Written by: Gino Matos
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
On July 1st, Ethereum Institutional was announced, consolidating the Ethereum Foundation's marketing efforts into one team. The team's responsibility is to promote Ethereum's tokenization and stablecoins to banks and asset management companies.
A few days prior, Ethlabs was unveiled, established by five former senior researchers from the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on two main directions: enhancing on-chain settlement efficiency and refining the ETH monetary narrative.
Bitmine, Sharplink, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin jointly provide funding for the two new organizations.
The launch of these two new entities coincides with ongoing high-level departures within the Ethereum Foundation. On June 18th, Hsiao-Wei Wang, the Foundation's Co-Executive Director, announced her departure. Previously, Tomasz Stańczak had submitted his resignation. In the past five months, at least eight executives have left the Ethereum Foundation.
As early as March 2026, the Ethereum Foundation published a new functional charter, redefining its position: solely as the guardian of self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy, and security principles, not claiming to be Ethereum's parent company nor holding ultimate decision-making power over the protocol. This positioning deliberately leaves a business gap, with commercial adoption-related work to be undertaken by external organizations.
Ethlabs inherits the technology R&D and asset value narrative sector, responsible for improving underlying infrastructure and crafting a complete logic for ETH as a monetary asset to alleviate institutional concerns about entering Ethereum. Ethereum Institutional is fully responsible for business engagement, aiming to convert industry interest into actual deployed capital by organizing industry forums, maintaining institutional relationships, and customizing promotional plans.
The core reason for the two teams operating independently from the Foundation is that the Foundation's neutral stance cannot accommodate commercial work simultaneously. A neutral standards-setting body acting as both an ETH promotion team and a corporate sales department would directly harm its own credibility.
Thus, Ethereum's tripartite power structure has taken shape. The Foundation is responsible for legitimacy and long-term protocol value, Ethlabs for ETH value capture and technology R&D, and Ethereum Institutional for corporate business promotion.
Ethereum Institutional revealed that the team has currently engaged with over 500 tier-one banks, global asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, custodians, and market infrastructure service providers. Its hosted Ethereum Institutional Summit gathered more than 150 financial executives, with participating institutions managing total assets of $250 trillion. Such vast industry resources are also a core reason for the official spin-off and establishment of independent entities, rather than keeping these as ancillary Foundation operations.
Handing corporate business and ETH value promotion to external agencies solves the Foundation's execution-level disconnect, but also means that giants holding massive amounts of ETH and possessing enormous balance sheets control the promotional channels facing Wall Street. Convenience and independence are two opposing directions, and Ethereum has chosen convenience.
Supporting Ethereum's Wall Street Layout are Corporations Holding Vast Amounts of ETH
Bitmine currently holds 5.7 million ETH, accounting for 4.7% of ETH's total circulating supply. Combined with cash and marketable securities, its total assets amount to $9.8 billion. Sharplink holds 886,725 ETH and added 10,000 ETH on June 28th at an average price of $1,611.
The two institutions collectively hold 6.59 million ETH, representing 5.46% of the 120.7 million circulating supply, with a total holding value of nearly $10.6 billion at current prices; Bitmine's own market capitalization is $6.55 billion, and Sharplink's exceeds $1 billion.
Once this business spin-off model proves successful, the two funding companies will directly benefit: more robust underlying infrastructure and more mature institutional business will boost ETH market demand. With their massive holdings, even slight ETH price fluctuations can lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in asset value changes. Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, supporting both non-profit organizations, sits at the core of this interest system, while Bitmine and Sharplink's financial gains are deeply tied to Ethereum ecosystem development.
PeerDAS has already launched, capable of increasing the data availability capacity of Layer 2 networks by about tenfold, while Glamsterdam, planned for the second half of 2026, aims to achieve base layer scaling, parallel transaction processing, and larger block payloads.
An academic report from June 2026 shows that transaction throughput on the mainnet and Layer 2 networks has doubled; median mainnet fees have dropped from over $2 to below $0.02, and Layer 2 fees have decreased by over 95%, as low as $0.0015.
The report also provides long-term performance predictions: before 2034, Ethereum mainnet transaction processing capacity will remain below 100 transactions per second; until March 2029, Layer 2 throughput will surpass Solana's, but by then Layer 2 fees will be far lower than the competitor's. Whether Ethereum can attract institutional entry almost entirely depends on Layer 2 scaling and industry standard adoption, which is precisely the core scope of Ethlabs' work.
Two Potential ETH Price Trajectories Will Determine This Structure's Ultimate Direction
The bullish rationale is that Ethereum already possesses considerable scale. Ethereum currently hosts a $157 billion stablecoin market capitalization, accounting for over half of the global stablecoin total; DeFi locked assets are $37.2 billion, representing 62% of the entire industry. RWA.xyz data shows Ethereum's tokenized real-world asset scale is $15.8 billion, with the total across all tracks at $315.2 billion, firmly holding the top position among public chains.
Citi Bank predicts that the global real-world asset tokenization market will expand from the current $17 billion to $5.5 trillion by 2030, with a lower bound of $2.7 trillion and an upper bound of $8.2 trillion. If Ethlabs continues to iterate on infrastructure and Ethereum Institutional can convert relationship networks into actually deployed capital, holding giants like Bitmine and Sharplink will become early industry beneficiaries, Ethereum will become the default settlement layer for compliant digital assets, and ETH's asset value will rise correspondingly.
The bearish rationale starts with price. Citi Bank lowered its 12-month target price for ETH from $3,175 to $2,240, citing weak ETF demand and negative fund inflows, and set a bear market scenario for ETH at $1,094.
Standard Chartered holds the completely opposite view, maintaining that ETH could reach $4,000 by the end of 2026. The significant divergence in expectations between the two institutions also reflects the high uncertainty in short-term market prospects.
If ETH remains weak long-term, with Bitmine and Sharplink's stock prices continuously trading at a discount relative to their held assets, the two companies' ability to fund the two non-profit organizations will continue to shrink. Even if Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional can maintain operations, funding stability will significantly decline, and the market will constantly question whether the core purpose of establishing the two organizations is to boost ETH price rather than building truly usable institutional-grade infrastructure.
Regulatory tailwinds support the bullish logic but cannot guarantee price increases. The enactment of the U.S. GENIUS Stablecoin Act in 2025 established a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins; Visa, Mastercard, and the Coinbase consortium subsequently launched the Open USD stablecoin. Regulatory improvements will bring incremental institutional settlement volume to all public chains, not a unique boon for Ethereum. McKinsey's prediction is more conservative, estimating the tokenization market size at around $2 trillion by 2030, forming a stark contrast with Citi's high expectations, indicating huge divergence in the perceived industry growth potential itself.
Summary
By spinning off business and establishing two independent entities, Ethereum has resolved the inherent contradiction between the Foundation's neutrality and commercialization. However, with both organizations funded entirely by companies holding vast amounts of ETH, this structure has coexisting pros and cons.
On the positive side, specialized agencies deepening infrastructure and engaging Wall Street could make Ethereum the universal settlement layer for tokenized finance. On the risk side, the ecosystem expansion system is completely tied to the balance sheets of holding giants, with ETH market conditions directly determining funding supply. Both scenarios will exist simultaneously. ETH's price one year from now will determine which trend dominates.
