Ethereum

0. Since EF spending has been a topic of conversation lately, here’s some thoughts and answers to some of the big questions we’ve seen.

(cross-posted from x)

1. First, we’ve been working on a new EF report, covering 2022 and 2023. We’re expecting to publish it before Devcon SEA. 

Here’s a preview of spend information from the upcoming report (exact figures TBD).

I work for Ethereum at the Ethereum Foundation.

3. Internal spend includes EF teams like:

- Geth (https://geth.ethereum.org)
- Privacy & Scaling Explorations (PSE) (https://pse.dev)
- Solidity (https://soliditylang.org)
- Cryptography Research (https://crypto.ethereum.org/team)
- Robust Incentives Group (http://rig.ethereum.org)
- Devcon (https://devcon.org)
- http://Ethereum.org
- Next Billion (https://nxbn.ethereum.foundation)
- And several others

4. All these teams work out in the open, and share info about their activities on their websites, githubs, and social channels. 

If you want to know what the EF is up to, follow EF teams!

5. External spend means grants. 

For the past 4 years, we’ve been publishing regular reports on EF grant activities on http://blog.ethereum.org

Here’s the latest one for Q1 2024 https://blog.ethereum.org/2024/05/14/esp-allocation-q124

Our grants team also publishes prominently on their homepage (https://esp.ethereum.foundation) the totals from the past few years.

6. The biggest new category in the charts I shared above is “New Institutions”. 

One key goal for the EF is to help build up new organizations that can strengthen and support the Ethereum ecosystem in the long run.

7. This category includes grants to organizations like:

- the Nomic Foundation (https://nomic.foundation/)
- the Decentralization Research Centre (https://thedrcenter.org/)
- L2Beat (https://l2beat.com/)
- 0xPARC Foundation (https://0xparc.org/)
- and other Ethereum related and adjacent orgs

2. Those graphs capture both internal and external spend. 

For example, “L1 R&D” includes grants to external client teams, and it also includes internal EF researchers. 

In both years, internal spend was about 38% and external spend was about 62%.