BlockBeats News, June 23rd - Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has revealed a budget cut of around 40% this year as part of its financial transition plan. According to the fund management policy released last year, EF is gradually shifting from a "spending organization" to an "endowment-based" model, aiming to reduce the annual expenditure ratio from the previous approximately 15% to around 5% after 2030. During this process, the foundation emphasized that inevitable personnel and resource adjustments would occur and acknowledged the loss of some capabilities and experience.

In this restructuring round, EF has reduced around 54 employees, approximately 20% of the overall team. Vitalik stated that many of these departing members may continue to participate in Ethereum's ecosystem in external forms in the future. Meanwhile, the foundation will shift its strategic focus to a more "lightweight" protocol governance and development path, including advancing the "Strawmap" long-term roadmap, covering core protocol upgrades such as consensus mechanisms, privacy technologies, account models, and state structures, and promoting Ethereum's entry into the third stage of evolution.

In terms of specific structural adjustments, EF will weaken the "multi-client redundancy-first" model, moving towards a more specialized division of labor and AI-assisted formal verification development approach; the privacy and scalability research team PSE will be reorganized, transitioning from exploratory research and development to a more focused engineering implementation; ecosystem events like Devcon will also gradually scale down. Furthermore, EF will reduce its involvement in cross-disciplinary large-scale projects in the future, placing more emphasis on protocol security and high-value improvements, while encouraging more innovative work to be carried out by external entities in the ecosystem. Despite the more streamlined path, Ethereum will continue to strengthen its core position as a highly censorship-resistant, long-term stable protocol.