The Ethereum Foundation sold 5,000 ETH worth roughly $10.2 million to BitMine Immersion Technologies in an over-the-counter deal. The transaction, confirmed via the EF’s Safe multisig wallet at address 0x9fC3dc011b461664c835F2527fffb1169b3C213e, went through at an average price of $2,042.96 per ETH. It is the second time the foundation has moved ETH directly to a corporate treasury buyer, following a 10,000 ETH deal with SharpLink Gaming in July 2025, which closed at $25.7 million.
The Ethereum Foundation said the proceeds go toward core operations. Protocol R&D, ecosystem development, and community grant funding are all in scope.
What the June 2025 Policy Actually Says
The mechanics of this sale trace back to the EF’s treasury policy published June 4, 2025, authored under guidance from Hsiao-Wei Wang, Vitalik Buterin, Dankrad Feist, Tim Beiko, and others. The document sets annual operating expenditure at 15% of total treasury, and holds a buffer of 2.5 years of operating runway. Every three months, the EF calculates how far its fiat-denominated assets have drifted from that buffer target. That gap determines whether any ETH gets sold that quarter, and how much.
The policy also sets a long-term direction. EF intends to cut annual opex in a roughly straight line over the next five years, reaching a 5% baseline, the kind of ratio used by large endowment funds.
Sales typically go through fiat off-ramps or onchain swaps. The current sale used CoW DAO’s TWAP mechanism, a time-weighted average price execution that breaks the transaction into smaller pieces across a time window. It reduces visible sell pressure on open markets. No single large order hits the books.
This approach did not exist before the OTC structure. The September 2025 sale of 10,000 ETH on centralized exchanges drew community backlash. The EF moved away from that model.
Defipunk and the Onchain Deployment Logic
The treasury policy does something less covered in most reporting. It introduces a framework the EF calls “Defipunk,” a set of criteria for evaluating any DeFi protocol before the foundation deploys capital there. The properties are concrete: permissionless core contracts, self-custody defaults, free and open source licensing under AGPL or MIT, onchain privacy options for transactions and user state, and minimal reliance on oracles or admin keys.
The EF is not just selling ETH. It is staking, lending, and deploying into DeFi. Current strategies listed in the policy include solo staking and supplying wETH to established lending protocols. The foundation may also borrow stablecoins and seek additional yield onchain. Every candidate protocol goes through a vetting process for contract security, liquidity risk, and de-peg risk.
Separately, on-chain data from Arkham Intelligence showed the foundation staked 22,517 ETH into the Ethereum Beacon Deposit Contract earlier this month. That is the largest single-day staking allocation the EF has recorded, worth over $46 million.
Privacy as a Treasury Principle
One part of the policy stands apart. The EF frames privacy not as a feature preference but as a structural requirement for the health of DeFi. The document states that much of today’s DeFi operates with backdoor shutdown functions, centralized UIs, pervasive whitelists, and no meaningful onchain privacy. The EF says it will use research, advocacy, and capital to push against this.
The policy references “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” arguing privacy requires network effects and early institutional support to shift the default. EF staff involved in treasury management are expected to use and contribute to open-source, privacy-preserving tools in their daily work.
That philosophy now applies to every onchain deployment. The Defipunk criteria will govern all future EF capital allocations, not just grants.
The EF’s Safe multisig address for the current transaction is publicly accessible onchain, in line with its stated transparency commitments. Quarterly reports go to the EF board and management. Annual reports will include a breakdown of fiat versus idle ETH versus deployed ETH.
As the Ethereum Foundation posted on X:
“This transaction is part of ongoing treasury management activities, following the policy published here.”
And in a follow-up post, the foundation clarified the sale structure and multisig origin:
“This sale funds the EF’s core operations and activities, including protocol R&D, ecosystem development, community grant funding and more. The onchain tx will be from this EF Safe multisig: 0x9fC3dc011b461664c835F2527fffb1169b3C213e.”
BitMine, listed on NYSE American under the ticker BMNR, is chaired by Fundstrat’s Tom Lee. The company holds over 4.5 million ETH, making it the world’s largest publicly traded ETH treasury company.
