The Ethereum Foundation ETH sale is running through CoWSwap’s time-weighted average price feature, with 5,000 ETH being converted to stablecoins. The Foundation confirmed the move on X, linking it directly to ongoing funding for R&D, grants, and donations.

On June 4, 2025, the EF published a full treasury policy document on its blog. It was the first time the Foundation had put its treasury decision-making process into a formal, public framework.

The Math Behind Every ETH Sale

The policy runs on two variables. First, annual operating expenses expressed as a percentage of total treasury value. Second, the number of years of operating runway held in reserve. Multiply them and you get the Foundation’s fiat reserve target. Whatever sits above that threshold stays in ETH.

Annual opex is currently set at 15% of total treasury. The runway buffer target is 2.5 years. When the fiat side of the treasury falls below that combined figure, ETH gets sold. The Foundation calculates the gap every quarter and decides how much to move.

Sales go through fiat off-ramps or onchain stablecoin swaps. This latest batch uses CoWSwap’s TWAP mechanism, which spaces the sale across time to reduce price impact on the open market.

As CryptoPatel reported on X, the numbers had already been moving before this batch:

“The Ethereum Foundation Continues Selling ETH. Yesterday EthereumFoundation Sold 416.67 ETH for 933340 DAI at a price of $2,240. After Yesterday’s sale, it has Now Sold Over 4,166 ETH (~$9.2M) at an Average Price of Around $2,210. It still has 1,250 ETH (~$2.71M) left to sell. The Ethereum Foundation is Currently Holding 127,686 ETH worth ~$277M.”

That puts total ETH sold past 4,166 at an average of around $2,210 per token. Roughly 1,250 ETH worth close to $2.71 million remains in the current sell window. The Foundation’s overall ETH holdings sit at 127,686 ETH, valued near $277M.

Community Pushback Came Quickly

The framing did not land without friction. As snelli5 posted on X:

“When Convert is another word of Sell”

The EF’s own post on X described the action plainly:

“Today, The Ethereum Foundation will convert 5000 ETH to stablecoins via CoWSwap’s TWAP feature as a part of our ongoing work to fund R&D, grants and donations.”

The Foundation has consistently described these moves as routine treasury maintenance tied to operational needs, not signals about ETH’s price direction.

A Defipunk Framework for DeFi Deployments

The section of the June 4 policy document that drew less attention than the sale figures is the Defipunk evaluation framework. It sets the criteria any protocol must clear before the EF puts capital into it.

Those criteria cover permissionless access, self-custody as default, free and open-source contracts, onchain privacy options, decentralized user interfaces, and what the policy calls maximally trustless core logic. Protocols with broad admin keys, centralized front-ends, or heavy multisig reliance do not pass. The EF says these criteria apply to all future onchain deployments.

The policy acknowledges most of today’s DeFi protocols fall short on several of these points. The Foundation says it will support projects with a credible path toward those standards rather than requiring perfection upfront.

Current ETH deployment strategies listed in the policy include solo staking and wrapped ETH supplied to established lending protocols. The EF also said it plans to bring select tokenized real-world assets into its fiat reserve strategy as the DeFi space develops.

The document credited input from Vitalik Buterin, Dankrad Feist, Tim Beiko, and more than a dozen other contributors across EF research and operations.