Vitalik Buterin says the Ethereum Foundation is entering a period of “mild austerity” to focus spending on its most important goals. Instead of funding many side experiments, the Foundation will direct more resources into core infrastructure, privacy, and long-term security.
Buterin revealed that 16,384 ETH came from Foundation-controlled funds as part of this change to fund a new round of open-source projects. That allocation is currently valued at tens of millions of dollars, and according to ecosystem sources, about $46 million in ETH is essentially set aside for full-stack, privacy-focused infrastructure.
Buterin’s Contribution Aimed at Full-Stack, Verifiable Privacy
Buterin explains that this money is not going into a single token or flashy app. Instead, it is for “open-source, secure, and verifiable full-stack infrastructure” that covers everything from user connectivity to Ethereum to data and transaction protection.
The roadmap he supports includes better private payments, stronger default encryption, and tools that stop wallets and dapps from leaking user information to centralized servers.
That means more funding for zero-knowledge proof systems, privacy-preserving data access methods such as private information retrieval, and node tools that make it easier for users to verify the chain themselves.
Connected Funding: From Messaging Apps to DAO-Era ETH
This move builds on a growing pattern in Buterin’s funding choices. In late 2025, he granted 256 ETH to two encrypted messaging projects, Session and SimpleX, arguing that strong, metadata-resistant chat is now a basic digital right.
At the ecosystem level, he has also helped design a plan to unlock approximately 70,500 ETH from the DAO era and convert it into a roughly $ 220 million community fund focused on security and public goods.
A meaningful share of that pool aims to support privacy research, incident response, and infrastructure that reduces reliance on centralized RPC providers and “trust me” wallets. Taken together with the new 16,384 ETH allocation, these efforts push total privacy-related commitments well into the tens of millions of dollars.
In recent comments, Buterin has argued that Ethereum has drifted toward speed and convenience while sacrificing too much in privacy and true decentralization. For 2026, he wants the network to “reclaim” self-sovereignty by making private payments easier, making full-node usage more practical, and reducing dapps’ dependence on centralized backends.
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