EthSystems, a startup building confidentiality tools for banks and asset managers transacting on Ethereum, launched Tuesday with backing from Bitmine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming.
The founding team said it spent the past year building and running the Ethereum Foundation’s Institutional Privacy Task Force, or IPTF. During that period, the group held discussions with central banks, regulators, tier-one banks, and asset managers, while publishing a year of open-source work that included private bonds, confidential stablecoin transfers, private cross-chain settlement, a privacy-preserving identity system, and a reference document called the Ethereum Privacy Map.
Confidentiality as the missing layer for institutional settlement
EthSystems describes itself as an independent, for-profit company backed by what it calls long-term Ethereum-aligned investors. Its core argument is that institutions have adopted Ethereum as an asset class, but not yet as settlement infrastructure.
The company’s pitch is straightforward: no bank will move billion-dollar flows in full public view. On a public ledger, each party to a transaction should see only the information it has a right to see. EthSystems is positioning its products around that requirement, aiming to add confidentiality without abandoning public-chain settlement.
The IPTF previously sat inside the Ethereum Foundation’s institutional layer and worked alongside its Privacy and Scaling Explorations research team. EthSystems said it is carrying that work forward as an independent company, with protocol specifications and security properties for each system published on its website.
EthSystems lists three co-founders on its website. Oskar Thoren wrote that Tuesday was his first day off the Ethereum Foundation payroll. Mo Jalil said in a post that he worked at Goldman Sachs before joining the Ethereum Foundation. According to his LinkedIn profile, Aaryamann Challani previously held engineering roles at the Ethereum Foundation, Fuel Labs, and Status.
Bitmine and SharpLink back the launch
Bitmine said it is a lead investor in the launch, alongside SharpLink and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin. Bitmine is the largest corporate holder of ETH, with 5.77 million tokens, about 4.8% of supply. As of July 12, the company said its total crypto and cash holdings were worth about $11.3 billion.
SharpLink joined the round as well. It is the second-largest corporate holder of ETH, with about 887,000 tokens. Lubin, who founded Consensys, also chairs SharpLink.
Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee cast the investment as a wager on institutional demand. “The institutionalization of Ethereum requires infrastructure that meets institutional standards for privacy and security,” Lee said. “The next $100 trillion of assets won't migrate on-chain without it.”
SharpLink Chief Executive Joseph Chalom said the company’s thesis is that “Ethereum’s differentiated value compounds as more financial activity moves onto it,” and that realizing that value depends on institutions being able to transact privately.
A second similar bet in three weeks
The launch follows a nearly identical move from the same backers three weeks earlier. On June 22, Bitmine, SharpLink, and Lubin anchored the launch of Ethlabs, a nonprofit research lab founded by five former Ethereum Foundation researchers to work on core protocol development.
On July 1, the same group backed Ethereum Institutional, an entity focused more on business development, institutional engagement, education, and ecosystem coordination.
Both firms hold billions of dollars of ETH, giving them a direct financial interest in Ethereum becoming institutional infrastructure. Their recent activity shows a shift from simply accumulating ETH to funding the network’s infrastructure and the teams building on top of it.
The third spinout from a Foundation with a narrower mandate
EthSystems is launching into a gap the Ethereum Foundation is deliberately creating. The Foundation cut about 20% of its staff in a June restructuring. Under a mandate published in March, it reorganized around a tighter set of priorities centered on the base protocol, censorship resistance, privacy, and security.
Vitalik Buterin said the Foundation is cutting its annual budget by roughly 40% and expects outside organizations to absorb work it no longer prioritizes.
Three organizations formed by Foundation alumni have now taken shape, each focused on a different layer. Ethlabs works on core protocol and infrastructure. Ethereum Institutional handles institutional engagement, education, and ecosystem coordination. EthSystems takes the applied technical layer, turning institutional requirements into production privacy systems. In its launch materials, EthSystems described the three as complementary spinouts.
EthSystems again identifies three co-founders, all former Foundation staff who led the IPTF: Mo Jalil, previously the Foundation’s institutional privacy lead and a former Goldman Sachs employee; Oskar Thoren; and Aaryamann Challani, who has held engineering roles at the Foundation and at Status, one of the earliest Ethereum mobile clients.
Competition in institutional privacy is already forming
EthSystems is not the only team targeting institutional privacy on Ethereum. Etherealize, co-founded by former Foundation researcher Danny Ryan, is building zero-knowledge privacy and settlement infrastructure for the same class of customers. The project has backing of $40 million from Paradigm and Electric Capital.
Established privacy protocols and enterprise vendors are also competing for the same deployments.
Tension built into the funding structure
The structure of the financing also creates an obvious tension. Bitmine and SharpLink each hold billions of dollars’ worth of ETH, so the infrastructure they fund is infrastructure whose success could raise the value of their own treasuries.
Ethlabs addressed a version of that issue by routing funds through an arm’s-length grants administrator. EthSystems, as a for-profit company, has not detailed a comparable arrangement.
Market backdrop
According to CoinGecko data, ETH changed hands around $1,880 on Tuesday. The report said that leaves ETH among the weakest-performing major crypto assets of 2026 and still well below its 2025 highs. That is the backdrop against which treasury companies are funding work designed to widen institutional demand for the asset.