On June 22, five former Ethereum Foundation principal investigators announced Ethlabs, an independent, nonprofit R&D lab with a mission to make Ethereum the colonization layer of the global economy.
Co-founders Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma framed the launch around Ethereum, the protocol, and ETH, the asset.
Their announcement names ETH as “the most valuable programmable store of value” and lists research into the monetary properties of ETH among Ethlabs’ early areas of work, a position that the Foundation, within its traditional framework of credible neutrality, has avoided taking directly.
The list of backers includes BitMine and SharpLink, two ETH treasury companies whose public market narratives depend on treating ETH as institutional-grade capital, and lists them as supporters alongside Joseph Lubin, Anchorage, Octant and SNZ.
Funders will have responsibility but not control of the research program, with final direction resting with Ethlabs management, quarterly reporting and independent annual audits.
| Ethlabs component | What it shows | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Founders | Five former senior researchers at the Ethereum Foundation | Gives credibility to the laboratory protocol and integrates it into the EF succession story |
| Assignment | Making Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy | Frames Ethlabs around adoption, not just maintenance of public goods |
| EPF language | Calls ETH a programmable store of value and includes ETH monetary research | Makes capturing ETH value explicit in a way that FE has historically avoided |
| Donors | BitMine, SharpLink, Joe Lubin, Anchorage, Octant, SNZ | Shows support from ETH-aligned capital, institutions, and ecosystem power centers |
| Governance safeguards | Donors get accountability but no control; Ethlabs sets the research agenda | Resolves the main legitimacy risk: management supported by capital without capturing sponsors |
The void into which Ethlabs enters
Trent Van Epps, a former EF contributor, published an essay arguing that the Foundation has successfully communicated that it should not be Ethereum’s sole center of power, but has not clearly defined who inherits responsibility when it steps down.
He warned of a potential funding crisis for the core protocol within three to nine months, estimating that core capacity requires about $30 million per year for client teams, research and coordination.
Van Epps noted that the EF needs a complete reset of social, political and economic contracts between stakeholders, going well beyond reducing its own footprint.
This is consistent with what became visible through individual departures prior to the Ethlabs announcement. Several co-founders directly announced that they were leaving the EF to join the new laboratory.
Yuga Cohler said he was sad to see dysfunction within the Foundation and that it was losing leaders faster than it could replace them. Dankrad Feist said those leaving still believe in the FE’s stated strategy, placing the failure squarely in management execution.
Ethlabs is a response to the funding and legitimacy gap described by Van Epps: an independent laboratory formed by former FE researchers, targeting the specific areas that the FE’s restricted mandate leaves exposed.
Capturing ETH value becomes a goal of the protocol
ETH treasury companies now fund Ethereum R&D and their business models create explicit alignment between the success of the protocol and the price of ETH.
BitMine disclosed annualized ETH staking revenue of approximately $258 million in an SEC filing in June 2026. If companies like BitMine devoted even a fraction of their staking revenue to public asset research, the calculations would cover a significant portion of the $30 million annual core development figure cited by Van Epps.
Funding Ethereum R&D transforms ETH treasury companies into players in the political economy of Ethereum, 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 be fine even if EF hits a wall, because others will take over the work.
Haseeb Qureshi presented it from a venture capital perspective, as EF builders multiply while the Foundation narrows its mandate. Joe Lubin described the emerging structure as a network of “stewardship nodes,” a multi-node future, which is exactly the language used in the Ethlabs announcement.
Ethereum has a stable market cap of around $157 billion and around $14.9 billion in active RWA market cap, according to data from DefiLlama. Stablecoins, tokenized assets, DeFi and eventually AI agent trading all require neutral settlement infrastructure.
ETH-aligned Ethereum backers support Ethlabs because their holdings increase in value if Ethereum wins an institutional settlement and their preferred base layer holds that position relative to competing L1s or L2s.
What Bull and Bear Cases Look Like
The Bull case argues that Ethlabs represents the first real institutional response to the Van Epps succession problem.
Former EF researchers bring credibility to the protocol, ETH-aligned capital brings funding and urgency, and the nonprofit structure with independent governance prevents the research program from being captured by a single sponsor.
If the multi-node business model produces coordinated R&D without roadmap capture, Ethereum gains execution capacity while preserving the credible neutrality that makes it defensible as a global settlement infrastructure.
ETH is becoming easier to collateralize as institutional collateral because the protocol now has explicit and funded advocates for its monetary properties, researchers doing the work that the FE has refused to name as its own.
The problem is that legitimacy follows funding, and once ETH treasury companies, DeFi founders, L2s, investors, and former EF researchers are all funding different parts of Ethereum’s roadmap, who decides what counts as “work on Ethereum” has no clear answer.
The soft power of the FE has been a focal point, and Ethlabs can solve a funding gap while opening a governance gap: Ethereum is moving from one soft power center to many, which is more decentralized in form but harder to coordinate when disputes arise over the roadmap.
Observers will wonder whether Ethereum has replaced the Foundation’s influence with a more distributed network of capital-backed management nodes, while remaining organized around capturing the value of ETH as a common goal.
Its chief strategic advisor released a framework for evaluating and financing spin-outs the same day Ethlabs announced its plans, suggesting the Foundation is actively managing a transition, with Ethlabs taking a sanctioned role in a deliberate transfer.
If EF and Ethlabs type organizations end up competing for legitimacy over the same protocol decisions, the risk of fragmentation of governance worsens more quickly than the funding gap is reduced.
What comes next
Ethereum’s public discourse is already moving toward an overtly pro-ETH framing, in a way that the Foundation has rarely practiced.
Ethlabs refers to ETH as a programmable store of value and lists the monetary research of ETH as its primary work. This language would have been unusual coming from the FE in its traditional stance.
Expect this posture to produce friction as the broader Ethereum community questions whether optimizing ETH value capture and optimizing credible neutrality are compatible or competing goals.
The conditions that created Ethlabs, such as a shrunken EF, funding gap, and institutional capital seeking protocol-adjacent returns, will produce more organizations like this.
The test of Ethereum’s multi-node management model is whether these nodes can coordinate without recentralizing around a new set of backers who hold large ETH positions.
Van Epps identified that the problem of subtraction without succession creates a void, and Ethlabs is the first serious attempt to fill it. How it handles the tension between ETH’s investability and Ethereum’s neutrality will determine whether the model holds up.
