth, Prysm, Lighthouse, Nethermind, Nimbus, Teku, Besu, Erigon, and Lodestar, each received grants totaling 144 validators, or 4,608 ETH, to operate on mainnet.
The funds vested over several years as long as teams continued meeting performance benchmarks and contributing to the protocol roadmap. That four-year program expired in April 2026, and Van Epps says no replacement mechanism has emerged.
Together, these two developments threaten to create what Van Epps calls a gap that may look episodic on the surface but is actually “symptomatic of larger structural issues related to gathering and allocating funding.”
The subtraction paradox
At the center of this funding squeeze is a philosophical framework the Ethereum Foundation has championed for roughly seven years: Subtraction. The idea, as the EF’s own March 2026 Mandate puts it, is to deliberately reduce the Foundation’s relative influence over time so that Ethereum matures into something “robust enough to outgrow and outlast” its founding organization.
Van Epps does not dismiss the aspiration. But he points to what he describes as a stubborn reality: legitimacy tends to pool around power-law concentrations, and no other organization currently has the same blend of brand trust, treasury purpose, control of key assets like ethereum.org and Devcon, or direct employment of core researchers.
The EF still holds many of the vectors that matter, even as its stated policy is to hand them off. The problem is that the institutions meant to pick up the slack have not yet been built or scaled to fill the gap.
“Legitimacy is downstream of repeated competency, which is itself downstream of resources,” Van Epps writes. If the resources dry up before successor institutions are ready, the competency erodes, and the legitimacy follows it down.
A brain drain already underway
The funding concerns do not exist in isolation. At least nine senior contributors have departed the Ethereum Foundation in 2026, with five of those resignations landing in May alone. The list includes some of the most recognizable names in Ethereum’s core development world. Barnabe Monnot and Tim Beiko, two of the most prominent figures in core protocol coordination, have stepped back.
Former co-executive director Tomasz Stanczak stepped down in February after less than a year in the role. Josh Stark, a seven-year EF veteran who led operations, departed in April. Van Epps himself left on April 10.
The EF’s Protocol Cluster, the team responsible for Ethereum’s base-layer research, has now lost contributors across every layer it covers. Regardless of the individual reasons behind each departure, the cumulative loss of institutional knowledge is difficult to dispute. New leadership has been installed, with Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik Svantes stepping in as co-leads of the reorganized Protocol team, but the transition is happening under pressure.
Glamsterdam hangs in the balance
The timing of all this is particularly uncomfortable because Ethereum is now deep into preparations for the Glamsterdam hard fork, which developers have described as the largest protocol overhaul since the Merge. The upgrade entered its final devnet phase in mid-June 2026, with mainnet activation currently expected in the second half of the year, most likely in Q3.
Glamsterdam introduces enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), Block-Level Access Lists for parallel execution, and gas repricing changes. The upgrade is also expected to raise Ethereum’s gas limit from 60 million to 200 million, significantly increasing Layer 1 capacity. These are not cosmetic tweaks. They represent foundational changes to how Ethereum builds and processes blocks, and they demand experienced hands to shepherd them through testing, auditing, and deployment.
Van Epps warns that without continuous funding, the network risks losing “people with critical context built up over years,” falling behind on challenges like quantum computing and scaling, and ultimately damaging the mainnet’s reputation for reliability. He cautions that by the time the ecosystem registers the symptoms of underinvestment in 12 to 18 months, the damage will be far harder and more costly to reverse.
What comes next
Van Epps is not calling for the Ethereum Foundation to reverse course. In fact, he takes Vitalik Buterin at his word when Buterin says the EF was never designed to be an eternal steward. Instead, Van Epps argues that the moment calls for entirely new social, political, and economic contracts between Ethereum’s stakeholders.
He calls for scalable and accountable funding mechanisms, active recognition of Ethereum’s interdependent resources, including the software, the network, and ETH as an asset, and a willingness to treat broad adoption as a first-class goal rather than something subordinated to ideological principles.
He says he will be writing more on the design space for these mechanisms, including the possibility of in-protocol funding, in the near future.
ETH is currently trading around $1,687, down roughly $775 from the same time last year and well off its all-time high of $4,946 set in August 2025, as per data from CoinGecko. The price action reflects a broader market cooldown, but it also underscores why the funding conversation matters. The Ethereum Foundation’s treasury is denominated heavily in ETH, and a lower token price means a smaller war chest in dollar terms at exactly the moment when spending is being cut.
Whether the ecosystem can organize quickly enough to prevent the slow bleed Van Epps describes remains an open question. But his warning is clear: the clock is ticking, the old funding structures are expiring, and the new ones do not exist yet.
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