In May, prominent Ethereum community figure David Hoffman publicly sold his ETH holdings to express dissatisfaction with the Foundation's management. This act appears to have catalyzed internal reflection within the community, and the new organizational structure he hoped for has now materialized.
Five Former Foundation Members Found Ethlabs
On the evening of June 22, Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma—five former Ethereum Foundation researchers—formally announced the launch of Ethlabs, an independent nonprofit R&D laboratory. The lab currently accepts donations in ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens. Each founder brings deep expertise in protocol research, economic modeling, consensus mechanisms, or applied cryptography. Dietrichs and 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 work on Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and cryptoeconomic mechanism design via the Foundation's Robust Incentives Group.
Mission and Positioning of Ethlabs
According to the official website, Ethlabs is a nonprofit R&D lab dedicated to the Ethereum ecosystem and ETH, with the mission of making Ethereum the settlement layer for the global economy. Ethlabs argues that the global financial industry is facing a turning point similar to the internet era: as value, assets, and markets become fully digital, a shared settlement infrastructure is urgently needed. Ethereum has unique advantages to serve as this neutral base layer, and Ethlabs provides three key reasons:
First, credible neutrality. Ethereum has operated stably and continuously for a decade, with minimal counterparty risk; its foundation cannot be unilaterally controlled by any institution, corporation, or individual. Second, ETH as a benchmark asset. ETH is a programmable store of value with mature distribution over ten years, deep on-chain liquidity, and the highest degree of decentralization within the ecosystem. Third, rich developer and DeFi resources. Ethereum hosts a permissionless marketplace for trading, credit, exchange, and ecosystem collaboration.
Ethlabs positions itself as a bridge between frontier developers and the underlying protocol, translating the real needs of users, apps, wallets, L2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, and core developers into protocol upgrades, universal standards, supporting infrastructure, and shippable products. It simultaneously plays the role of connecting on-the-ground requirements from builders with the base layer that must support all applications.
Strong Investor and Community Backing
Disclosed backers include Bitmine, Sharplink, and Consensys founder Joe Lubin. Bitmine is the largest corporate ETH treasury holder, with over 5.67 million ETH, and operates its own validator infrastructure; in March it launched MAVAN, a self-developed Ethereum validator network. Sharplink is another ETH treasury company that in May co-launched a $125 million DeFi fund, "Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund," focusing on on-chain lending and liquidity provision. Joe Lubin contributed as a key individual backer. David Hoffman also publicly pledged support for Ethlabs' journey.
According to Ethlabs' official funding page, other 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 members Justin Drake and Tim Beiko, and Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi, totaling about 50 donors. This broad financial and community endorsement signals strong recognition from key ecosystem participants.
A New Landscape for the Ethereum Ecosystem
According to Aerugo, a spin-off project must meet several conditions: Is the work core to the Foundation's mission? Would the Foundation choose to do it internally if it had sufficient organizational and financial capability? Is there no more suitable host? Can an external team execute while avoiding increased control risk, private interest extraction, opacity, or dependency? Ethlabs and the Foundation clearly overlap in core research areas such as MEV mitigation, but this does not imply direct competition. As Ethlabs itself states: "Operating independently, Ethereum is a public project of all builders; Ethlabs is just one node in a vast governance network."
For now, Ethlabs likely represents a shift from a single-core coordination model to a multi-R&D-body collaborative model—the future of multi-node synergy. However, as overlaps in talent, funding, and technical direction increase, potential friction may arise. But Ethlabs is more of an organizational evolution: the key is not whether it replaces the Foundation, but whether multiple R&D bodies can coordinate to jointly push Ethereum toward becoming a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.