Thanks to the EFers that offered helpful enter and suggestions to the draft doc: Bastian Aue, Vitalik Buterin, Bogdan Popa, Tomasz Stańczak, Fredrik Svantes, Yoav Weiss, Dankrad Feist, Tim Beiko, Nicolas Consigny, Nixo, Alex Stokes, Ladislaus, and Joseph Schweitzer.
Thanks to kpk, Steakhouse Monetary, and pcaversaccio for offering helpful and insightful enter and the ultimate evaluation of this doc.
The Ethereum Basis (EF) exists to strengthen Ethereum’s ecosystem and uphold its long-standing non-negotiable goals: enabling “purposes that run precisely as programmed with none risk of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference“. EF Treasury helps EF’s long-term company, sustainability, and legitimacy. Capital deployments must be balanced between searching for returns above a benchmark charge and lengthening EF’s position as a steward of the Ethereum ecosystem, with a selected give attention to DeFi.
This doc gives the insurance policies and steerage for EF Treasury administration and discusses the important thing indicators and issues.
1. Macro Coverage
To realize its goals, EF will keep and periodically refine an asset-liability administration coverage and a high-level grant allocation technique. EF will handle its belongings, contemplating threat, length, and liquidity, whereas remaining aligned with Ethereum’s core rules.
Our strategy focuses on two variables:
A: Annual Opex (expressed as % of present complete treasury)
B: Years of Opex Buffer (variety of years of working runway held in reserve)
The place:
- A × B: determines goal fiat-denominated (offchain or onchain) reserves. This worth instantly informs the scale and the cadence of ETH gross sales.
- (TotalTreasury – A × B) defines the worth of ETH reserves: dividing by ETH worth provides the variety of ETH that may stay in core holdings.
At common intervals, the Board and Administration re-evaluate each variables, weighing market dynamics and neighborhood enter to maintain short-term operations aligned with long-term technique. Two additional lenses form every evaluation: (1) figuring out pivotal years that advantage heightened ecosystem engagement and (2) sustaining a counter-cyclical posture—stepping up help in downturns and moderating it in bull runs.
Present targets stand at A = 15% of treasury for annual opex and B = 2.5 years. This coverage displays our conviction that 2025-26 are prone to be pivotal for Ethereum, warranting enhanced give attention to vital deliverables.
EF expects to stay a long-term steward, however envisions its scope steadily narrowing. We intend to scale back annual opex roughly linearly over the subsequent 5 years, ending at a long-term 5% baseline that’s frequent for endowment-based organizations. This glide path and baseline will likely be reviewed and adjusted as situations evolve.
2. Crypto Belongings Coverage
The EF will search to earn acceptable returns on treasury belongings in a fashion per Ethereum’s underlying rules.
The important thing issues of the on-chain portfolio embrace, however will not be restricted to:
- Security and safety: favor battle-tested, immutable, audited, permissionless protocols. Encourage positive-sum actors within the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. Intention to counterbalance, and never contribute to, systemic dangers to Ethereum as a complete. Regularly re-evaluate tasks for assault vectors and dangers, together with however not restricted to: sensible contract, governance, custodial (e.g., stablecoins), and oracle dangers.
- Cheap return and threat: choose conservative decisions with increased levels of liquidity as an alternative of chasing solely excessive returns. Guard towards not simply the danger of lack of funds but in addition dangers to liquidity and basic portfolio flexibility. Deployments which might be considerably increased threat might occur however will likely be of a extra restricted scale and in segregated sleeves. In all circumstances, intention to be a modest portion of any single challenge’s complete TVL.
- Ethereum’s deeper objectives: help maximally safe, decentralized, open supply, cypherpunk purposes. Cypherpunk DeFi is permissionless: no barbed-wire fences. Perfect protocols are trust-minimized, composable, and maximally privacy-friendly.
We’ll incessantly reallocate funds between protocols for causes reminiscent of altering market situations, diversification, or new yield alternatives. Withdrawals must be understood on this context and never as anti-endorsements.
2.1 Ether Gross sales
All year long, EF will periodically calculate the deviation of the treasury’s fiat-denominated belongings from the Opex Buffer (“B”) goal and decide how a lot, if any, Ether will likely be bought over the subsequent three months. These gross sales will sometimes be through fiat off-ramps or onchain swaps for fiat-denominated belongings.
2.2 Ether Deployments
Our present methods embrace solo staking and wETH equipped to established lending protocols. Core deployments are re-evaluated frequently however meant to be long-term. EF can also borrow stablecoins and search increased yields onchain. EF Administration and advisors will vet candidate protocols for contract safety, liquidity threat and de-peg threat, and different components. Because the DeFi ecosystem matures, EF plans to fold choose on-chain allocations, together with to rigorously vetted farms and tokenized RWAs, into its fiat reserve.
3. Fiat-denominated Belongings Coverage
The EF will allocate its fiat holdings throughout:
- Fast-liquidity belongings: money and different extremely liquid fiat-denominated devices that cowl real-time operational wants;
- Legal responsibility-matched reserves: fixed-term deposits, investment-grade bonds, and different low-risk devices aligned with longer-term obligations; and
- Tokenized RWAs: ruled by the identical strategic goals and threat pointers as native crypto belongings.
4. Transparency Coverage
The EF Co-EDs are accountable to the Board for the administration of the treasury.
To make sure transparency, accountability, and knowledgeable oversight, a structured inside reporting cadence is in place. Reviews are ready and maintained by the Finance workforce, with distribution primarily based on scope and sensitivity.
4.1. Quarterly Reviews
The Finance workforce gives quarterly stories to the Board and Administration, together with:
- Efficiency (Absolute and towards Benchmarks)
- All positions (Open & Closed because the final report)
- A abstract of notable occasions, together with:
- Operations (processes, infrastructure, safety updates/incidents)
- Ecosystem engagement (conferences taken, partnerships, and so on.)
4.2. Annual Reviews
The annual EF Report will embrace additional treasury-related data, together with a abstract of main treasury allocations. For instance, percentages in fiat, idle ETH, and deployed ETH.
5. Cypherpunk Targets
The EF (via its analysis, advocacy, and capital deployments) will construct on cypherpunk rules to assist formalize and apply a sensible analysis framework we check with as “Defipunk” which has the next properties:
Privateness is traditionally uncared for within the broader DeFi house, however it stays important. Privateness protects market individuals from each digital surveillance (e.g., entrance working, sandwiching, liquidation sniping, focused phishing, profiling and data-based coercion) and bodily threats (i.e. in-person coercion).
5.1. EF ought to actively help tasks of their Defipunk journey
Ethereum is poised to draw exponentially bigger flows of capital, expertise, and progressive vitality. Development, nevertheless, is usually path-dependent: requirements adopted in intervals of chaotic fast progress harden into legacy constraints, and designs that privilege transparency can lock in surveillance by default. Incumbent methods typically exert refined pressures that slim the design house for novel DeFi primitives and constrain privacy-focused innovation. The Ethereum Basis will defend towards these pressures.
Via analysis, advocacy, and strategic capital deployments, the EF may help domesticate an Ethereum-native monetary ecosystem that safeguards self-sovereignty and sustains, at scale, “an open society within the digital age.”
Turning this imaginative and prescient into actual infrastructure takes work. There are quite a few challenges to constructing cypherpunk DeFi protocols right now: increased fuel costs for privateness, UX friction, issue bootstrapping liquidity, extra stringent audit wants related to technical complexity and immutability, and, merely put, opponents to privateness. Consequently, a lot of right now’s DeFi ecosystem depends on centralized components: backdoor shutdown mechanisms or funds extraction features, extreme reliance on multisigs or MPC, pervasive use of whitelists, centralized and surveilled UIs, and a basic absence of onchain privateness – all go away each DeFi markets and individuals uncovered to systemic vulnerabilities.
Privateness is especially essential to get proper. As A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto factors out, “for privateness to be widespread it have to be a part of a social contract”. Privateness has inherent community results, and but it has obtained little or no consideration up to now. This implies that sturdy, early institutional help from an EF-like entity may be uniquely helpful in flipping the equilibrium towards a extra privacy-focused DeFi panorama.
EF is well-positioned to assist information DeFi’s evolution towards these objectives. For instance:
- Supporting nascent DeFi protocol to develop privateness options
- Encouraging mature protocols to strengthen Defipunk properties with analysis collaborations, liquidity, legitimacy, and different sources
- Selling analysis and improvement of decentralized UIs
A extra full checklist of standards for challenge help may be present in §5.3.
5.2. Defipunk begins at house
Advocating for open supply, privateness and different Defipunk objectives extends far past EF, however embrace EF’s personal inside operations the place potential. Utilizing Defipunk rules within the EF’s personal treasury administration is a key first step on this regard. Extra usually, the EF can use secureware instruments, construct a prudent operational construction that’s supportive of all certified contributors, together with anon and pseudonymous individuals, and in any other case enhance its safety and privateness practices. This may assist the EF stay principled and develop in energy, stability, and the flexibility to face agency.
Workers concerned in treasury administration ought to use and/or contribute to open-source, privacy-preserving instruments for routine duties, particularly if this requires upskilling in these areas. By taking care to reside and breathe Defipunk rules in its personal actions, EF will keep heading in the right direction and acquire the capabilities to help the remainder of the ecosystem in doing the identical.
5.3. Defipunk Standards
These are concrete standards for inside analysis of protocols and UIs, meant to encourage new tasks to begin, and current tasks to enhance. They are going to apply to all of EF’s future onchain deployments. Whereas some standards (e.g., permissionless entry, self-custody, and FLOSS) are easy binary determinants for deployment, others are extra complicated. For now, tasks will not be required to sit down on the “very best” finish of each axis. We search for credible progress and a roadmap for enchancment, fairly than perfection on day one. We share the framework brazenly to offer legibility for EF selections and construct alignment on these axes, and in order that the broader neighborhood can take into account, adapt, or apply them when forming its personal views.
- Permissionless entry
- Can anybody work together with the core sensible contracts with out KYC or whitelisting?
- Self Custody
- Does the protocol permit customers to take care of self-custody and current it as default?
- Free-Libre & Open Supply (FLOSS)
- Is the contract code free-libre open-source, with both a copyleft license (e.g., AGPL) or a permissive license (e.g., MIT, Apache)? Supply-available (e.g., BSL) does NOT qualify.
- Privateness
- Transactions: Does it provide choices for shielding tx origins/locations/quantities?
- State: Is consumer/private information and/or place data shielded onchain?
- Information: Does the protocol (and its typical UIs) keep away from pointless assortment of consumer information (e.g., user-agent) and private information (e.g., IP addresses)?
- Open Growth Processes
- Is the event course of moderately clear?
- Are code repositories publicly accessible and actively maintained?
- Are protocol modifications documented with clear rationales and versioning historical past?
- Is there visibility into the decision-making course of for upgrades, parameters, and roadmaps?
- Maximally Trustless Core Logic
- Immutability: is the elemental logic of the protocol non-upgradeable or ruled by a extremely decentralized, time-locked, and clear course of? (Keep away from admin keys with broad powers.)
- Maximal viable cryptoeconomics: does the protocol rely maximally on cryptographic ensures & financial incentives, and cut back the usage of authorized wrappers (like collateralization assurances) or offchain enforcement to the naked minimal required for its core operate?
- Oracle reliance
- Does it reduce reliance on oracles, and reduce losses in circumstances the place the oracle is compromised?
- Does it use strong, decentralized, governance-minimized and manipulation-resistant oracles wherever oracles are essential?
- Common Safety
- Are the contracts audited, and processes in place to trace the audited commit hash towards what was final deployed, ideally together with monitoring/alerting when the diff modifications?
- Are contract properties formally verified or a minimum of bytecode-verified on block explorers?
- Distributed UIs
- Are there a number of unbiased UIs?
- Is the first UI open supply and hosted in a decentralized method?
- Can customers work together instantly with contracts?
Enduring Stewardship
The EF is right here to remain for a very long time and wishes a sturdy long-term treasury administration coverage. We have now for a very long time merely held ETH, however at the moment are more and more shifting into staking and DeFi, each to boost monetary sustainability and to help a key software class that’s delivering on the promise of permissionless safe entry to base civilizational infrastructure for tens of millions of individuals right now. EF’s involvement in these areas is well-positioned to set precedents for instrument use that’s accountable and appropriate with its underlying objectives. To do that, it is going to make investments closely in skilling up its personal competency over time.
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