David Hoffman's ETH Sale Spurs Change
In May, prominent Ethereum community figure David Hoffman publicly sold all his ETH, expressing strong dissatisfaction with the management of the Ethereum ecosystem. This act appeared to catalyze reflection within the community, eventually leading to organizational restructuring at the Ethereum Foundation. 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 Ethlabs, an independent non-profit research and development laboratory. The lab currently accepts donations in ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens.
Ethlabs' Mission: Ethereum as the Global Settlement Layer
According to its official website, Ethlabs is a non-profit R&D lab dedicated to making Ethereum the settlement layer for the global economy. It argues that the internet became global because common protocols provided a unified language for interaction; the financial industry is now at a similar inflection point. As value, assets, and markets become fully digitized, the world needs a shared, neutral settlement infrastructure. Ethereum offers three unique advantages: (1) credible neutrality—ten years of stable operation, minimal counterparty risk, and no single entity controls the base layer; (2) ETH as a programmable store of value, widely distributed over a decade with deep on-chain liquidity, making it the most decentralized native asset in the ecosystem; (3) a rich developer community and DeFi ecosystem that already provides open access to trading, lending, and collaboration.
Positioning: Bridge Between Frontier Developers and Base Protocol
Ethlabs positions itself as a bridge connecting users, applications, wallets, layer 2 networks, infrastructure teams, institutions, and core developers. It translates real-world needs from all these parties into protocol improvements, common standards, supporting infrastructure, and deployable products. By engaging with both front-line developers and the underlying protocol, Ethlabs ensures that protocol evolution stays aligned with practical usage requirements.
Core Team Background
Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot are among the most cited researchers in Ethereum protocol research over the past decade. Dietrichs has long been involved in Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) research; Monnot is well known for his work on Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) and cryptoeconomic mechanism design through the Ethereum Foundation's Robust Incentives Group. Caspar Schwarz-Schilling (economic models), Josh Rudolf (consensus research), and Julian Ma (applied cryptography) bring deep expertise in their respective fields.
Investors and Donors
Disclosed investors include Bitmine, Sharplink, and Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Consensys. Bitmine is the largest corporate ETH treasury, holding over 5.67 million ETH; in March it launched its own validator node network, MAVAN. Sharplink, another ETH treasury company, co-launched the $125 million DeFi fund “Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund” with Galaxy in May, focusing on on-chain lending and liquidity provision. Joe Lubin contributed as a core backer in his personal capacity, and David Hoffman has also publicly pledged support.
Other institutional backers include SNZ, Octant, Anchorage Digital, and investor Konstantin Lomashuk. The community donor list includes roughly 50 supporters, notably Uniswap's Hayden Adams, Base's Jesse Pollak, Etherealize's Danny Ryan, Ethereum Foundation's Justin Drake and Tim Beiko, and Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi.
Relationship with the Ethereum Foundation: Collaboration Over Competition
According to Aerugo's framework, a spin-off project should satisfy: Is the work core to the Ethereum Foundation's mission? Could the Foundation do it internally? Is there no more suitable host? Can an external team avoid increasing control risk, private interest extraction, or opacity? Ethlabs and the Ethereum Foundation share clear overlap in core research areas—for example, eliminating MEV is described as “the next major front in the cypherpunk war” and is a core protocol research direction for the Foundation, precisely where Dietrichs and Monnot specialize. At this stage, Ethlabs likely represents a transition from a single coordination model to a multi-entity collaborative development model within the Ethereum ecosystem. As Ethlabs states: operating independently, Ethereum is a public project owned by all builders; Ethlabs is merely one node in a large governance network. The future hinges not on whether Ethlabs replaces the Foundation, but on whether multiple R&D organizations can work synergistically to make Ethereum a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.
