Table of Contents

It is almost the end of 2024, and the Ethereum Foundation report is out. This report highlights various segments, such as the team’s activities for 2024, its impact on the ecosystem, the community’s vision, and so on. Let us look at a quick analysis of the report.
What is the Ethereum Foundation?
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a non-profit that supports the Ethereum ecosystem. They are part of a larger community of organizations, individuals, and companies that fund protocol development, grow the community, and advocate for Ethereum. 23 teams under the Ethereum Foundation handle various domains, such as ecosystem growth, community education, building products for the ecosystem, etc. It serves three core values: long-term thinking, subtraction, and stewardship of values.
Long Term Thinking
The Ethereum ecosystem is still very young and in such a nascent stage, a long-term vision is a very important factor for the community to have which is to be able to look beyond the peaks and valleys of market cycles and focus on the larger picture. The Ethereum Foundation is helping the community to set and fulfill those long-term visions/.
Subtraction
Another major core value is Subtraction which means that the EF team is not trying to accumulate power and prestige. Instead, their success metric is measured by what the Ethereum ecosystem achieves as a whole while they quietly work in the background.
Stewardship of values
The team believes that Ethereum is more than a technology. It is a community bound by a common set of values, with a vision for how those values can improve the world. The Ethereum ecosystem stands on the shoulders of a long history of open-source and cypherpunk communities that paved the way before us and thus it is very important to that the values are nurtured and well-protected over time in order to witness the growth in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Ethereum Foundation Grants
Road to Devcon Grant
The Ethereum Foundation supports various activities in the ecosystem through its grants program. The Road to Devcon grant program caught a lot of attention in 2024 when communities across the globe conducted events spreading more awareness about the ecosystem before their year-end event Devcon in Thailand. One of which is mentioned in the report is the “Road to Devcon University Roadshow” in which events at five universities across Thailand were conducted, to expose students to the Ethereum ecosystem, educate them about Ethereum, and connect them to career opportunities granted $10K awarded in April ‘24. You can check out the active grants and support programs active in the ecosystem Ecosystem Support Program(ESP) website.
wtf.academy Grant
The other grant program that caught the attention of the community is the wtf.academy grant. The WTF Academy produces free, open-source, concise, and community-reviewed tutorials on web3 development tools, including Solidity, Ethers, and more, with a focus on Chinese language content. ESP’s grant helped them expand their curriculum, as well as translate more content into English with a grant of $30K awarded to them.
Ethereum’s Ecosystem of Institutions
There are a lot of institutions contributing to the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole. The Ethereum Foundation tends to support institutions that support Ethereum’s vision help share responsibility, and maintain the vision and growth. It has worked to nurture and support many new organizations that are now driving the Ethereum ecosystem forward like Argot Collective, Geodework, L2BEAT, Nomic Foundation, and 0xPARC. Let us look in brief what each of these institutions do.
Argot Collective
The Argot Collective is a non-profit, group dedicated to maintaining free and independent software for Ethereum. It is formed by 25 former Ethereum Foundation team members, including compiler engineers, programming language theorists, and verification experts, it focuses on core infrastructure development. Their mission is to focus on long-term sustainability, and transparency, opposing profit-driven motives. It is currently focussing on a few projects that include:
Sourcify: Open-source and decentralized source-code verification service
Act: Formal specification language for smart contracts
Ethdebug: Standardized debug info format for the EVM
Fe: Smart contract language
Hevm: Symbolic execution engine for the EVM
Solidity: Smart contract language
Geodework
It is a public benefit organization dedicated to Ethereum ecosystem development and building a better internet. Its core focus is pursuing the geographic decentralization of Ethereum, which means building community and educational infrastructure and supporting local innovators and leaders across the globe. It facilitates grant giving, creates ecosystem tools, products, and services, and executes a range of projects geared towards strengthening the community layer of Ethereum. Geodework is currently under development within the EF.
Nomic Foundation
This is the team behind the popular Hardhat framework. It is an early-stage non-profit providing open-source engineering software that advances the Ethereum ecosystem. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that Ethereum continues to deliver a top-quality, reliable developer experience. Their motto is Empowering developers to decentralize the world. Apart from Hardhat other projects under the Nomic Foundation include Slang and EDR. Slang is a modular set of compiler APIs empowering the next generation of Solidity code analysis and developer tooling. Written in Rust and distributed in multiple languages and EDR is an Ethereum development runtime implementation that can be reused to build new developer tools.
Ethereum Foundation spending analysis 2022 and 2023


$240 million was spent in the past two years on various projects and initiatives for the development of the ecosystem. This amount was spent across various domains like all R&D related to mainnet upgrades, Geth, internal security research, cryptography R&D, economic modeling and mechanism design, longer-term research to achieve the Ethereum community roadmap, and grants to external execution & consensus layer clients. This category also includes many other grants to external parties, ranging from network stress testing to outside research on specialized cryptography. But overall the spending is categorized as discussed:
- L1 R&D – This category includes all R&D related to mainnet upgrades, Geth, internal security research, cryptography R&D, economic modeling and mechanism design, longer-term research to achieve the Ethereum community roadmap, and grants to external execution & consensus layer clients.
- L2 R&D – This includes internal teams who contribute to L2 research & development, as well as grants to external parties to improve the L2 ecosystem.
- Applied ZK R&D – This includes funding for teams working on projects like MACI, Anon Aadhaar, TLS Notary, etc. This category also includes many grants, ranging from ZK developer tooling, ZK ceremony design UX, and ZK application proof of concepts.
- Developer platform – This category includes all work related to improving Ethereum as a developer platform. This includes projects like Solidity, and Remix, developer libraries like Ethers.js and Web3.js, and support for the Python ecosystem.
- Community Development – This category includes various work to support different segments of the Ethereum community. From engaging with core protocol communities Devcon and Devconnect, as well as Ethereum.org and other educational resources. It also includes many grants to local and regional Ethereum communities and events around the world.
- Internal Operations – This category includes general expenses that support all teams at the Ethereum Foundation. This includes all costs related to internal and external legal, accounting, and financial services, and org-wide subscriptions and service providers, ranging from data services to operational tools, and technical infrastructure. It also includes all fees related to individual investments within our treasury management strategy, as well as salaries of all operational and administrative staff.
- New Institutions – This category includes grants to help new institutions dedicated to supporting the Ethereum ecosystem like Nomic Foundation, Argot, etc.
Treasury Distribution

This graph shows the total value held in project treasuries. This includes amounts that are liquid and available to the project as well as amounts that are still vesting from different projects. These treasuries are mainly composed of that project’s native token. This means that the total value of a project treasury is much greater than the total value that could be deployed immediately in fiat terms.
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Conclusion
These reports are a good way to understand how the internal community is working for the overall development of the ecosystem. It also highlights the major areas of improvement and progress in the coming years thus a good resource for developers, researchers, and enthusiasts to contribute. Other ecosystems are growing rapidly in the web3 space like Solana, Aptos, and Sui. Developers do check out Metaschool to learn and become early contributors to these ecosystems.