Former Ethereum Foundation member Trent Van Epps warned on Thursday that Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) faces a critical funding gap within 3 to 9 months.

Why The Foundation Is Pulling Back On Purpose

Van Epps, who spent five years at the Ethereum Foundation before recently stepping away, explained in an interview with Coindesk that the organization is deliberately pushing legitimacy and funding power out into the broader ecosystem rather than holding onto it. 

The Foundation’s treasury, built from the network’s earliest days, has funded critical shared resources like client development and the move from proof of work to proof of stake, but that treasury is shrinking by design.

Core development funding needs sit at roughly $30 million per year, a small figure against Ethereum’s $200 billion market cap and the trillions in stablecoin settlement the network handles. 

The problem isn’t a lack of need. It’s that as the Foundation steps back, no clear institution has stepped up to fill the gap, even as the Foundation recently cut its workforce by 20% and saw executives depart.

Protocol Guild Raised $40 Million In Four Years, But It Isn’t Enough

Van Epps built Protocol Guild, a collective funding mechanism for Ethereum’s core developers, distributing nearly $40 million over four years. 

“We’ve had some good success,” he said, “but ultimately it’s not sufficient.”

He pointed to the free-rider problem as the core obstacle to fixing it. 

“If somebody donates, but their competitor doesn’t, all of a sudden they have a distinct advantage over somebody who’s parted with some of their resources to fund the shared resource,” he said, calling coordination among large stakeholders genuinely hard even when most understand what’s at stake.

Beyond the funding question, Van Epps argued ETH as an asset needs fresh, confident storytelling that connects the token directly to the EVM’s dominance, the engine underpinning roughly 90% of total value locked across crypto including layer-2 networks.

ETH’s Chart Shows Oversold Conditions After A Sharp Trendline Break

ETH broke a rising trendline that had held since February, triggering a fast move down through $1,900, then $1,800, into the $1,557 level. 

The death cross from November 2025 remains intact across all major moving averages.

RSI sits at 28.98, an oversold reading that often precedes bounce attempts even within a larger downtrend. 

The 20-day EMA at $1,707.57 and 50-day EMA at $1,864.11 sit overhead as the first levels traders will watch for any recovery to either fail or gain real traction.

Image: Shutterstock