Jun 25, 2026 · 18 min · 12 segments
**Does Ethereum have a funding crisis?** On today's Markets Outlook, Protocol Guild Organizer Trent Van Epps tells CoinDesk's Jennifer Sanasie why the Ethereum Foundation's subtraction philosophy is…
Trent Van EppsGuest
Jennifer SanasieHost
The EF, uh, as everybody probably is somewhat aware, is like the key coordinator of, uh, or, or has been for many years, the key coordinator of a lot of the network upgrades, the stewardship of the Ethereum network.
it has developed this, um, organizational and operational philosophy called subtraction, which is they wanna sort of push out legitimacy, push out power into the broader ecosystem.
And this is an intentional decision, and they've made increasingly greater and greater steps to do this over the years.
And, uh, earlier this year, it became clear that this was gonna happen on a more significant scale, and this was the right time for me to step away and, and start to think about what do-- what new institutions are necessary in the Ethereum ecosystem, and how can this transition actually be successfully managed.
Um, the, you know, they've-- Aya and Vitalik have written about it and spoken about it over the years, but it's just this idea of the EF is very concerned with not accruing power to itself, um, and pushing that out into the ecosystem.
And the idea is that in the same way that the network is decentralized, where you have many different nodes running, um, consensus processes, you can also have, um, different organizations and different institutions running on the political and social layer of bootstrapping the network, engaging with stakeholders, things like that.
The EF, uh, as everybody probably is somewhat aware, is like the key coordinator of, uh, or, or has been for many years, the key coordinator of a lot of the network upgrades, the stewardship of the Ethereum network.
it has developed this, um, organizational and operational philosophy called subtraction, which is they wanna sort of push out legitimacy, push out power into the broader ecosystem.
And this is an intentional decision, and they've made increasingly greater and greater steps to do this over the years.
And, uh, earlier this year, it became clear that this was gonna happen on a more significant scale, and this was the right time for me to step away and, and start to think about what do-- what new institutions are necessary in the Ethereum ecosystem, and how can this transition actually be successfully managed.
Um, the, you know, they've-- Aya and Vitalik have written about it and spoken about it over the years, but it's just this idea of the EF is very concerned with not accruing power to itself, um, and pushing that out into the ecosystem.
And the idea is that in the same way that the network is decentralized, where you have many different nodes running, um, consensus processes, you can also have, um, different organizations and different institutions running on the political and social layer of bootstrapping the network, engaging with stakeholders, things like that.
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