foundation

The Hyper Foundation announced that it will provide approximately $10 million in grants to developers affected by the USDH exit, to cover migration costs and support an orderly transition of the ecosystem. This round of funding will be allocated to affected HIP-1 spot deployers, HIP-3 perpetual contract deployers, HyperEVM protocol, USDH:USDC cross-chain bridge, and other ecosystem participants.Among them, migration grants are aimed at teams migrating USDH-related markets or deployments to USDC; while exit grants are for projects that choose to terminate USDH-related businesses, with amounts lower than equivalent migration plans, to encourage a smooth conclusion of the ecosystem. HIP-1 and HIP-3 grants are based on auction deployment cost estimates, while HyperEVM grants are assessed based on the scale of USDH TVL affected. All beneficiaries must complete migration or business closure by the end of July.On the user side, USDH holders need to operate according to the guidelines of each protocol and can complete the exchange to USDC through the spot market or HyperEVM path. The official has provided support for asset conversion with no fees or spot trading channels. The Hyper Foundation also stated that the USDH migration is progressing smoothly, thanks to the active cooperation of developers and the community, and expressed gratitude to the relevant builders.

The data market platform Kled AI announced on platform X that The Data Foundation (formerly Story) has invested $3 million, bringing the company's total funding to $14 million.Kled stated that it had previously been strict in selecting investors, only accepting capital with strategic value. The Data Foundation has now joined several top venture capital and angel investors that have previously supported Kled. Kled expects that this year, user uploads will exceed 5 billion, with an average of over 2 million active data contributors daily.

According to The Block, Story, which focuses on on-chain intellectual property infrastructure, has been renamed DATA Foundation, shifting its business focus to AI training data and launching the on-chain data registration and auditing platform Trace. The native IP token of Story will be migrated to the new DATA token at a 1:1 ratio, and holders do not need to take any action; specific timing and guidance will be announced later.DATA also announced a deep integration with the AI training data marketplace Kled, bringing over 1.5 billion pieces of user-contributed data into the DATA network. Through Trace, each data contribution will generate an on-chain receipt, recording the data source, authorization method, contributor consent, and payment information, supporting settlement to contributors in stablecoins or fiat currency.

The new research lab Ethlabs was launched this week, co-funded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, Bitmine Immersion Technologies holding approximately 5.7 million ETH, and Sharplink holding approximately 876,000 ETH, with the specific funding amount undisclosed.Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom stated that Ethlabs will complement the Ethereum Foundation, but acknowledged that the two will "overlap in certain areas," and that "the most concentrated talent" will be at Ethlabs. The lab focuses on faster settlement, cross-chain interoperability, and readiness for institutional and AI applications, which highly overlaps with the priorities of the Foundation after its reorganization this week.This move comes as the Ethereum Foundation cut about 40% of its 2026 budget and eliminated 54 positions this week, with Vitalik Buterin defining it as a shift towards a donation fund model. Former Foundation core development coordinator Trent Van Epps warned last week that core development faces a funding gap in three to nine months. Ethlabs' first real test will be the Glamsterdam upgrade, where the roadmaps of the two organizations will intersect for the first time in a limited upgrade queue.

The Sentient Foundation announced an investment of $42 million through its "Open Source AGI Grant Program" to support developers and research institutions building and applying Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in an open-source environment.It is reported that the program aims to promote open access and ecological development of key AI technologies, ensuring that AGI remains open, decentralized, and aligned with the long-term interests of humanity. The co-launch ecological partners of this program include Alibaba Cloud, Franklin Templeton, Princeton University, and the Indian Institute of Science and Technology.

Aptos Foundation announced that it has become one of the founding contributors to the Legal Context Protocol (LCP). LCP was initiated by ADR and launched in collaboration with organizations such as Google and Circle, aiming to provide verifiable legal terms, user authorizations, and dispute resolution standards for AI Agent autonomous trading scenarios, in order to enhance compliance and enforceability in the AI agent economy.

According to Arkham monitoring, the value of the ETH holdings of the Ethereum Foundation has dropped to its lowest level in nearly 6 years (in USD), currently holding 209 million USD in ETH. Over the past two and a half weeks, its ETH holdings value reached a near 6-year low, with the last time being below the current level in October 2020.

The South Korean payment platform KG Inicis announced that it will introduce stablecoin payments to the Solana blockchain and has signed a strategic cooperation memorandum (MOU) with the Solana Foundation.KG Inicis has an annual transaction volume exceeding 250 trillion won. This collaboration will combine its existing payment infrastructure and merchant network to promote the on-chain payment of digital assets. In the future, the platform will also launch a token-based merchant reward mechanism.Currently, South Korean payment giants are accelerating the exploration of stablecoin applications in real payment scenarios, and this collaboration with Solana is seen as an important layout in the field of on-chain payments.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, stated that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a budget cut of approximately 40% this year as part of its financial transformation plan.According to the funding management policy released last year, EF is gradually transitioning from an "expenditure-based organization" to an "endowment-based model," aiming to reduce the annual expenditure ratio from about 15% to approximately 5% after 2030. In this process, the foundation emphasizes that it will accept inevitable personnel and resource adjustments and acknowledges the loss of some capabilities and experience.In this round of restructuring, EF has reduced approximately 54 employees, accounting for about 20% of the overall team. Vitalik stated that many of these departing members may continue to participate in the Ethereum ecosystem in external forms in the future. Meanwhile, the foundation will shift its strategic focus to a more "lightweight" protocol governance and development path, including advancing the "Strawmap" long-term roadmap, covering core protocol upgrades such as consensus mechanisms, privacy technologies, account models, and state structures, and promoting Ethereum's evolution into its third phase.In terms of specific structural adjustments, EF will weaken the "multi-client redundancy priority" model and shift towards a development approach based more on specialized division of labor and AI-assisted formal verification; the privacy and scalability research team PSE will be restructured, transitioning from exploratory R&D to more focused engineering implementation; the scale of ecosystem activities such as Devcon will also gradually be reduced.In addition, EF will reduce investments in large cross-domain projects in the future, placing greater emphasis on protocol security and high-value improvements, while encouraging more innovative work to be completed externally. Although the path is more streamlined, Ethereum will continue to strengthen its core positioning as a highly censorship-resistant and long-term stable protocol.

The Ethereum Foundation announced in a blog that it has completed a months-long reorganization and laid off 54 people, approximately 20% of the previous workforce.This adjustment continues the strategic transformation of "Lean Ethereum" and the development direction for 2026, repositioning the Ethereum Foundation as a lighter protocol governance and maintenance entity, rather than a primary core builder.This change is further advanced based on the 2025 PR&D (Research and Development) reorganization (reducing staff from over 110 to below 100), the previous layoff of about 19 people, and the successive departures of several senior researchers.

The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission has announced that it has listed Aurum/Aurum Foundation as a suspicious virtual asset trading platform. The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission stated that the company claims to be registered in Hong Kong under the Companies Ordinance and provides virtual asset, futures contracts, and derivative trading services on its relevant website, but the company is not licensed by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission and is suspected of conducting unlicensed activities.

According to GlobeNewswire, former Ethereum Foundation researchers have established an independent nonprofit organization called Ethlabs, supported by Bitmine, SharpLink, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, and ecosystem participants such as Anchorage, Octant, and SNZ, aiming to prepare for the next phase of institutional adoption of Ethereum. The five co-founders include Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma, who have led significant upgrades to the network over the past decade. Ethlabs' early work will focus on the demand for large-scale institutional on-chain solutions: faster settlement speeds, native issuance, cross-chain transactions based on robust infrastructure, mainnet capacity, and research laying the foundation for ETH's monetary properties.

Members of the management team of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and CSA Operator Aerugo published a systematic explanation of EF's mission. Aerugo stated that EF's core mission is to ensure that Ethereum becomes and continues to be a truly permissionless sovereign infrastructure: censorship-resistant, capture-resistant, open-source, private, and secure, capable of supporting large-scale trustless coordination.He emphasized that EF's focus is on eliminating extraction and capture risks that may arise at the protocol layer of Ethereum, particularly the two core challenges of MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) issues and the lack of default privacy. Aerugo described MEV as "the main battleground of the next cypherpunk war," and pointed out that "a public ledger without serious default privacy is a monitoring infrastructure with settlement guarantees."In addition, EF will move some of its work out of the foundation through spin-offs in the future, but will maintain strict standards for external funding. The recent departure of some personnel is part of normal organizational adjustments, and EF will handle it in a dignified manner without making personnel issues public.

In response to recent community doubts about the Ethereum Foundation and the potential for a funding crisis, Grayscale Research Director Zach Pandl posted on the X platform, stating that in the long run, the current institutional adjustments being made by the Ethereum Foundation are positive for Ethereum for two main reasons: first, more development work will be transferred to commercial organizations, which can reduce the development responsibilities borne by the Foundation and may encourage more work to be driven by commercial entities, thereby improving the overall efficiency of the ecosystem; second, the structural adjustments help maintain Ethereum's core principles as a digital currency infrastructure, and a Foundation with clearer responsibilities and a more focused scope may be more beneficial in ensuring that Ethereum continues to adhere to the "CROPS" principles necessary for building a sound digital currency.If the Ethereum Foundation reduces its direct involvement in ecosystem development in the future and focuses on maintaining Ethereum's long-term core goals, it may help strengthen ETH's positioning as a decentralized digital asset infrastructure.