The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a significant treasury deployment of 2,400 ETH, valued at approximately $9.6 million, along with about $6 million in stablecoins into yield-bearing vaults on the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Morpho. This move is part of the EF's broader strategy to optimize its treasury management, generate passive yield, and support open-source Ethereum ecosystem projects while addressing criticism over its historical spending habits.
The deployment into Morpho's vaults, including versions like Morpho Vault v2 and Morpho Blue v1—both released under an open GPL2.0 license—underscores the foundation's commitment to Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) principles. In an X post, the EF praised Morpho as a "pioneer in permissionless DeFi protocols" and emphasized its alignment with security, privacy, and self-sovereignty values. This action follows earlier plans to transfer a portion of its treasury into DeFi protocols, beginning with 50,000 ETH, and previous allocations to platforms like Compound and Spark.
According to Arkham Intelligence, the Ethereum Foundation currently holds over $820 million in crypto assets, with $735 million worth of ETH. The foundation's updated strategy aims for financial sustainability, targeting 15% of its treasury for annual operating expenses and maintaining a 2.5-year operating runway. It plans to diversify assets through periodic Ether sales, long-term staking and lending deployments, and allocations into fiat for liquidity and tokenized real-world assets, with a long-term goal to reduce annual operating expenses to 5%.
