GNOME Foundation revenue was $2,892,213 in 2025, and 77% of it was one crypto donation

Quick answer. The GNOME Foundation reported total revenue of $2,892,213 for the fiscal year ended 30 September 2025, against expenses of $934,099 and net assets of $2,973,306. That is the figure Google shows, and it is correct. It is also 77.7% a single cryptocurrency donation of $2,248,286 from one contributor. Strip the non-cash gifts out and the Foundation's cash contributions for 2025 were $655,633, against the $586,000 its own board had budgeted. Of the $2,973,306 in net assets, only $442,083 is unrestricted.

The interesting thing about this filing is not that anyone got the number wrong. Nearly everyone got it right. The interesting thing is how little the right number tells you.

The number everyone is quoting

The GNOME Foundation's Form 990 for the year ended 30 September 2025 was filed on 30 June 2026. Its headline lines read:

Read cold, that is a transformation. The prior year showed $1,943,051 of revenue against $1,683,137 of expenses. Revenue rose 48.8% while expenses fell 44.5%, and net assets nearly tripled.

Organisations do not normally do that. When revenue climbs by half while spending drops by nearly half in the same twelve months, the two numbers are usually not describing the same kind of event.

Where $2,248,286 of it came from

Part VIII of the return splits contributions into cash and non-cash. For 2025 the non-cash line is $2,249,433 of the $2,905,066 total. Schedule M itemises it:

One donor, one gift, 77.7% of the year's revenue.

That leaves $655,633 of cash contributions, which is the number that describes what supporters actually sent the GNOME Foundation in 2025. The 2024 equivalent was $883,660 once the $1,057,239 of government grants are set aside.

The Foundation's own budget was almost exactly right

On 10 October 2024, ten days into the fiscal year, the GNOME Foundation published its approved budget for 2024-2025. It states, in terms:

GNOME Foundation, budget post, 10 October 2024: "The new 2024-2025 budget considers a total income of $586k, and total expense of $550k"

Against $655,633 of actual cash contributions, a $586,000 forecast is out by 11.9%. That is an unremarkable budgeting miss for a volunteer-governed nonprofit.

Against the $2,892,213 headline, the same budget looks 4.94 times too low. It is not. The budget was forecasting the Foundation's operations. The headline is forecasting nothing, because most of it is a transfer of an asset somebody else had been holding since the previous decade.

The same budget post is unusually candid about what was coming:

GNOME Foundation, same post: "This number is uncommonly high due as we have been workng with the GIMP on financial and legal arrangements to receive approx $1M of historical Bitcoin donations."

The typo is in the original. The sentence sits under a budget line of "$65,500 in fiscal sponsorship fees", which the post explains is "based on a % fee the GNOME Foundation takes for our operational costs from hosting GIMP and Black Python Devs." GNOME is GIMP's fiscal host, which the return confirms independently: program service 2 is described as "GIMP, Black Python Developers - Help fiscally sponsored projects with their nonprofit goals", carrying $219,302 of expenses and $149,481 of grants, and Schedule F records $140,880 of "GIMP Project Development" grants wired to two individuals in Europe.

The crypto was sold, at a loss

The Foundation did not hold the position. Part VIII reports gross proceeds from sales of assets of $2,208,458 against a cost basis of $2,248,286, for a realised loss of $39,828, or 1.77% of the basis.

That loss was not a misjudgement. The same October 2024 budget post says what the Foundation intended to do the moment the coins arrived, in a parenthesis its own readers mostly skipped:

GNOME Foundation, October 2024, on the incoming bitcoin: "And sell them immediately" ... "holding Bitcoin assets creates a regulatory/reporting problem for US nonprofits and our accountants have advised us against it."

Twenty months later the filing shows exactly that policy executing. The basis and the Schedule M valuation are the same number to the dollar, which tells you the disposal was of the donated crypto and that it was sold close to the date it was received. That $39,828 is why the Foundation's Part I investment income line reads negative $14,316 for 2025 despite $25,512 of actual investment income.

By year end the balance sheet holds $630,467 of non-interest-bearing cash and $2,483,889 in savings and temporary cash investments. The crypto is money in a bank account, not a position on a chart.

Only $442,083 of it can be spent

This is the part no aggregator surfaces, and it is the part that matters.

Total net assets grew by $1,930,885 in 2025. Unrestricted net assets grew by $104,278.

Expressed as days of cover against each year's own expenses:

The headline reserve reads as three years and two months of runway. The spendable reserve is five and a half months. The two differ by a factor of 6.73.

Gross balance-sheet figures overstate spendable money on infrastructure nonprofits with some regularity, though the mechanism varies. Ruby Central's 2024 cash pile looked like a recovery until you netted off $912,949 of liabilities against it. Here nothing is owed to anyone. The money simply is not the Foundation's to spend.

The honest version of the 2025 story is that the GNOME Foundation's own reserve position improved from about ten weeks to about six months, which is a real and welcome recovery, and that a large restricted asset passed across its balance sheet in the same year.

The accounting consequence: public support fell to 47.92%

A 501(c)(3) that relies on broad public support has to keep proving it. Schedule A computes the test over a rolling five years, and gifts from any one substantial contributor count only up to 2% of total support.

A single $2,248,286 gift is exactly the kind of concentration that rule exists to catch. Schedule A for 2025 excludes $3,138,730 from the five-year gifts total of $6,055,561, which is 51.83% of everything the Foundation received over five years.

The prior year's figure was 63.85%. The test threshold is 33 1/3%. So the Foundation's cushion above the line narrowed from 30.52 points to 14.59 points in the year its revenue hit a record. It still passes comfortably, and the 990 checks the box saying so. But the direction is the opposite of what the headline implies.

What the organisation actually did in 2025

Set the gift aside and the operating picture is a contraction, not an expansion.

The 2024 government grant line is consistent with Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund, whose own programme page records a EUR 1,000,000 investment in GNOME across 2023 and 2024. Its near-total disappearance in 2025 is most of the expense story: the contractor spending it paid for went with it. The Foundation ended 2025 with four employees on its Part I headcount and an interim executive director, Richard Littauer, on $32,500. Rosanna Yuen, director of operations, is the highest-paid individual at $105,385 plus $4,040 of other compensation.

The audit flag flipped, and the committee came later

Three consecutive returns answer the "were your financial statements audited" question false, false, true. The 2025 return is the first audited year, and the audit committee question flips with it.

Schedule O explains the sequencing without being asked twice:

GNOME Foundation, Schedule O, FY2025: "The organization established an audit committee after the end of the fiscal year to provide oversight during the subsequent audit process"

The trigger is in the budget post again: the Foundation budgeted $17,500 for an external audit "which is required due to our income (mostly due to STF) being over the $2M threshold". Accounting fees rose from $19,293 to $42,701 accordingly.

The first audited year also carries a prior-period adjustment of negative $27,229. That is not new here: the 2023 return restated by negative $28,999. Both are small, both are disclosed on the face of the return, and both are included in the roll-forward below.

Grading the answers already on the page

ProPublica's page is the best answer on the internet and it is not close. Every figure it extracts matches the filed XML exactly, including revenue, expenses, net income, net assets, contributions, program services, investment income, the negative $39,828 on sales of assets, total assets, total liabilities, executive compensation, other salaries, and all three paid officers. It even lists Schedule M among the attached schedules.

It also never mentions the words cryptocurrency or restricted. The fair verdict is accurate and radically incomplete, not wrong. Note as well that ProPublica's public API still lists 2023 as its most recent year with extracted data while the page renders 2025 correctly, which is now the expected state rather than a surprise.

Wikipedia's infobox carries $2,892,213 and $934,099 exactly, and then says the Foundation has 22 employees. The 990 says four. Both numbers are in the filing: Part I line 5 reports 4, and Schedule F reports 22 employees, agents and independent contractors outside the United States, summed across ten regions as 0, 1, 11, 0, 1, 0, 1, 5, 0 and 3. The two XML elements have the same tag name in different schedules. Whoever populated that infobox took the second one.

I am in no position to be smug about it. Writing this piece I made the same class of error twice: my first expense parser took only the first of three repeated "other expenses" lines and manufactured a $2,089 shortfall in a total that foots perfectly, and my first headcount read returned 4 without noticing 22 existed.

GetLatka, updated 10 August 2026, files the GNOME Foundation under "Terminal Emulator Software" and estimates $14.9M of ARR and 135 employees. LeadIQ estimates $25M to $50M and about 138 employees. Both are applying a SaaS revenue model to a nonprofit that files a 990 and has four staff. On employees they are out by a factor of roughly 34.

The checks that passed

A filing this lumpy invites suspicion, so it is worth saying plainly that it is internally clean.

• Net asset roll-forward, 3 of 3 years foot exactly, including both prior-period adjustments.
• Part IX functional expenses, 3 of 3 years foot exactly once all repeated lines are summed.
• Schedule M totals to the Part VIII non-cash line exactly: $2,248,286 plus $1,147 equals $2,249,433.
• Schedule A arithmetic exact: $6,055,561 minus $3,138,730 equals the $2,916,831 of public support, and $2,916,831 over $6,087,048 is 47.9186% against the 47.920% printed.
• Balance sheet identity holds: $3,162,187 minus $188,881 equals $2,973,306.
• Schedule I names the Software Freedom Conservancy at EIN 41-2203632 for an $8,000 Outreachy grant. Checked against the IRS record, that EIN is Software Freedom Conservancy Inc, Brooklyn NY, 501(c)(3). Exact match.

Two disclosures are worth noting neutrally because both are made voluntarily and in the open. Schedule L reports $19,330 of program contract fees paid to board member Julian Sparber, disclosed as a related-party transaction. Schedule R reports Flathub LLC as a disregarded Delaware entity of the Foundation, which means its activity is already inside the numbers above rather than hidden behind them.

What this filing does not settle

Schedule M does not name the donor, and the 990 nowhere states that the $2,248,286 of cryptocurrency is the GIMP bitcoin. What is on the record is that GNOME said in October 2024 it expected roughly $1M of historical GIMP bitcoin, that donor-restricted net assets then rose by $1,826,607, and that the Foundation is GIMP's fiscal host. The obvious reading is the obvious reading. It is not something the filing proves, and the difference between $1M anticipated and $2,248,286 received is not explained anywhere I could find.

The Foundation's own annual reports page currently lists nothing later than 2023-2024, for both annual reports and 990s, so the 2025 filing discussed here is not yet on it. That is a navigation gap rather than a transparency failure; the return is public, and ProPublica has had it since June.

One more caution for anyone tempted to reuse these numbers. Schedule F reports total foreign expenditures of $586,595 for 2025. That is within a rounding error of the $586,000 income figure in the budget post, and the two have nothing to do with each other. Coincidences like that are how bad charts get made.

The number to actually use

If you want one figure for the GNOME Foundation in 2025, $2,892,213 is defensible and nearly useless on its own.

The number that describes the organisation is $655,633 of cash contributions against $934,099 of expenses, funded partly out of reserves, with $442,083 of spendable money left at year end. That is a small foundation running a large desktop, which had a very good year on its balance sheet and a fairly hard one everywhere else.

It is a more interesting story than a record, and every service that published the headline had the composition sitting a few pages further into the same document.