David Hoffman's ETH Liquidation Sparks Change
In May, prominent Ethereum community member David Hoffman publicly announced he had sold all his ETH, expressing strong dissatisfaction with the current management of the Ethereum ecosystem. This act directly spurred the community to consider organizational restructuring. Just a month later, the new entity he had hoped for emerged.
Five Former EF Members Launch Ethlabs
On the evening of June 22, five former Ethereum Foundation (EF) members — Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma — jointly announced the creation of Ethlabs, an independent non-profit R&D laboratory. The lab currently accepts donations in ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens. According to its website, Ethlabs's mission is to "make Ethereum the settlement layer for the global economy."
Why Ethereum Can Become a Global Settlement Infrastructure
Ethlabs argues that the internet achieved globalization because universal protocols provided a common language for all networks. Finance is now at a similar inflection point — as value, assets, and markets digitize, the world needs a shared, co-built settlement infrastructure. Ethereum offers three unique advantages:
- Credible Neutrality: Ten years of stable uptime with minimal counterparty risk, not controlled by any single institution or individual.
- ETH as a Base Asset: ETH is programmable, widely distributed over a decade, with deep on-chain liquidity, making it the most decentralized native asset in the ecosystem.
- Rich Developer and DeFi Resources: Ethereum has already formed open markets, credit, exchange, and collaboration systems accessible to everyone.
Team Background and Investor Lineup
Ansgar Dietrichs has long researched Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), while Barnabé Monnot is known for work on MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) and crypto-economic mechanism design via the EF's Robust Incentives Group. Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma bring expertise in economic modeling, consensus research, and applied cryptography, respectively.
Disclosed backers include:
- Bitmine: The largest corporate treasury holder of ETH, with over 5.67 million ETH, and operator of the self-developed validator network MAVAN.
- Sharplink: Another corporate ETH treasury firm that launched a $125 million DeFi fund "Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund" with Galaxy in May.
- Joe Lubin: Co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Consensys, participating as a core individual investor.
Relationship with the Ethereum Foundation: Collaboration, Not Replacement
Ethlabs shares significant overlap with the EF in core research areas — for example, eliminating MEV is listed as a key EF protocol research direction, and it is precisely Dietrichs's and Monnot's specialty. Ethlabs positions itself as a bridge between frontline developers and the base layer, translating real needs from users, apps, wallets, L2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, and core developers into protocol upgrades, standards, and shippable products.
As Aerugo noted, a spin-off should meet criteria such as: the work is core to the EF's mission; the EF would do it internally if it had capacity; no better host exists; and the external team can avoid risks of centralization. At this stage, Ethlabs likely represents a shift from Ethereum's "single-core coordination model" to a "multi-entity collaborative R&D model." Ethlabs emphasizes: "Ethereum belongs to all its co-builders. We are just one node in a vast governance network."
Going forward, with increasing overlap in talent, funding, and research directions, potential friction may arise. Yet Ethlabs is best seen as an organizational evolution in Ethereum's maturation — the key is not whether it replaces the EF, but whether multiple R&D entities can collaborate to push Ethereum toward becoming a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.