Related Articles
Bitwise Asset Management’s staking technology is chosen by **The Ethereum Foundation to manage one of the most important treasury deployments in history of decentralized finance, selecting the firm’d open-source tools for handling a planned 70,000 Ether ($ETH)’stake program at current prices over $140 million. ** ** .
The asset manager, which manages over $15 billion in client assets, said Monday that its onchain staking arm Bitwise Onchain Solutions is developing and maintaining the software behind the foundation’s program.
According to the foundation, on February 24 it had started staking with an initial deposit of 2,016 $ETH. It also added ‘At the time it goes, about 70,000 $ETH will be invested in prizes going back to the ‘EF treasury’. Paraphrast.
Ethereum’s $ETH token is trading around $2,000 at the time of writing, so a total of about $140 million worth to fund its 70,000 token staking target.
The staking rewards will be returned to the treasury for support of protocol research and development, ecosystem grants or 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.
A new policy, based on feedback of co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others who were senior contributors, proposed an annual operating expenditure of about 15% of total treasury value and required maintaining a 2 per cent. 5-year runway in operation.
$ETH staking was identified as the natural first step.
This policy also ties it to what the foundation calls “Defipunk” principles. The principles include the use of capital only through open-source, permissionless, privacy-respecting infrastructure.
Solo staking using Bitwise’s tools satisfied all of those criteria.
The foundation is also not concentrating with one operator, and does so by directly participating in consensus through validator nodes. This allows for avoiding the need to go back to an independent third-party staking service and making sure that it doesn’t take over from one side of its own hands.
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.
Sreejith Das, Jim McDonald and Steve Berryman were the founders of Attestant. Attestant was acquired by Bitwise in late 2024, with an estimated $33 million. The company was absorbed into what became Bitwise Onchain Solutions and managed 7 billion in staked assets under management, which were then taken over by the team.
As Dirk is an omnipresent key-signing tool, it spreads cryptographic signing duties across multiple machines and jurisdictions so that no single point of failure can interfere with the foundation’s validation work.
As a legitimate client coordinator, Vouch manages several execution and beacon clients pairing (and uses configurable approaches) to protect against client diversity risks; this is known vulnerability in proof-of-stake networks where one dominant client bug could cause mass slashing?
Sreejith Das, who is now head of onchain solutions at Bitwise, said ‘We were trying to create the most resilient, secure staking infrastructure for the ecosystem when we first built Dirk and Vouch. Its use of these tools for its own treasury is validation of that original vision, as seen by the Ethereum Foundation. Paraphrast.
Bitwise chief technology officer Hong Kim called the selection “a watershed moment” for the firm.
They remain open-source public goods tools and are free to the Ethereum ecosystem as a source of both tools. Bitwise has said it will continue to update and support the software regardless of commercial arrangements.
Thanks for reading Ethereum Foundation taps Bitwise tech for $140M 70K ETH staking initiative
