Ether held by the non-profit represents about 0.3% of the total ether supply as of March 31, 2022.

The Ethereum Foundation held more than $1.6 billion in treasury assets at end-March, the non-profit said Monday.
Almost $1.29 billion was held in ether, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. That represented over 0.297% of the total ether supply as of March 31. Some $11 million was held in other cryptocurrencies.

The treasury also included about $300 million in non-crypto investments. The foundation did not return requests for details on the makeup of these assets at writing time.

“We also increase our non-crypto savings in response to rising ETH prices,” the foundation said in the report. “(This) provides a greater safety margin for our core budget and would enable us to continue funding non-core but high leverage projects through a market downturn.”

The holdings included 39,168 ether already committed to client teams building on Ethereum, according to the report.
The foundation funds research and development on Ethereum and related technologies. It spent in excess of $48 million on various teams, funding and bounties last year, the report said.

Ethereum developers, agencies, and teams involved in the foundation’s activities pocketed a cumulative $5.1 million in 2021, the report noted.

Research and development of layer 1, or base blockchains, saw a majority of last year’s spending at over $21 million, which included research on mainnet upgrade, security, mechanism design and grants to external clients.
Ether is trading just over $3,050 at writing time, CoinGecko data show.

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It’s the second large, non-crypto firm to join Shyft, following law firm DLA Piper last month.

Worldpay from FIS, the world’s largest payments processor, has partnered with the Shyft Network, a digital identity system designed to bring the cryptocurrency industry in line with global anti-money laundering (AML) rules.

Shyft is focused on allowing pseudonymous entities participating in crypto transactions – such as exchanges, custodial wallets and brokerage firms – to identify each other and securely share data about their customers, as per the requirements of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and its so-called “Travel Rule.”

The crypto industry has responded to FATF’s recommendations with a number of consortia efforts and technical initiatives that allow personally identifiable information (PII) to “travel” with crypto transactions over a certain threshold. Shyft uses blockchain technology to achieve this goal, and also stands out by having large non-crypto firms like Worldpay from FIS, and recently global law firm DLA Piper joining its ranks.

Worldpay, which provides card-to-crypto processor services for most of the large cryptocurrency exchanges, will become a member of the Shyft Federation, the companies said on Wednesday.

Worldpay will be running some of the federation nodes used by Shyft Network to validate transactions and provide data attribution, but it’s also getting involved in Shyft’s “Veriscope” Travel Rule solution, a smart-contract layer sitting on top of the network.

“FIS and Worldpay are getting equipped for the next generation of payments,” said Shyft co-founder Joseph Weinberg in an interview. “Having a regulatory-compliant data layer becomes critical, whether it be with stablecoins or between VASPs [virtual asset service providers], from a Travel Rule perspective.”

Weinberg views FATF’s Travel Rule as the beginnings of a broader decentralized identification architecture, but its first phase, which is being enormously bolstered by the likes of DLA Piper and Worldpay, is essentially about onboarding VASPs.

“It’s about how we bridge the crypto world and the traditional world,” said Weinberg. “Having institutions like DLA Piper or Worldpay being able to cross-verify these types of entities really helps establish on-chain trust in ways that we’ve never seen before.”

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