Ether’s biggest corporate holders back new Ethereum research hub

A group of former Ethereum Foundation researchers have started a new nonprofit research and development organization backed by some of ether's largest corporate holders, as the Ethereum ecosystem undergoes a major organizational shift.

Ethlabs, announced on Monday, is funded by two of the largest Ethereum treasury firms SharpLink Gaming (SBET), Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), alongside with Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO Joe Lubin and several other entities including Anchorage Digital, Octant and SNZ.

The organization is led by five former senior Ethereum Foundation contributors: Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma, according to the press release. The researchers worked on areas including Ethereum scaling, data availability, protocol economics and network finality.

The launch comes amid a period of upheaval at the Ethereum Foundation, the Switzerland-based nonprofit that coordinates much of Ethereum's research and development efforts. Last week, co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang announced she would step down from her leadership position, adding to a growing list of exits from the organization. Ma and Monnot left the foundation earlier this year as part of those high-profile exits.

Against that backdrop, Ethlabs represents what supporters describe as a broader transition toward a "multi-node" development model, where independent organizations share responsibility for advancing the network rather than relying heavily on the Foundation.

"We are now poised to recognize and implement the idea that there should be a number of steward nodes of Ethereum," Joe Lubin said, "each configured in their unique way to evolve and protect what is sacred about the network and massively grow the world's appreciation and utilization of it."

Ethlabs' initial work will focus on faster transaction settlement, expanding Ethereum's capacity and improving infrastructure for institutions issuing tokenized assets and stablecoins onchain. Ethereum dominates the $300 billion stablecoin market with a 53% market share and hosts roughly half of the $32 billion tokenized asset market, RWA.xyz data shows.

The initiative also reflects the growing institutional investment in Ethereum. SharpLink and Bitmine have both built sizable ETH treasury strategies, while Ethereum continues to host the majority of stablecoins and tokenized real-world asset issuance.

"Ethereum is at a pivotal moment," Ansgar Dietrichs, Ethlabs' executive director, said in a statement. "As blockchain systems move rapidly into mainstream use, the coming years will define the shape of the onchain economy for decades."