BitMine Adds 52K ETH to 5.67M Stack as Ethlabs Launches, ETH Holds Near $1,720

Ethereum News

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed on Tuesday that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) will cut its budget by roughly 40% this year, calling it a painful but necessary real sacrifice. Buterin said the Foundation is pivoting toward an endowment-style model resembling a university trust, aiming to grind its annual spend rate down from about 15% before 2026 to roughly 5% after 2030. Even with resources tightening, the EF will concentrate its firepower on the third-generation upgrade dubbed the Strawmap, progressively replacing the consensus, proving, privacy and account-model layers. Once that work lands, Buterin signaled, Ethereum will follow Bitcoin toward minimalism, focusing only on security fixes and high-value optimizations — a strategic turn for the underlying blockchain that marks a new phase for the base protocol.

The budget cut came alongside a sweeping staffing overhaul. In a June 23 reorganization notice, the Foundation eliminated 54 roles — about 20% of headcount — and redrew its internal structure into five core clusters plus operations and management support teams. The protocol cluster leads with 57 people, nearly double the second-largest access layer at 34, underscoring that protocol R&D remains the clear priority. The new structure puts long-horizon research — post-quantum security, zkEVM and L1 privacy — front and center, explicitly refusing to compromise for short-term financial gain and vowing to defend Ethereum’s core principles of censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security (CROPS). Departing staff receive severance of one month’s pay per year of service or the local statutory standard, whichever is higher.

As the Foundation slims down, fresh research muscle is entering the ecosystem. Five former senior EF researchers co-founded the non-profit Ethlabs, backed by the two largest publicly listed Ethereum treasury companies, Bitmine and Sharplink, and by co-founder Joe Lubin. Investor-relations disclosures show Bitmine and Sharplink hold roughly 5.7 million and 876,000 ETH, respectively. Ethlabs will focus on faster settlement, stronger interoperability, mainnet capacity and research into ETH’s monetary properties, paving the way for institutional uses across stablecoins, real-world asset tokenization and autonomous AI commerce. Lubin stressed that Ethereum is entering a new era in which multiple independently governed nodes maintain the network, no longer leaning on a single guardian.

The reshuffle of funding sources also lit a governance debate. Former insiders warned the core development ecosystem could face a slow-burning funding crisis within the next three to nine months. Kleros co-founder Clément Lesaege floated a validator-yield-transfer proposal, suggesting a protocol-level mechanism that would route up to 10% of staking rewards to an ecosystem fund — an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 ETH a year at current scale, or roughly $82.5 million to $116 million. Critics counter that squeezing validator profits would concentrate validators among large operators and harm node diversity. Ethlabs’ voluntary-sponsorship route, meanwhile, shifts the question from how to tax toward whether a tax is needed at all.

On-chain data reveals a sharp split in network fundamentals. In Q1 2026, Ethereum Layer 1 averaged 13.2 million monthly active users, up 53.5% quarter over quarter and a striking 85.9% year over year, with transaction count reaching 200.4 million. Yet Layer 1 fees fell to $39.9 million, down 47.9% quarter over quarter and 81.9% year over year — the network handled more activity at lower cost. By market value, Ethereum remains the leading chain for decentralized finance and tokenized assets, with quarterly tokenized-asset market cap averaging $203.4 billion, up 42.9% year over year, of which stablecoins accounted for $178.9 billion. ETH holders grew to 292.8 million and the staking rate climbed to 31%, signaling that more ETH is securing the network even under price pressure.

(as of 05:48 UTC) As Layer 2 divergence deepens, World Chain has carved out an independent run. Driven by World ID’s real-user base and the AI narrative, WLD has gained about 136% over the past 30 days, outpacing most major assets. Nasdaq-listed Eightco Holdings holds roughly 283 million WLD, about 8.4% of circulating supply. On-chain data shows network total value secured (TVS) has topped $610 million, up about 122.6% in 30 days, though the capital leans heavily on cross-chain bridge inflows, with roughly $557 million sourced from standard bridge assets. Powered by high-frequency activity from tens of millions of real users, World Chain has submitted more than 2.63 million blobs to mainnet since launch, making it the second-largest blob consumer behind Base.

As of 05:47 UTC, COINOTAG’s 42-indicator composite support/resistance scoring engine reads the key levels around ETH’s spot price near $1,676: $1,635 support scores 72/100 (strong), driven by the prior-day low, S3 and the 0.114 Fibonacci confluence; overhead $1,680 resistance scores 67/100 (strong) from a stack of R1, the LVN, a doji and the pivot, while $1,735 resistance scores 66/100. On the derivatives side, the perpetual funding rate sits at -0.0002%, open interest stands at $6.28 billion, and the long/short account ratio is an elevated 3.05 (75.3% long), flagging crowded retail longs and the risk of a long squeeze. RSI at 37.24 is near oversold and MACD has flipped bullish, yet the broader trend remains down; the Fear & Greed Index reads just 17, deep in extreme fear. Holding $1,635 and reclaiming $1,680 on volume opens a path toward $1,735; conversely, a break below $1,594 would invalidate the bullish case.