Ethereum moves to onboard fresh developers after Q1 austerity

The Ethereum Foundation has opened applications for the seventh cohort of its Ethereum Protocol Fellowship today, Thursday, April 30.

The program is designed to bring new developers into core protocol work months after co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced a period of fiscal restraint for the organization.

The applications for the cohort tagged EPF7 are going to be open through May 13, and the cohort is expected to run from June through November. 

The selected participants will receive monthly stipends and mentorship from active core developers. An introductory town hall is scheduled for May 6 at 1500 UTC.

In January, Buterin wrote on X that the Foundation was “entering a period of mild austerity” to balance an aggressive technical roadmap with long-term financial sustainability. The Foundation held roughly 172,000 ETH at the time and had faced criticism for annual spending that previously reached as high as $100 million, according to Cryptopolitan’s earlier reporting. 

Currently, the Foundation holds over 92,500 ETH per Arkham Intelligence, having sold some of its holdings to BitMine six days ago.

What is the Ethereum Foundation’s upcoming cohort about?

According to the Foundation’s protocol support team, the coming cohort will be smaller compared to previous rounds. The team stated that they are “prioritizing depth of engagement over breadth.”

Fellows who join the cohort will get to work more closely with the mentors, and this should also enable them to make “higher-impact contributions to the projects they take on.”

The program targets software engineers with a solid technical foundation who are self-directed and motivated by open-source work. The makeup has always revolved around gathering a diverse group with the goal of advancing Ethereum’s roadmap. 

Fellows will contribute to client implementations, testing, specifications, and core protocol research. Past participants have joined client teams and remained long-term contributors, according to the Foundation.

The May 13 application deadline will determine the size and composition of the cohort. Buterin’s January commitment to personal austerity, including earmarking 16,384 ETH for ecosystem goals over five years, set expectations that the Foundation would do more with less. 

How did Ethereum use its resources in Q1?

A day before the EPF7 announcement, the Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program published its Q1 2026 allocation update. The report lists grants across cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, security tooling, and protocol research, suggesting that while spending discipline has tightened, core development funding continues.

Among the funded projects are maintenance for the EthereumJS TypeScript stack, Lighthouse client development for the Fusaka transition, L2BEAT’s 2026 operations, and a performance benchmarking initiative to stress-test states 10 times the size of the mainnet. 

The Foundation also funded several positions through its 2026 internship program in areas including protocol consensus, cryptography, and protocol security.

The Ethereum Applications Guild, a new nonprofit announced on April 29, adds another layer to the Foundation’s developer recruitment effort. In its bio on X, the organization describes itself as “a global non-profit collaborative organization dedicated to advancing the innovation, adoption, and real-world impact of Ethereum-native applications.”