A coder that has been working at the Ethereum Foundation (EF) for years says their funding stopped on December 1st.

“Other projects’ funding will also have their funding cut in the following year,” Nina Breznik (pictured standing), an eth developer said after adding:

“Ethereum Foundation is planning to stop funding for most of the internal teams in the next year.

I joined about 3 years ago and was working for 2 years on Remix and then in the last year on PlayProject.”

Joseph Schweitzer, who says he works as Communications Lead at the Ethereum Foundation, publicly stated the above is “completely untrue” and called Breznik’s statements “vengeful.”

Asked to clarify what exactly was untrue, Hudson Jameson who is in charge of dev relations at EF, disputed that “they decided to stop funding the youngest projects first.” He said “I don’t see examples of this in the EF.”

In response Breznik said: “I assumed they start with the youngest first. But you are right. They said all will have to get defunded in the future but they didn’t say what pattern they’ll chose for who goes first.”

In response Jameson issued a blanket denial stating “that is categorically untrue that most of the internal teams are getting defunded.”

Alexander Praetorius, another eth coder, corroborated Breznik’s statement, saying “The only feedback we got is: That is was discussed and decided. We don’t know who actually decided, they would not tell. We don’t know what where the reasons, they would not tell.

One week ago, we finally got a reason in a few sentences via email: our project is too decentralized.”

Remix, as you might know, is one of the most used ethereum tool for coding smart contracts as it compiles human readable code into machine readable bytecode of sort of 1s and 0s.

https://twitter.com/ninabreznik/status/1202906595035770880

Praetorius himself has a fairly busy Github, with much green for quite a few years.

Why they were let go is not clear, but apparently there has been some sort of restructuring as EF now seemingly starts dipping into the eth pot.

Last time we looked in August, they had 608,000 eth, now it’s ◊597,000. Meaning ◊10,000 has been spent in about three months, worth $1.5 million.

So EF is spending about half a million dollars a month in eth, with it unclear whether they have any fiat left.

They used to burn through $20 million a year, or circa $2 million a month. Making it a 75% reduction in operations.

Although that $20 million includes grants and the rest too, if they are now going through eth, then presumably they have no fiat left so that $500,000 a month might be for everything.

They still have some $88 million worth of eth at current prices, but although that would last a few years, they’re presumably thinking long term.

They get income from the Devcon ticket sales and when Proof of Stake goes out, they’ll stake, but it looks like EF is becoming a bit leaner in this bear market.

It’s not clear whether pay reduction was offered in an attempt to retain talent which if the market turns, would probably be very much needed.

Otherwise the risk is other projects poach these coders building development tools, with attempts already underway:

If any EF funded teams are looking to continue working on similar things in a cross-blockchain way, Tezos Foundation would potentially be interested in providing funding. https://t.co/iG7eo9UEbb — Ryan Lackey (@octal) December 6, 2019

The Ethereum Foundation has made no statement on these developments with it quite unclear what Schweitzer does as communications lead because there hasn’t been much communication from EF.

It’s unclear for example just what EF’s strategy is, or how they plan to be self sustainable.

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