In May of this year, David Hoffman made a high-profile announcement on social media that he had completely divested from ETH. This move was clearly an expression of strong dissatisfaction with the current Ethereum ecosystem management. Perhaps inspired by this action, the Ethereum community has finally begun to brew a transformation, and the "new organizational structure" that David Hoffman has longed for has finally emerged.

On the evening of June 22, former Ethereum Foundation members Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma officially announced the launch of the independent non-profit R&D lab Ethlabs, which currently accepts donations in ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens.

What is Ethlabs?

According to the theme page of the official website, Ethlabs is a non-profit R&D lab dedicated to the Ethereum ecosystem and ETH, with a mission to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy.

Ethlabs believes that the reason the Internet has achieved globalization is that a universal protocol has provided a unified language for various networks, while various private systems, although still valuable, have always had boundary limitations. Now the financial industry is experiencing a similar turning point. As value, assets, and markets are fully digitized, the world urgently needs a collectively built and shared settlement infrastructure.

In this regard, Ethereum has a unique advantage, enough to become this universal neutral foundation, allowing individual users, institutions, and various smart entities to transact without intermediaries. Ethlabs provides three main reasons:

1. Ethereum has trust-neutral characteristics: It has been running steadily for ten years with the lowest transaction counterparty risk, and its underlying foundation will not be unilaterally controlled by any institution, corporation, or individual.

2. ETH can serve as a benchmark asset: ETH is a mature programmable value storage medium. After ten years of widespread distribution, it has abundant on-chain market liquidity and is the most decentralized native asset in the Ethereum ecosystem.

3. Developer Ecosystem and Rich DeFi Resources: Ethereum has formed an open transaction market, credit, exchange, and ecosystem collaboration system for everyone.

Ethlabs positions itself as a bridge between cutting-edge developers and underlying protocols, translating the real needs of ordinary users, applications, wallets, layer 2 networks, infrastructure teams, institutions, and core developers into protocol iterations, universal standards, supporting infrastructure, and deployable products.

On the other hand, Ethlabs will also play a role in connecting the Ethereum ecosystem: on one side, the real-world implementation needs brought by frontline developers, and on the other side, the underlying protocols that need to support all applications.

“We connect ordinary users, decentralized applications, wallets, layer 2 networks, infrastructure teams, institutions, ETH holders, core developers, and researchers, ultimately transforming the real demands of all parties into protocol optimizations, universal industry standards, supporting infrastructure, and formally deliverable products.”

What is the background of the Ethlabs founding team?

Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot are among the most cited researchers in the Ethereum protocol research field over the past decade. The former has long been involved in Ethereum's “Proposer-Builder Separation” research, while the latter is well-known for his research on MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) and cryptographic economic mechanism design conducted through the Ethereum Foundation's “Robust Incentives Group.”

Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma have rich backgrounds in economic modeling, consensus research, and applied cryptography, respectively.

Who is supporting ETHlabs?

Investors who have been disclosed to date include Bitmine, Sharplink, and ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin:

Bitmine is the largest enterprise-level ETH treasury institution by holding volume, with an ETH balance of over 5.67 million coins. It is also continuously building its own staking node infrastructure and launched its in-house Ethereum validation node network, MAVAN, in March of this year.

Sharplink is another ETH treasury company that, in May of this year, jointly launched the $125 million DeFi fund “Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund” with Galaxy, focusing on high-yield strategies such as on-chain lending and liquidity provision.

Joe Lubin is the founder of Consensys and a co-founder of Ethereum, with his personal role as a core contributor. David Hoffman has also publicly expressed his support for ETHlabs' future endeavors.

According to the official sponsorship page of ETHlabs, other institutional backers include SNZ, Octant, Anchorage Digital, and investor Konstantin Lomashuk. Community supporters consist of approximately 50 donors, including Uniswap's Hayden Adams, Base's Jesse Pollak, Etherealize's Danny Ryan, Ethereum Foundation's Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, and Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi.

Is Ethlabs a Signal of Ethereum Foundation's "Spinouts"?

The timing of ETHlabs' establishment is intriguing as it coincided with a series of discussions by Aerugo, Ethereum Foundation's Chief Strategy Officer, regarding the foundation's future direction, including the evaluation criteria for foundation-backed "spinout projects" and when the foundation should provide funding support.

According to Aerugo, spinout projects must meet the following criteria:

"Does the work fall within the Ethereum Foundation's core mission? Would the Ethereum Foundation choose to do this internally if it has sufficient organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better-suited home? Can external teams execute while mitigating capture risk, rent-seeking, opacity, or dependency?"

In fact, ETHlabs and the Ethereum Foundation have a significant overlap in core research directions. Aerugo mentioned the elimination of MEV as the "next major front in the crypto-punk wars" and listed it as one of the Ethereum Foundation's core protocol research directions, an area Dietrichs and Monnot have long been researching.

At this stage, the emergence of ETHlabs may not necessarily imply direct competition with the Ethereum Foundation but rather a shift in the Ethereum ecosystem from a "single core coordination model" to a "multi-research entity collaboration model." As ETHlabs itself states: maintaining independent operation, Ethereum belongs to all co-builders as a public project, and ETHlabs is just one node in the vast ecosystem governance network, representing the future pattern of multi-node collaboration.

However, as the two sides' intersection in talent, funding, and technology deepens, there may still be potential disagreements in the future.

Ethlabs appears more like an organizational evolution in the maturation process of the Ethereum ecosystem. The key in the future is not whether it will replace the Ethereum Foundation but whether multiple R&D organizations can collaborate to drive Ethereum towards a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.

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