The Ethereum Foundation (EF) announced on Apr. 8 that it would convert 5,000 ETH into stablecoins through CoWSwap’s TWAP feature to fund research, grants, and donations.
The announcement reopened a debate over what the foundation’s treasury overhaul was ever meant to accomplish. Over the last year, EF moved treasury assets into DeFi, borrowed against ETH collateral, and then launched a staking initiative centered on about 70,000 ETH.
The reality described in EF’s June 2025 treasury policy suggested a different model. It tied monetization to a fiat-denominated operating buffer and kept ETH sales, staking, and stablecoin borrowing inside the same treasury framework.
On Feb. 13, 2025, EF Treasury said it had deployed 45,000 ETH across Spark, Aave Prime, Aave Core, and Compound. On May 29, it borrowed $2 million in GHO against its Aave position.
The move carried symbolic weight because it showed EF using DeFi rails to raise working capital without selling spot ETH.
By early April, that interpretation had filtered into retail discourse, as a Reddit post argued that EF was “no longer selling.” One commenter replied that “it’s good that they stopped selling.”
Despite anecdotal evidence, this kind of chatter shows how the stronger version of the thesis had already entered circulation before EF announced the Apr. 8 conversion.
The selling continues
As EF launched its staking initiative on Feb. 24, it said it would stake 70,000 ETH, with rewards routed back to the treasury.
On Mar. 14, it finalized a 5,000 ETH OTC sale to BitMine at an average price of $2,042.96. On Apr. 3, on-chain activity pushed the staked total to roughly 69,500 ETH, close to the target. Then came the Apr. 8 CoWSwap conversion, highlighting that selling and staking had already been operating side by side for weeks.
At an ETH price around $2,220.76, a 5,000 ETH conversion equals about $11.1 million, while ETH staking reference rates in early April sat around 2.73% to 3.00%.
Applied to 70,000 ETH, that produces roughly 1,912 to 2,102 ETH a year, worth about $4.25 million to $4.67 million at current prices. A single 5,000 ETH sale equals about 2.4 to 2.6 times the full-year yield from the entire 70,000 ETH staking sleeve.
The staking program improves treasury efficiency and reduces funding requirements, but it remains well below the scale needed to replace treasury sales.
The EF June 2025 framework set annual opex at 15% of treasury and the operating buffer at 2.5 years, which implies a fiat-denominated reserve equal to 37.5% of treasury.
Applied only as an illustration to EF’s last full treasury snapshot, the Oct. 31, 2024, report showed $970.2 million in total treasury and $181.5 million in non-crypto assets, implying a policy target reserve of about $363.8 million.
EF had already publicly added stablecoin exposure after that snapshot, deploying 2,400 ETH and about $6 million in stablecoins into Morpho in October 2025, and it later announced additional ETH-to-stablecoin conversions in October 2025 and April 2026.
The exact current size of EF’s fiat-like bucket and whether tokenized RWA holdings have already been added in material size are still unknown. So the 2024 snapshot should still be treated as illustrative rather than as a stand-in for today’s balance sheet.
EF’s own allocation update showed $32.6 million in grants for the first quarter of 2025. At today’s ETH price, that equals roughly 14,700 ETH. The Apr. 8 conversion covers only about 33% of that quarter’s grant total, excluding protocol research, staffing, operations, and broader industry support.
Yield and borrowing leave the fiat-denominated budget intact and still require periodic monetization.
Potential outcomes
The bull case for EF rests on straightforward treasury arithmetic, as a higher ETH price and a lower long-run opex ratio would allow the foundation to maintain its dollar buffer while monetizing fewer coins.
| Scenario | What changes | Likely treasury effect |
|---|---|---|
| Bull case | ETH price rises, long-run opex ratio falls | Fewer coins need to be sold to maintain fiat buffer |
| Base case | Mixed strategy continues | Staking, DeFi, borrowing, and periodic sales coexist |
| Bear case | ETH price weakens, spending pressure rises | More ETH may need to be monetized to preserve runway |
| Key implication | Reserve target stays fiat-denominated | “Less selling” narrative breaks down if ETH falls |
In that setting, staking rewards and selective borrowing can reduce quarterly sales and give EF more flexibility around venue choice, whether through OTC blocks, TWAP execution, or conservative DeFi positions.
Treasury modernization would then show up in lower cadence, smaller clips, and better execution.
The bear case runs through the same framework in reverse, as EF’s reserve target is denominated in fiat terms.
A weaker ETH price can force more monetization to preserve runway, especially if the foundation leans into its counter-cyclical mandate and spends more aggressively during harder market conditions.
Under that setup, a large staking sleeve still generates yield, but the reserve requirement can rise faster than that yield offsets it.
Public expectations built around “less selling” then collide with the balance-sheet discipline EF had already written into policy.
The Apr. 8 conversion brought that discipline back into view. EF’s treasury strategy had already combined DeFi deployment, stablecoin borrowing, staking, and periodic ETH sales.
The market narrative extended beyond the written policy and beyond the foundation’s own post-staking transaction record.