Background: David Hoffman's ETH Dump Sparks Community Turmoil
In May 2026, David Hoffman, a well-known figure in the Ethereum ecosystem, publicly announced that he had sold all his ETH holdings. This dramatic move was a clear expression of his strong dissatisfaction with the current management of the Ethereum ecosystem. His action acted as a catalyst, prompting the community to seriously discuss organizational changes. Just one month later, the "new organizational structure" that Hoffman had hoped for finally emerged.
Ethlabs Officially Launches: Core Former EF Members Form Independent R&D Lab
On the evening of June 22, five former Ethereum Foundation members — Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma — jointly 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. Its mission is unambiguous: to make Ethereum the settlement layer for the global economy. Ethlabs believes that just as the internet achieved globalization through universal protocols, the financial industry now requires a shared settlement infrastructure for the digital age.
Mission and Positioning: Three Unique Advantages of Ethereum
Ethlabs outlines three key advantages that position Ethereum as the ideal neutral base layer:
- Credible neutrality: Ethereum has operated stably for a decade with minimal counterparty risk, and its foundation is not controlled by any single entity, company, or individual.
- ETH as a base asset: ETH is a mature, programmable store of value with widespread distribution over ten years and deep on-chain liquidity, making it the most decentralized native asset in the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Rich developer and DeFi resources: Ethereum has fostered an open market for trading, lending, exchange, and collaboration accessible to everyone.
Ethlabs positions itself as a bridge between frontline developers and the underlying protocol. It aims to translate the real needs of ordinary users, applications, wallets, L2 networks, infrastructure teams, institutions, and core developers into protocol improvements, common standards, supporting infrastructure, and deployable products.
Core Team and Strong Investor Lineup
The five founders bring deep expertise: Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot are among the most cited researchers in Ethereum protocol studies over the past decade. Dietrichs has long worked on Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), while Monnot is known for his MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) research and work on the Ethereum Foundation’s “Robust Incentives Group.” Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma have backgrounds in economic modeling, consensus research, and applied cryptography, respectively.
The investor list is equally impressive: Bitmine, the largest corporate ETH treasury holder, possesses over 5.67 million ETH and has been building validator infrastructure, launching its own MAVAN validator network in March 2026. Sharplink, another ETH treasury company, teamed up with Galaxy in May to launch a $125 million DeFi fund called “Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund,” focusing on on-chain lending and liquidity provision. Joe Lubin, Consensys founder and Ethereum co-founder, participated as a core individual investor. David Hoffman also publicly pledged support. 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, Ethereum Foundation members Justin Drake and Tim Beiko, and Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi, among roughly 50 donors.
Relationship with the Ethereum Foundation: Collaboration, Not Competition
Ethlabs and the Ethereum Foundation share clear overlap in core research directions, such as eliminating MEV, which Aerugo described as “the next important front in the cypherpunk war.” This is precisely the area Dietrichs and Monnot have long studied. The emergence of Ethlabs does not necessarily signify direct competition with the Ethereum Foundation. Rather, it represents a shift from a “single-core coordination model” to a “multi-R&D entity collaboration model” within the Ethereum ecosystem. As Ethlabs states, it remains independent, but Ethereum is a public project belonging to all contributors; Ethlabs is merely one node in a vast ecosystem governance network — a future of multi-node collaboration. While potential differences may arise over time due to overlapping talent, funds, and technical directions, the key question is whether various R&D organizations can work together to make Ethereum a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.
