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It’s frankly actually onerous to be the Ethereum Basis.
Your job is to fund public items R&D and ship complicated community upgrades. However meaning you’re additionally always selecting between promoting ETH and being yelled at for promoting ETH.
The EF has a employees of about 200 staff and an annual working funds of ~$145 million. That cash comes from a treasury of largely ETH. That ETH must be bought to pay your employees, however ETH holders dislike whenever you promote the factor they personal. That is crypto’s most uniquely recurring theme: “Please make quantity go up, whereas additionally paying for issues with the quantity.”
So the Crypto Twitter peanut gallery needs the EF to know they’ll merely “use DeFi.” Put the ETH in a lending vault, accumulate yield and cease wrecking the ETH chart, please.
The EF has traditionally been reluctant to do this for apparent causes: It isn’t the job of a impartial ecosystem steward to be making complicated threat administration choices.
But, yesterday the Ethereum Basis doubled down on its use of DeFi (a continuation since February). The EF deposited 2400 ETH ($9.1 million) and $6 million of stablecoins into Morpho’s vaults.
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This needs to be excellent news for bagholders, however not everyone seems to be pleased:
The place beforehand the Ethereum Basis wasn’t supporting its personal ecosystem, now it’s not supporting the proper gamers, i.e. the smaller guys and underdogs.
I don’t know, man. You’ll be able to’t appear to please everybody, so possibly these choices merely shouldn’t be public.
You possibly can think about a world the place the EF tries to be “truthful.” It allocates capital to smaller tasks, however that exposes the muse to a wider vary of good contract/safety dangers.
Finest case state of affairs: Nothing breaks however the basis’s working bills are inflated to pay for safety researchers and an funding crew. Equity is dear. Worst case: Protocols get exploited and the EF’s treasury runway is shortened.
Solana doesn’t appear to have the identical issues, specifically as a result of its basis isn’t dedicated to the identical ranges of radical transparency as Ethereum is. Solana is promoting SOL too, presumably, however nobody’s upset as a result of it’s not on the Twitter timeline.
For starters, the muse has actively backed the Solmate DAT, and has an lively partnership with the “Solana Firm” DAT (beforehand Helius Medical). The EF has bought ETH in OTC gross sales to DATs, however has not participated in any formal investments or partnerships with DATs.
