Trent Van Epps, a former Ethereum Foundation contributor who spent five years coordinating core protocol development, has warned that Ethereum’s core development could slide into a funding crisis within three to nine months as a major client funding program lapses and the foundation winds down its spending. Van Epps argues that sustaining Ethereum’s network of more than ten client teams, researchers, and coordination groups costs roughly $30 million a year, and that the sources covering that figure are tightening at the same time, with no replacement mechanism announced.
Two Funding Streams Contract
The Client Incentive Program, a four-year effort that funded client teams through staking rewards, expired in April 2026 without a successor, according to Van Epps. Alongside that expiration, the Ethereum Foundation has begun executing a treasury plan announced in June 2025 that charts a glide path from 15% annual spending toward a 5% endowment baseline by 2030, tightening one of the ecosystem’s most consistent sources of support. Van noted that
“The ongoing execution of this plan will continue to have ripple effects throughout the ecosystem.”
The foundation has reworked how it manages those reserves under the plan, converting ETH into stablecoins for predictable operational funding and deploying up to 70,000 ETH into staking to generate sustainable yield. Van Epps estimates the combined effect could open a “slow-burning funding crisis” within three to nine months. He frames the gap not as a one-time episode but as a symptom of structural problems in how the ecosystem gathers and allocates funding.
Stewardship Without a Successor
The warning ties the funding question to the foundation’s “Subtraction” philosophy, its stated effort to reduce its relative influence over Ethereum so the ecosystem can outgrow and outlast it. Van Epps wrote that the policy has communicated the foundation’s intent not to act as the sole center of power, while leaving gaps that no other institution has stepped in to fill. That retreat has coincided with steep leadership turnover, including the departure of co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak earlier this year.
Van Epps pointed to co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s own framing that the foundation “was not designed to be an eternal steward,” having completed the limited work scope set out in Ethereum’s token sale documents by 2022. Without continuous funding, Van Epps argued, Ethereum risks losing contributors who hold years of accumulated context, falling behind on challenges such as quantum computing and scaling, and eventually undermining mainnet’s reputation for reliability.
He warned that the damage would prove far harder and costlier to reverse once its symptoms surface in 12 to 18 months, and called for new funding mechanisms and a fresh set of contracts between ecosystem stakeholders before protocol maintenance becomes an “unfunded mandate.” The warning landed the same week the foundation absorbed another leadership change, as Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned as co-executive director and board member, the second co-executive director to leave in four months.
