The Ethereum Foundation has opened applications for the seventh cohort of its Ethereum Protocol Fellowship, known as EPF7, on Thursday, April 30. The program aims to integrate new developers into core protocol work, following co-founder Vitalik Buterin's announcement of fiscal restraint for the organization.
Applications for EPF7 will be open through May 13, with the cohort expected to run from June through November. 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. Currently, according to Arkham Intelligence, the Foundation holds over 92,500 ETH, having sold some of its holdings to BitMine six days ago.
According to the Foundation’s protocol support team, the upcoming cohort will be smaller than previous rounds, prioritizing “depth of engagement over breadth.” Fellows will have closer collaboration with mentors, enabling “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.
Fellows will contribute to client implementations, testing, specifications, and core protocol research. Past participants have joined client teams and remained long-term contributors. 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. A day before the EPF7 announcement, the Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program published its Q1 2026 allocation update, listing grants across cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, security tooling, and protocol research. 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 Ethereum Applications Guild, a new nonprofit announced on April 29, adds another layer to the Foundation’s developer recruitment effort, describing itself as “a global non-profit collaborative organization dedicated to advancing the innovation, adoption, and real-world impact of Ethereum-native applications.”
