The original text comes from Defiant, authored by The Defiant Team

Translation | Odaily Planet Daily Moni

The Ethereum Foundation has deliberately left a power vacuum for new organizational structures to emerge and influence the direction of Ethereum's development.

———Bankless Founder David Hoffman

In May this year, David Hoffman publicly announced his exit from ETH on social media, clearly expressing strong dissatisfaction with the current management of the Ethereum ecosystem. Perhaps stimulated by this action, the Ethereum community has finally begun to brew change, and the “new organizational structure” that David Hoffman has long anticipated has finally appeared.

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

What is Ethlabs?

According to the introduction on the official website’s main page, Ethlabs is a nonprofit R&D laboratory aimed at the Ethereum ecosystem and ETH, with the mission of making Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy.

Ethlabs believes that the globalization of the internet was achieved because universal protocols built a unified language for interaction across various networks. While various proprietary systems still have practical value, they always face boundary limitations. The financial industry is now facing a similar turning point, as value, assets, and markets are fully digitized, and there is an urgent need for a shared settlement infrastructure globally.

In this regard, Ethereum has a unique advantage, sufficient to become this universal underlying neutral base, allowing individual users, institutions, and various smart entities to conduct transactions without intermediaries. Ethlabs provides three major reasons:

1. Ethereum has credible neutrality: It has operated stably and continuously for ten years, with the lowest counterparty risk, and its underlying foundation cannot be unilaterally controlled by any institution, enterprise, or individual.

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

3. An abundance of ecosystem developers and DeFi resources: Ethereum has formed an open trading market, credit, exchange, and ecosystem collaboration system accessible to everyone.

Ethlabs positions itself as a bridge between frontier developers and underlying protocols, transforming the real needs of ordinary users, applications, wallets, layer two networks, infrastructure teams, institutions, and core developers into protocol iterations, universal standards, supporting infrastructures, and deployable products.

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

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

What is the background of Ethlabs' founding team members?

Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot are among the most cited researchers in the field of Ethereum protocol research over the past decade. The former has long participated in research related to Ethereum’s “Proposer-Builder Separation” (PBS), while the latter is known for his work on MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) and the design of cryptoeconomic mechanisms conducted through the Ethereum Foundation’s “Robust Incentives Group.”

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

Who is supporting Ethlabs?

Currently disclosed investors include Bitmine, Sharplink, and Consensys founder Joe Lubin:

Bitmine is the largest enterprise-level ETH treasury institution, holding over 5.67 million ETH, while also continuing to build its own validation node infrastructure, and launched its self-developed Ethereum validation node network MAVAN in March this year.

Sharplink is another ETH treasury company, which launched a $125 million DeFi fund, “Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund,” in collaboration with Galaxy in May this year, focusing on high-yield strategies like on-chain borrowing and liquidity provision.

Joe Lubin is the founder of Consensys and co-founder of Ethereum, personally acting as a core investor, while David Hoffman has also publicly stated he will support Ethlabs’ progress.

According to Ethlabs’ official funding page, other institutional funders include SNZ, Octant, Anchorage Digital, and investor Konstantin Lomashuk. Community supporters include about 50 donors such as Uniswap’s Hayden Adams, Base’s Jesse Pollak, Etherealize’s Danny Ryan, and Ethereum Foundation’s Justin Drake, Tim Beiko, and Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi.

Is Ethlabs a “separation” signal from the Ethereum Foundation?

The establishment of Ethlabs is particularly noteworthy because, on the same day, Ethereum Foundation Chief Strategy Advisor Aerugo released a series of discussions about the Foundation's future execution direction, including the evaluation criteria for “spinout projects” from the Ethereum Foundation and when funding support should be provided by the Foundation.

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

“Does this work belong to the core mission of the Ethereum Foundation? If the Ethereum Foundation has sufficient organizational and financial capability, would it choose to undertake it internally? Is there no more suitable host? Can external teams execute while avoiding increasing control risk, private profit extraction, opacity, or dependency?”

In fact, there is a clear intersection between ETHlabs and the Ethereum Foundation's core research directions. Aerugo mentioned that eliminating MEV is “the next important front in the cryptopunk wars” and listed it as one of the key protocols being researched by the Ethereum Foundation, which is precisely the area that Dietrichs and Monnot have long researched.

At this stage, the emergence of Ethlabs may not necessarily mean direct competition with the Ethereum Foundation but rather represents a transition of the Ethereum ecosystem from a “single core coordination model” to a “multi-research entity collaboration model.” As Ethlabs itself states: to maintain independent operations, Ethereum belongs to all co-builders as a public project, and Ethlabs is just a node in the vast ecological governance network, reflecting the future pattern of multi-node collaboration.

However, with increasing overlap in talent, funding, and technological directions, potential divergences may still exist in the future.

Ethlabs appears more as an organizational evolution in the maturity of the Ethereum ecosystem. In the future, the key will not be whether it replaces the Ethereum Foundation, but whether multiple research organizations can collaborate to jointly promote Ethereum as a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.

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