The Ethereum Foundation (EF) spends about $20 million a year on employees, grants and its operations according to a rough estimate by Justin Drake, a researcher at EF.
They apparently have about 100 employees, with a visualization made last year showing a number of different teams with different degrees of connections. It says:
“From the expanded graph we see that, in a loose sense, EF is an org with a center and two wings. The greens are the most central members of the org, with the two wings being the {blue,pink} wing and {brown,purple} wing.
EF is a rather silo’ed organization. This is probably more good than bad—it allows the different organs within the org to behave relatively autonomously without much bureaucracy.
Management should occassionally check-in on {Fabian, Samuel} and {Victor Maia, Leonardo} just to see how they are doing. These two pairs are wholly separated and would probably appreciate some love.”
The Foundation has about $100 million worth of eth, so they can probably afford this level of spending for years to come.
They don’t really touch the eth however save for maybe a few hundreds here and there with a movement of about ?100,000 being about two years ago.
That may have given them sufficient fiat funds to operate for years without relying on the eth holdings assuming this ?100,000 was sold at the December-January high.
Prior to that they moved millions of eth in what must be 2015 or 2016 according to blockchain data.
The foundation has recently been criticized for lacking transparency following some debate on whether using some of the block rewards and/or fees to fund protocol development would be a good idea or otherwise.
There is little clarity on who for example is the media contact if they wished to ask questions, how the grants program works exactly, and usually there is almost no public communication from EF.
Aya Miyaguchi, the Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, is presumably the one ultimately responsible for keeping the public up to date on developments at EF.
Almost nothing is heard from her, but recently she became an advisor to some sort of blockchain game, in addition to apparently sitting at the Blockchain Global Council of the World Economic Forum.
The Ethereum Foundation is apparently going through some re-organization which may potentially give rise to more clarity and transparency.
Copyrights Trustnodes.com
