A five-person team of former Ethereum Foundation researchers stood up EthLabs on Wednesday, backed by roughly $11.3 billion in ETH held by Bitmine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming. The new nonprofit will compete with the Foundation for talent and research direction — and the funders have said so publicly.
EthLabs launched on Wednesday as an independent research nonprofit funded through ETH holdings that Bitmine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming — the two largest publicly traded corporate holders of ether — collectively value at about $11.3 billion. The organisation is led by five former Ethereum Foundation researchers: Ansgar Dietrichs as executive director, alongside Barnabe Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma. Between them they spent years inside the Foundation working on consensus, MEV, and protocol design. Now they are outside it.
The framing from the funders was unusually direct. Both Bitmine and SharpLink acknowledged publicly that EthLabs is not a supplement to the Ethereum Foundation but a competitor for the same technical talent and the same research agenda. Joe Lubin, whose Consensys is another named backer, took the point further: EthLabs is designed to attract "the densest talent" in Ethereum, and the funders are content to run that competition in the open. This is the sharpest institutional split Ethereum has seen since the Foundation was formally spun out of the original Homestead-era leadership structure a decade ago.
The endowment structure is the interesting piece of engineering. Bitmine and SharpLink together hold roughly 6.54 million ETH, valued at $11.3 billion at Wednesday's prices, and both companies have committed treasury income to fund EthLabs research grants. Bitmine alone reached 4.8 million ETH earlier this quarter and has continued to buy through the recent drawdown. Crucially, the funders have no vote on what EthLabs works on; every contribution passes through an independent grants administrator, and final research decisions rest with the leadership team. That structure was drawn deliberately to avoid the pattern that has weighed on the Foundation itself, where the perception of proximity to donor priorities has repeatedly caused senior researchers to leave.
The Foundation has been shrinking. Vitalik Buterin published a post earlier this year framing a 40 per cent budget cut and a shift to an endowment model targeting 5 per cent annual spend of treasury by 2030 — the language of a research organisation preparing to hand off operational responsibility rather than expand it. In June, the Foundation confirmed 54 job cuts and the closure of its zero-knowledge research lab. Both co-executive directors are now gone: Tomasz Stańczak departed in February, and Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned effective 18 June. Dankrad Feist proposed a $1 billion ETH advocacy fund on his way out in May — the eighth senior staff departure of 2026. Buterin has been explicit that this is intentional. His stated view is that the Foundation should be "one node with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes," not the centre of Ethereum development.
EthLabs is the first node to actually take him at his word. The technical agenda published on launch day targets five areas: faster settlement, native asset issuance, cross-chain interoperability, mainnet capacity, and research into ETH's monetary properties. All five are areas where institutional adopters — banks, custodians, tokenised-asset issuers — have said the current protocol falls short. The framing is deliberate. Where the Foundation's public research agenda has spent years on longer-horizon items like statelessness, single-slot finality, and censorship resistance, EthLabs is positioning itself as the group that ships what Wall Street wants next.
Whether that positioning survives contact with actual research is a fair question. Dietrichs and Schwarz-Schilling both worked extensively on MEV theory at the Foundation — a subject with almost no near-term institutional relevance and enormous long-term protocol implications. Rudolf's background is in consensus and validator economics; Ma has published widely on cryptoeconomic incentives. The team has the depth to work on either agenda, and the immediate work — pushing single-slot finality below fifteen minutes — is the kind of engineering that matters equally to a Deutsche Bank settlement desk and a censorship-resistance advocate.
Bitmine and SharpLink both have skin in the game beyond talent competition. Both companies have built their public equity story on ETH treasury holdings, and both trade at valuations that require Ethereum to remain the dominant smart-contract chain. Underwriting a research organisation that keeps the protocol competitive against Solana, Base, and the newer rollups gaining share is a defensive move on their equity. It is also cheaper than paying yield on 6.54 million ETH.
The talent-drain risk to the Foundation is now the story to watch. Foundation researchers have watched five colleagues walk out the door with $11 billion behind them and a clean mandate. The pipeline works both ways, and the next quarter of Foundation attrition will tell whether EthLabs has genuinely reset the compensation and prestige balance in Ethereum research — or whether Buterin's endowment model can hold what remains.
