A New Chapter for the Ethereum Community: The Birth of Ethlabs
In May, David Hoffman publicly sold all his ETH to express his strong dissatisfaction with the current management of the Ethereum ecosystem. This move seemingly spurred the community to contemplate change. 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 nonprofit R&D laboratory. The lab currently accepts donations in ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens.
Why Ethereum as the Settlement Layer?
According to its official website, Ethlabs' mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer for the global economy. They argue that just as the internet achieved globalization through universal protocols, the financial sector now faces a similar inflection point. As value, assets, and markets become fully digital, a shared settlement infrastructure is needed. Ethereum offers three unique advantages: first, credible neutrality — ten years of uninterrupted operation with minimal counterparty risk, controlled by no single entity; second, ETH as a reserve asset — a programmable store of value with deep on-chain liquidity after a decade of widespread distribution; third, a rich ecosystem of developers and DeFi resources — an open market for trading, credit, exchange, and collaboration.
Ethlabs’ Positioning and Core Team
Ethlabs positions itself as a bridge between front-line developers and the underlying protocol. It translates the real needs of ordinary users, dApps, wallets, L2 networks, infrastructure teams, institutions, and core developers into protocol upgrades, standards, supporting infrastructure, and shippable products. The core team comes with deep expertise: Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot are among the most cited researchers in Ethereum protocol research over the past decade. Dietrichs has long worked on Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), while Monnot is known for research on MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) and cryptoeconomic mechanism design through the Ethereum Foundation's Robust Incentives Group. Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma bring backgrounds in economic modeling, consensus research, and applied cryptography, respectively.
Investors and Community Support
Disclosed backers include Bitmine, Sharplink, and Consensys founder Joe Lubin. Bitmine is the largest corporate ETH treasury, holding over 5.67 million ETH and operating its own validator node network, MAVAN. Sharplink, another ETH treasury company, co-launched a $125 million DeFi fund “Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund” with Galaxy in May, focusing on on-chain lending and liquidity provision. Joe Lubin is a key individual backer. David Hoffman has also publicly pledged support for Ethlabs’ journey. Additional institutional supporters 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 and Tim Beiko, Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi, and approximately 50 other donors.
Relationship with the Ethereum Foundation: Collaboration, Not Competition
According to Aerugo, a spin-off project must meet certain criteria: Is the work core to the Ethereum Foundation’s mission? Would the Foundation do it internally if it had the capacity? Can an external team execute it without increasing control risk, private profit extraction, opacity, or dependency? In fact, Ethlabs and the Ethereum Foundation share clear overlaps in core research. For instance, eliminating MEV is described as "the next important front in the cypherpunk war" and is a core research direction for the Foundation — exactly the area Dietrichs and Monnot have long studied.
At this stage, Ethlabs may not directly compete with the Ethereum Foundation. Rather, it 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 for all builders, and Ethlabs is just one node in a larger governance network — a multi-node collaborative future. However, as overlaps in talent, funding, and research directions increase, potential divergences may emerge. Ultimately, the key is not whether Ethlabs replaces the Ethereum Foundation, but whether multiple R&D organizations can synergize to advance Ethereum as a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.
With the growing intersection in talent, capital, and technical direction, latent disagreements may still arise, but the era of multi-node collaboration has begun.
