On June 22, five former senior researchers from the Ethereum Foundation announced Ethlabs, an independent nonprofit R&D lab with a mission to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy.
The co-founders, Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma, designed the launch around Ethereum, the protocol, and ETH, the asset.
Their announcement calls ETH “the most valuable, programmable store of value” and mentions research into ETH’s monetary properties among Ethlabs’ early work areas, a stance that the Foundation, in its traditional, credibly-neutral framework, avoided taking directly.
The backer list includes BitMine and SharpLink, two ETH treasury companies whose public market story depends on treating ETH as institutional-grade capital, and lists them as backers alongside Joseph Lubin, Anchorage, Octant and SNZ.
Funders will be accountable, but not in control, of the research agenda, with ultimate control resting with Ethlabs leadership, quarterly reporting and independent annual audits.
| Ethlabs component | What it shows | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Founders | Five former senior researchers from the Ethereum Foundation | Gives the laboratory protocol credibility and makes it part of the EF follow-up story |
| Mission | Make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy | Frames Ethlabs around adoption, not just the maintenance of public goods |
| ETH language | Calls ETH a programmable store of value and includes ETH monetary research | Makes ETH value capture explicit in a way that the EF has historically avoided |
| Supporters | BitMine, SharpLink, Joe Lubin, Anchorage, Octant, SNZ | Shows support from ETH-aligned capital, institutions and ecosystem power centers |
| Administrative guardrails | Financiers are given responsibility but not control; Ethlabs determines the research agenda | Addresses the most important legitimacy risk: capital-backed stewardship without capturing sponsors |
The vacuum that Ethlabs comes into
Trent Van Epps, former EF employee, published an essay arguing that the Foundation has managed to communicate that it should not be Ethereum’s sole power center, but has not clearly defined who will inherit responsibility if it steps back.
He warned of a potential funding crisis in the core protocol within three to nine months. He estimated that core capacity needs about $30 million annually for customer teams, research and coordination.
Van Epps noted that the EF needs a complete reset of the social, political and economic contracts between stakeholders, which go far beyond reducing its own footprint.
This is consistent with what became visible through individual departures before the Ethlabs announcement. Several co-founders immediately announced that they would be leaving EF to join the new laboratory.
Yuga Cohler said yes sad to see dysfunction at the Foundation and that it was losing leaders faster than it could replace them. Danrad Feist said the people who leave still believe in the EF’s strategy, which places the failure directly in the management’s execution.
Ethlabs is one answer to the funding and legitimacy gap that Van Epps described: an independent laboratory formed by former EF researchers, focusing on the specific areas exposed by the EF’s restrictive mandate.
Capturing ETH values becomes a protocol goal
ETH treasury companies now fund Ethereum R&D, and their business models ensure an explicit alignment between the success of the protocol and the ETH price.
BitMine disclosed annualized ETH stakes of approximately $258 million in a June 2026 SEC filing. If companies like BitMine spent even a fraction of their revenue on public goods research, the calculation would cover a significant portion of the $30 million annual core-dev figure Van Epps cited.
By funding Ethereum R&D, ETH treasury firms become actors in Ethereum’s political economy, with incentives to push the protocol toward outcomes that increase ETH’s institutional utility via settlement finality, monetary clarity, and depth of DeFi liquidity.
Marc Zeller responded that Ethereum will do well even if the EF hits a wall, because others will pick up the work.
Haseeb Qureshi shaped it from the enterprise side while EF builders were running while the Foundation limits its mandate. Joe Lubin described the emerging structure as a network of “steward nodes”, a multi-node future, which is exactly the language in Ethlabs’ own announcement.
Ethereum has approximately $157 billion in stablecoin market capitalization and approximately $14.9 billion in active RWA market capitalization, according to DefiLlama data. Stablecoins, tokenized assets, DeFi and ultimately trading by AI agents all require a neutral settlement infrastructure.
Ethereum’s ETH-oriented backers support Ethlabs because their assets gain value if Ethereum wins an institutional settlement and their favored base layer takes that position against competing L1s or L2s.
What the bull and bear cases look like
The bull case means that Ethlabs is the first real institutional answer to Van Epps’ succession problem.
Former EF researchers provide credibility to the protocol, ETH-directed capital provides funding and urgency, and the non-profit structure with independent governance ensures that the research agenda is not set by a single sponsor.
If the multi-node stewardship model delivers coordinated R&D without committing to roadmaps, Ethereum gains execution capacity while maintaining the credible neutrality that makes it defensible as a global settlement infrastructure.
ETH becomes easier to endorse as institutional collateral because the protocol now has explicit, funded advocates for its monetary properties, researchers doing the work that the EF refused to name as its own.
The bear case is that legitimacy follows funding, and once ETH treasury firms, DeFi founders, L2s, investors, and former EF researchers all fund different parts of Ethereum’s roadmap, the person deciding what counts as “Ethereum work” won’t have a ready-made answer.
The EF’s soft power was a focal point, and Ethlabs could solve a funding gap while opening up a governance rift: Ethereum moves from one soft power center to many, more decentralized in form but harder to coordinate when roadmap disputes arise.
Observers will wonder whether Ethereum has replaced the Foundation’s influence with a more distributed network of capital-backed stewardship nodes, while still being organized around capturing ETH value as a shared goal.
The chief strategy advisor published a framework for evaluating and financing spinouts on the same day Ethlabs announced its plans, suggesting the Foundation is actively managing a transition, with Ethlabs playing a sanctioned role in a purposeful transfer.
If EF and Ethlabs-type organizations end up competing for legitimacy over the same protocol decisions, the risk of governance fragmentation increases faster than the funding gap is closed.
What comes next
Ethereum’s public discourse is already moving toward overt pro-ETH framing in a way that the Foundation rarely practiced.
Ethlabs calls ETH a programmable store of value and cites ETH monetary research as its core work. This language would have been unusual, coming from the EF in its traditional attitude.
Expect this stance to cause friction as the broader Ethereum community debates whether optimizing for ETH value capture and optimizing for credible neutrality are compatible or competing goals.
The conditions that Ethlabs have created, such as a shrinking EF, a funding gap, and institutional capital looking for returns that align with the protocol, will breed more organizations like it.
The test for Ethereum’s multi-node stewardship model is whether these nodes can coordinate without recentralizing around a new group of backers who happen to hold large ETH positions.
Van Epps identified that the problem of subtraction without sequence creates a vacuum, and Ethlabs is the first serious attempt to fill it. How it handles the tension between ETH investability and Ethereum neutrality will determine whether the model holds up.