Ethereum Foundation Cuts 40% Budget, 54 Jobs as ETH Holds Near $1,650, SBI Lists RLUSD

Ethereum News

The Ethereum Foundation has approved a roughly 40% reduction in its 2026 budget alongside 54 layoffs — about 20% of its staff — as the nonprofit pivots toward an endowment-style operating model. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin disclosed the budget cut on June 23, framing it as a structural shift rather than a reaction to weak markets. Under the new design, the Foundation aims to fund its work from investment returns without depleting principal, sustaining development across multiple cycles. The reorganization consolidates operations into five clusters, and departing staff receive severance of one month per year served plus transition support, a notable moment for the leading altcoin ecosystem.

Buterin positioned the restructuring around an ambitious technical roadmap he calls the Strawmap, describing it as Ethereum's third major iteration after The Merge. The plan revisits nearly every layer of the protocol — consensus, cryptographic proofs, privacy, account models and state management — but rolls out incrementally rather than in a single hard fork. He said the Foundation will also expand its role in the user-facing access layer while refusing to compromise on building a protocol resilient to quantum computing and the AI era. Privacy research tied to projects like the Aztec Network sits within this broader effort to deliver a sweeping upgrade with leaner resources.

The budget discipline follows a treasury framework the Foundation published in 2025. Buterin said annual spending will fall from roughly 15% of remaining reserves — the pre-2026 average — to around 5% from 2030 onward, a glide path designed to make the organization self-sustaining. He acknowledged the cuts impose real costs, conceding that external developers cannot fully absorb the lost capacity. To soften the impact, the Foundation said it would provide career counseling and transition grants to the 54 departing employees. Buterin praised his former colleagues as dedicated engineers, some of whom had contributed to the protocol for nearly a decade.

Buterin detailed five areas facing cuts or redirection. The multi-client strategy will move from prioritizing redundancy toward specialization, leaning on AI-assisted formal verification — already used in BLS signature libraries — to secure the protocol. The privacy and scaling research unit will narrow from broad exploration to focused construction on key cryptography. Devcon will shrink into a leaner, less loss-making event. Foundation-led projects outside Ethereum will scale back, with Buterin personally funding some, while institutional outreach concentrates on reproducible, censorship-resistant use cases. He suggested clients freed from heavy maintenance could redirect engineers toward user-facing features and improvements that matter most to everyday holders.

Separately, Japanese exchange SBI VC Trade began offering Ripple's dollar-pegged RLUSD on June 24, supporting it exclusively on the Ethereum network. The exchange's official announcement marked the country's first listing of a so-called type-4 electronic payment instrument under Japanese law. RLUSD, issued by Ripple's Standard Custody and Trust subsidiary, trades natively on Ethereum and the XRP Ledger. SBI VC Trade said deposits and withdrawals carry no fees, though single withdrawals are capped at the equivalent of one million yen. The listing expands access to dollar stablecoin mechanics on Ethereum, adding a second dollar-pegged token after USDC.

Looking beyond the Strawmap, Buterin endorsed a long-term philosophy he termed soft lean-and-done — prioritizing security fixes and high-value changes while raising the bar sharply for new features. He pointed to Bitcoin's restrained development culture as a model for keeping Ethereum decentralized without ballooning budgets. The retrenchment lands against a striking divergence: on-chain data shows monthly active users hit 13.2 million in the first quarter, up 53.5%, and transactions reached 200.4 million, yet base-layer fees fell 48% to $39.9 million as trading activity across automated market makers weakened. ETH has slid more than 43% year to date, deepening a prolonged bear market.

COINOTAG's proprietary 42-indicator composite scoring engine rates the $1,680 resistance at 66/100, a level reinforced by the confluence of R1 and a pivot-point cluster, while the $1,635 support scores a stronger 72/100, anchored by the previous day's low and an S3 Fibonacci reading. Derivatives data adds caution: aggregate open interest sits near $6.29 billion with a near-flat 0.0012% funding rate, and a long/short account ratio of 2.96 leaves 74.7% of traders positioned long — crowded enough to fuel a long squeeze. With the Fear & Greed Index at 17 (Extreme Fear) and RSI at 37, a hold above $1,635 keeps the bullish MACD thesis alive, while losing it opens the door to $1,594.