Ethereum Foundation - CryptoMarketsWiki (2024)

The Ethereum Foundation is a private non-profit company that promotes and manages Ethereum. It is based in Zug, Switzerland.^[1]

Background

The Ethereum Foundation was created in 2014 by Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and several others in order to help organize the efforts of Ethereum's global community. The Ethereum Foundation's 2014 presale of Ether digital tokens (ETH) raised 31,591 bitcoins (BTC), which at the time were worth $18,439,086. Approximately 60,102,216 Ether tokens were sold.^[2]

Overview

The Ethereum Foundation has been responsible for the creation of numerous events and programs meant to foster the development of Ethereum. In November 2014, the Ethereum Foundation organized an event in Berlin called DEVCON-0 in order to bring together Ethereum developers from around the world. DEVCON-0 included several presentations on the Ethereum development process by core members of its global development team, including Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood.^[3]

In April 2015, the Foundation announced the creation of the DEVgrants program, which was created in order to support and reward the work of developers contributing to the Ethereum project. Around the same time, the Foundation also began the Olympic testnet, as well as the Ethereum Bounty Program. The Olympic testnet was actually an event in which members of the Ethereum community were invited to attempt to break the Ethereum system down in any way they could; members who were particularly successful were rewarded with ETH.^[4] The Ethereum Bounty program provided rewards in BTC for any user that could find bugs or vulnerabilities in the Ethereum Platform's underlying software. The program is ongoing, and is hosted on bounty.ethereum.org. Currently, participants are rewarded in ETH, not BTC.

The Ethereum Bounty program uses a points system earned by users who find programming glitches and bugs; the more bugs you find, the higher your "score" becomes. The program's website has a leaderboard of "high scores" for its top-ranking programmers on its homepage.^[5]

In 2015, the Ethereum Foundation hosted their second developer conference, called DEVCON-1, in London. This time, attendees included Microsoft and IBM.^[6]

In January 2018, Vitalik Buterin posted on the official Ethereum blog that the Ethereum Foundation had begun the process of creating two programs to help fund the efforts of developers working on scaling solutions for Ethereum. Vitalik said these "subsidy" programs are "not intended to be sources of substantial profit," but rather "to cover some of the costs involved, with the understanding that anyone who participates in the scheme will have access to a unique opportunity to participate in Ethereum 2.0 development."^[7] The first wave of grants were announced in March 2018; 13 projects were awarded a combined total of $2.5 million worth of funding from the Ethereum foundation.^[8]

Virgil Griffith, an American employee of the foundation residing in Singapore, was arrested by U.S. authorities as he attempted to enter the United States on November 28, 2019 Thanksgiving Day - at Los Angeles International Airport. The U.S. government charged Griffith with violating sanctions against North Korea when Griffith traveled there in April to speak at a conference on cryptocurrencies. Griffith had admitted earlier to participating in the conference when he was questioned by the FBI. The foundation denied that it supported the trip and said that Griffith had traveled to North Korea on a private basis.^[9] Griffith, a research scientist for the foundation holds a PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech.^[10]

In January 2021, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it was partnering with the online forum Reddit so that both organizations can help each other scale and develop new projects for their respective communities.^[11]

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