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This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <\/em>subscribe<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n It is frankly really hard to be the Ethereum Foundation.<\/p>\n Your job is to fund public goods R&D and ship complex network upgrades. But that means you\u2019re also constantly choosing between selling ETH and being yelled at for selling ETH.<\/p>\n The EF has a staff of about 200 employees and an annual operating budget of ~$145 million. That money comes from a treasury of largely ETH. That ETH needs to be sold to pay your staff, but ETH holders dislike when you sell the thing they own. This is crypto\u2019s most uniquely recurring theme: \u201cPlease make number go up, while also paying for things with the number.\u201d<\/p>\n So the Crypto Twitter peanut gallery wants the EF to know they can simply \u201cuse DeFi.\u201d Put the ETH in a lending vault, collect yield and stop wrecking the ETH chart, please.<\/p>\n The EF has historically been reluctant to do that for obvious reasons: It is not the job of a neutral ecosystem steward to be making complex risk management decisions.<\/p>\n Yet, yesterday the Ethereum Foundation doubled down on its use of DeFi (a continuation<\/a> since February). The EF deposited 2400 ETH ($9.1 million) and $6 million of stablecoins into Morpho\u2019s vaults.<\/p>\n This should be good news for bagholders, but not everyone is happy:<\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Where previously the Ethereum Foundation wasn\u2019t supporting its own ecosystem, now it\u2019s not supporting the right <\/em>players, i.e. the smaller guys and underdogs.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know, man. You can\u2019t seem to please everyone, so maybe these decisions simply shouldn\u2019t be public.\u00a0<\/p>\n You could imagine a world where the EF tries to be \u201cfair.\u201d It allocates capital to smaller projects, but that exposes the foundation to a wider range of smart contract\/security risks.\u00a0<\/p>\n Best case scenario: Nothing breaks but the foundation\u2019s operating expenses are inflated to pay for security researchers and an investment team. Fairness is expensive. Worst case: Protocols get exploited and the EF\u2019s treasury runway is shortened.<\/p>\n Solana doesn\u2019t seem to have the same problems, namely because its foundation isn\u2019t committed to the same levels of radical transparency as Ethereum is. Solana is selling SOL too, presumably, but no one\u2019s upset because it\u2019s not on the Twitter timeline.<\/p>\n For starters, the foundation has actively backed the Solmate DAT, and has an active partnership with the \u201cSolana Company\u201d DAT (previously Helius Medical). The EF has sold<\/a> ETH in OTC sales to DATs, but has not participated in any formal investments or partnerships with DATs.<\/p>\n Solana DATs, too, have been unabashedly proud about using <\/em>DeFi. Forward Industries\u2019 Kyle Samani wants Forward to be the most \u201cnatively onchain publicly traded company in the world,\u201d he said on an Empire<\/a> podcast, teasing the use of SOL in select Solana protocols.<\/p>\n