以太坊基金会分家了？！一文读懂Ethlabs的“光明未来”

Original article from Defiant, by The Defiant Team

Translated by Odaily Planet Daily Moni

The Ethereum Foundation deliberately left a power vacuum to allow new organizational structures to step up and influence the direction of Ethereum's development.

— David Hoffman, Founder of Bankless

In May this year, David Hoffman loudly announced on social media that he had liquidated his ETH holdings, a move clearly expressing strong dissatisfaction with the current management of the Ethereum ecosystem. Perhaps spurred by this action, the Ethereum community has finally begun to ferment change, and the "new organizational structure" that David Hoffman had hoped for has now emerged.

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

What is Ethlabs?

According to the introduction on 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 for the global economy.

Ethlabs believes that the internet achieved globalization because universal protocols established a common interaction language for various networks. Although various private systems still hold practical value, they are always limited by boundaries. The financial industry is now facing a similar turning point. As value, assets, and markets become fully digitized, the world urgently needs a shared and co-built settlement infrastructure.

In this regard, Ethlabs argues that Ethereum has a unique advantage, sufficient to serve as this universal and neutral underlying foundation, allowing individual users, institutions, and various smart agents to conduct transactions without intermediaries. Ethlabs gives three reasons:

1. Credible Neutrality: Ten years of stable, uninterrupted operation, minimal counterparty risk, and a foundation that cannot be unilaterally controlled by any institution, enterprise, or individual.

2. ETH as a Base Asset: ETH is already a mature, programmable store of value. After a decade of wide distribution, it possesses ample on-chain market liquidity, making it the most decentralized native asset within the Ethereum ecosystem.

3. Rich Ecosystem Developers and DeFi Resources: Ethereum has formed a trading market, credit system, exchange mechanism, and ecosystem collaboration system open to everyone.

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

On the other hand, Ethlabs will also play a role bridging the Ethereum ecosystem: on one side are the real-world implementation needs from frontline developers, and on the other is the underlying protocol that needs to support all applications.

"We connect ordinary users, decentralized applications, wallets, Layer 2 networks, infrastructure teams, institutions, ETH holders, core developers, and researchers, ultimately converting the genuine demands of all parties into protocol optimizations, universal industry standards, supporting infrastructure, and products ready for official launch."

What are the backgrounds of the Ethlabs founding team?

Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot are among the most cited researchers in Ethereum protocol research over the past decade. Dietrichs has long been involved in research related to Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), while Monnot is renowned for his work on Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and cryptoeconomic mechanism design through the Ethereum Foundation's "Robust Incentives Group."

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

Who is supporting Ethlabs?

Disclosed investors to date include Bitmine, Sharplink, and Consensys founder Joe Lubin:

Bitmine is the largest institutional ETH treasury holder, with ETH holdings exceeding 5.67 million. It is also continuously building its own validator node infrastructure and launched its self-developed Ethereum validator node network, MAVAN, in March this year.

Sharplink is another ETH treasury company. In May this year, it co-launched a $125 million DeFi fund, the "Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund," with Galaxy, focusing on high-yield strategies such as on-chain lending and liquidity provision.

Joe Lubin, founder of Consensys and co-founder of Ethereum, acts as a core individual investor. Of course, David Hoffman has also publicly stated his support for Ethlabs on its path forward.

According to Ethlabs' official funding page, other institutional contributors include SNZ, Octant, Anchorage Digital, and investor Konstantin Lomashuk. Community supporters include Uniswap's Hayden Adams, Base's Jesse Pollak, Etherealize's Danny Ryan, Ethereum Foundation members Justin Drake and Tim Beiko, Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi, and approximately 50 other donors in total.

Is Ethlabs a Signal of a "Split" from the Ethereum Foundation?

The timing of Ethlabs' establishment is noteworthy, as on the very same day, Aerugo, Chief Strategic Advisor at the Ethereum Foundation, published a series of discussions regarding the Foundation's future execution direction. This included evaluation criteria for Ethereum Foundation "spinouts" and when the Foundation should provide funding support.

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

"Is this work core to the Ethereum Foundation's mission? If the Foundation had sufficient organizational and financial capacity, would it choose to conduct this work internally? Is there no other more suitable entity to undertake it? Can an external team execute it while avoiding increased risk of control, private interest extraction, opaqueness, or dependency?"

In fact, there is significant overlap between the core research directions of Ethlabs and the Ethereum Foundation. Aerugo identified eliminating MEV as "the next important front in the cypherpunk war" and listed it as one of the Foundation's core protocol research directions — precisely the field where Dietrichs and Monnot have long conducted research.

For now, the emergence of Ethlabs may not necessarily mean direct competition with the Ethereum Foundation, but rather represents a shift in the Ethereum ecosystem from a "single core coordination model" to a "multi-R&D entity collaboration model." As Ethlabs itself states: maintaining independent operation, Ethereum is a public project belonging to all co-builders. Ethlabs is merely one node in a vast ecosystem governance network. This is the future landscape of multi-node collaboration.

However, as the intersection between the two parties increases in terms of talent, funding, and technical direction, potential differences may still arise in the future.

Ethlabs appears to be an organizational evolution during the maturation of the Ethereum ecosystem. The key in the future lies not in whether it replaces the Ethereum Foundation, but in whether multiple R&D organizations can achieve synergy, jointly promoting Ethereum to become a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.