Ethereum Foundation taps Bitwise tech for $140M, 70K ETH staking initiative

The Ethereum Foundation has chosen Bitwise Asset Management’s staking technology to manage one of the most significant treasury deployments in the history of decentralized finance, selecting the firm’s open-source tools to handle a planned 70,000 Ether ($ETH) staking program worth more than $140 million at current prices.

The asset manager, which oversees more than $15 billion in client assets, announced on Monday that its onchain staking division, Bitwise Onchain Solutions, is developing and maintaining the software behind the foundation’s initiative.

The foundation announced on February 24 that it had begun staking with an initial deposit of 2,016 $ETH. It added, “Approximately 70,000 $ETH will be staked with rewards directed back to the EF treasury.”

With Ethereum’s $ETH token trading around $2,000 at the time of writing, the total of the foundation’s 70,000 token staking target is worth about $140 million.

The staking rewards will be directed back to the treasury to help fund protocol research and development, ecosystem grants, and other core operations.

Why is the Ethereum Foundation staking its treasury?

In June 2025, the Ethereum Foundation introduced a treasury management policy, its first formal framework for active deployment of assets.

The policy, developed with input from co-founder Vitalik Buterin and other senior contributors, set annual operating expenditure at roughly 15% of total treasury value and mandated maintaining a 2.5-year operational runway.

$ETH staking was identified as the natural first step.

The foundation’s policy also commits it to what it calls “Defipunk” principles. The principles involve deploying capital exclusively through open-source, permissionless, privacy-respecting infrastructure.

Solo staking using Bitwise’s tools satisfied all of those criteria.

The foundation is also avoiding concentrating staking with one single operator, and it does this by participating directly in consensus through validator nodes. This helps it to avoid delegating to a third-party staking service and ensuring that staking doesn’t become centralized.

Does Bitwise own the staking tech Ethereum Foundation chose?

The tools the Ethereum Foundation is using are Dirk and Vouch, both of which were originally built by Attestant, a London-based specialist staking infrastructure company.

Attestant was founded by Sreejith Das, Jim McDonald and Steve Berryman. Bitwise acquired Attestant in late 2024, bringing about $3.7 billion in staked assets under management and absorbing the team into what became Bitwise Onchain Solutions.

Dirk functions as a distributed key-signing tool, spreading cryptographic signing responsibilities across multiple machines and jurisdictions so that no single point of failure can interrupt the foundation’s validation duties.

Vouch acts as a validator client coordinator, managing multiple execution and beacon client pairings and applying configurable strategies to guard against client diversity risks, a known vulnerability in proof-of-stake networks where a dominant client bug could trigger mass slashings

“When we first built Dirk and Vouch, our mission was to create the most resilient, secure staking infrastructure for the ecosystem,” said Sreejith Das, now Bitwise’s head of onchain solutions. “Seeing the Ethereum Foundation adopt these tools for its own treasury is validation of that original vision.”

Bitwise chief technology officer Hong Kim called the selection “a watershed moment” for the firm.

Both tools are maintained as open-source public goods and are freely available to the Ethereum ecosystem. Bitwise has stated it will continue to update and support the software regardless of commercial arrangements.

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