Originally from Defiant, Author: The Defiant Team
Compiled by | Odaily Planet Daily Moni
The Ethereum Foundation intentionally left a power vacuum so that new organizational structures could step up and influence Ethereum's development direction.
———David Hoffman, Founder of Bankless
In May this year, David Hoffman publicly announced on social media that he was selling all his ETH, clearly expressing strong dissatisfaction with the current management of the Ethereum ecosystem. Perhaps stimulated by this move, the Ethereum community finally began to brew change, and the "new organizational structure" David Hoffman longed for in his heart has now appeared.
On the evening of June 22, five former Ethereum Foundation members—Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma—officially announced the launch of an independent non-profit research and development lab, Ethlabs. It currently accepts donations in ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens.
What is Ethlabs?
According to the introduction on the official website's main page, Ethlabs is a non-profit R&D lab dedicated to the Ethereum ecosystem and ETH, with a mission to make Ethereum the global economic settlement layer.
Ethlabs believes that the internet achieved globalization because universal protocols created a common interaction language for various networks. While various private systems still hold practical value, they always have inherent limitations. Now, the financial industry is facing a similar turning point. As value, assets, and markets become fully digitalized, the world urgently needs a collaboratively built and shared settlement infrastructure.
In this regard, Ethereum possesses unique advantages, sufficient to become this universal, neutral base layer, allowing individual users, institutions, and various smart agents to conduct transactions without intermediaries. Ethlabs provides three key reasons:
1. Ethereum has credible neutrality: Ten years of stable, uninterrupted operation, possessing the lowest counterparty risk. Its foundational layer cannot be unilaterally controlled by any institution, company, or individual.
2. ETH can serve as the benchmark asset: ETH is already a mature store of value with programmable properties. After a decade of wide distribution, it has ample on-chain market liquidity and is the most decentralized native asset within the Ethereum ecosystem.
3. Rich ecosystem of developers and DeFi resources: Ethereum has already formed an open trading market, credit, exchange, and ecosystem collaboration system accessible to everyone.
Ethlabs positions itself as a bridge between cutting-edge developers and the underlying protocol, translating the real needs of ordinary users, applications, wallets, Layer 2 networks, infrastructure teams, institutions, and core developers into protocol iterations, universal standards, supporting infrastructure, and deployable products.
On the other hand, Ethlabs will also play a role in bridging the Ethereum ecosystem: on one side are the practical deployment needs brought by front-line developers, and on the other side is the underlying protocol that needs to support all applications.
"We connect with ordinary users, decentralized applications (dApps), wallets, Layer 2 networks, infrastructure teams, institutions, ETH holders, core developers, and researchers, ultimately translating the real demands of all parties into protocol optimizations, universal industry standards, supporting infrastructure, and products ready for official launch and delivery."
What are the backgrounds of Ethlabs' founding team members?
Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot are among the most cited researchers in Ethereum protocol research over the past decade. The former has long been involved in research related to Ethereum's "Proposer-Builder Separation" (PBS), while the latter is renowned for his research on MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) and cryptoeconomic mechanism design conducted through the Ethereum Foundation's "Robust Incentives Group."
Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma have rich backgrounds in economic modeling, consensus research, and applied cryptography, respectively.
Who is supporting ETHlabs?
Currently disclosed backers include Bitmine, Sharplink, and Joe Lubin, founder of Consensys:
Bitmine is the largest enterprise-level ETH treasury institution by holdings, with over 5.67 million ETH. It is also continuously building its own validator node infrastructure and launched its self-developed Ethereum validator network, MAVAN, in March this year.
Sharplink is another ETH treasury company. In May this year, it jointly launched a $125 million DeFi fund, "Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund," with Galaxy, focusing on high-yield strategies such as on-chain lending and liquidity provision.
Joe Lubin is the founder of Consensys and a co-founder of Ethereum. He is participating as a core funder in his personal capacity. Of course, David Hoffman has also publicly stated that he will provide support on Ethlabs' path forward.
According to ETHlabs' official funding page, other institutional backers include SNZ, Octant, Anchorage Digital, and investor Konstantin Lomashuk. Community supporters include Uniswap's Hayden Adams, Base's Jesse Pollak, Etherealize's Danny Ryan, the Ethereum Foundation's Justin Drake and Tim Beiko, Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi, and approximately 50 other donors in total.
Is Ethlabs a signal of the Ethereum Foundation's "Split"?
The timing of Ethlabs' establishment is particularly noteworthy because, on the very same day, Aerugo, the Chief Strategy Officer of the Ethereum Foundation, initiated a series of discussions regarding the Foundation's future execution direction. This included evaluation criteria for Ethereum Foundation "spinouts" and when it is appropriate for the Foundation to provide funding support.
According to Aerugo, spinout projects need to meet the following conditions:
"Is the work core to the Ethereum Foundation's mission? If the Ethereum Foundation had sufficient organizational and financial capacity, would it choose to undertake this work internally? Is there no more suitable party to carry it? Can an external team execute it while avoiding increased risk of capture, private benefit extraction, lack of transparency, or dependency?"
In fact, ETHlabs and the Ethereum Foundation have significant overlap in core research directions. Aerugo mentioned that eliminating MEV is "the next important front in the cypherpunk war" and listed it as one of the Ethereum Foundation's core protocol research areas—precisely the field Dietrichs and Monnot have long been researching.
At this stage, the emergence of Ethlabs may not necessarily signify direct competition with the Ethereum Foundation. It more likely represents a shift in the Ethereum ecosystem from a "single-core coordination model" to a "multi-R&D entity collaboration model." As Ethlabs itself stated: Maintaining independent operation, Ethereum belongs to the public project of all builders. Ethlabs is just one node in the vast ecosystem governance network—this is the future landscape of multi-node collaboration.
However, as the overlap in talent, funding, and technical direction between the two parties increases, potential divergences may still arise in the future.
Ethlabs resembles more of an organizational evolution in the maturing process of the Ethereum ecosystem. The key for the future lies not in whether it replaces the Ethereum Foundation, but in whether multiple R&D organizations can form synergies to jointly promote Ethereum into becoming a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.
