The Ethereum Foundation (EF) released an update Monday that detailed its role in the ecosystem and its specific plans for funding allocation over the next year. Ethereum faces challenges from a number of newer, faster solutions that have better scaling mechanisms such as EOS and Cardano, and the next twelve months could be critical in the platform’s future.
The #Ethereum Foundation is excited to share our plans for the next year, and more.https://t.co/FxJTMsFWGQ
— Ethereum (@ethereum) May 21, 2019
Ethereum Foundation’s $160 Million War Chest
The report states that the Foundation currently holds around 0.6% of ETH in circulation, valued at approximately $160 million, as well as reserves held in cash. Despite these deep pockets however, the Foundation is keen to encourage other organizations within the community to support high-priority projects while simultaneously supporting innovative funding opportunities such as Gitcoin and MolochDAO. Just last week, Ameen Soleimani, the founder of MolochDAO, announced that the Foundation had submitted a 1,000 ETH application proposal to the grant-making co-operative. The Ethereum Foundation used the update to announce plans to spend $30 million on key projects across the ecosystem. The bulk of this, $19 million, will be allocated towards Ethereum 2.0-specific projects including client development, state channels and plasma, formal verification, and Ethereum WebAssembly (EWASM). $8 million will be reserved for ETH 1.x initiatives, with the remaining $3 million going towards developer education, community event planning, and continued improvements to ethereum.org.
Ethereum’s Upgrades Need to Succeed
Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrade finally went live in February 2019, meaning that attention has now turned towards the next wave of protocols – Casper, Plasma, and sharding – which are part of Ethereum’s six-year plan, as outlined by BlockExplorer:no
Ethereum needs to spend big in order to fulfil this roadmap and stay ahead of its competition, so it’s reassuring for investors and developers that the Foundation has the resources to fund these upgrades, allowing them to push hard to keep Ethereum where it is today.
