In May of this year, David Hoffman publicly announced on social media that he had liquidated his ETH holdings, expressing strong dissatisfaction with the current management of the Ethereum ecosystem. Perhaps stimulated by this move, the Ethereum community began brewing change, and now the "new organizational structure" that Hoffman had hoped for has finally emerged.
Five Former Ethereum Foundation Members Co-Found Ethlabs
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 lab. The lab currently accepts donations in ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens.
According to its official website, Ethlabs is a non-profit R&D lab focused on the Ethereum ecosystem and ETH, with the mission of making Ethereum the settlement layer for the global economy. Ethlabs believes that the internet achieved globalization because universal protocols provided a unified interaction language for various networks. The financial industry is now facing a similar turning point, requiring a globally shared settlement infrastructure.
Three Core Advantages of Ethlabs
Ethlabs believes Ethereum possesses unique advantages to serve as a universal underlying neutral base, citing three key reasons:
1. Ethereum has credible neutrality: ten years of stable uninterrupted operation, minimal counterparty risk, and the foundation cannot be unilaterally controlled by any institution, company, or individual.
2. ETH can serve as a base asset: ETH is a mature store of value with programmability, widely distributed over a decade, with ample on-chain market liquidity, making it the most decentralized native asset in the ecosystem.
3. Rich ecosystem of developers and DeFi resources: Ethereum has formed an open trading market, credit, exchange, and ecological collaboration system accessible to all.
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 improvements, common standards, supporting infrastructure, and deliverable products.
Research Team and Supporters
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 Ethereum's Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) research, while Monnot is known for his work on Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and cryptoeconomic mechanism design through the Ethereum Foundation's Robust Incentives Group. Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma bring expertise in economic modeling, consensus research, and applied cryptography, respectively.
Disclosed investors include Bitmine, Sharplink, and Consensys founder Joe Lubin. Bitmine is the largest enterprise ETH treasury holder, with over 5.67 million ETH, and launched its own Ethereum validator node network MAVAN in March. Sharplink co-launched a $125 million DeFi fund "Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund" with Galaxy. Joe Lubin is a core backer as an individual, and David Hoffman has also publicly expressed support for Ethlabs.
According to Ethlabs' official funding page, other institutional donors 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's Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi, and approximately 50 other donors.
Relationship with the Ethereum Foundation: Collaboration or Competition?
According to Aerugo, a spin-off project must meet certain conditions: Is the work core to the Ethereum Foundation's mission? Can an external team execute it while avoiding increased control risk, private interest extraction, opacity, or dependency? In fact, Ethlabs and the Ethereum Foundation share significant overlap in core research directions. For instance, eliminating MEV is considered "the next important front in the cypherpunk war," a field long studied by Dietrichs and Monnot.
At this stage, the emergence of Ethlabs does not necessarily mean direct competition with the Ethereum Foundation. It more likely represents a shift from a "single-core coordination model" to a "multi-R&D entity collaboration model." As Ethlabs itself states: operating independently, Ethereum is a public project belonging to all contributors, and Ethlabs is just one node in the vast ecosystem governance network. However, as overlap in talent, funding, and technical direction increases, potential divergences may arise in the future.
Ethlabs represents an organizational evolution in the maturation of the Ethereum ecosystem. The key in the future is not whether it replaces the Ethereum Foundation, but whether multiple R&D organizations can collaborate synergistically to drive Ethereum toward becoming a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.