Ethereum has formed three major power centers, with its commercialization lifeline firmly in the hands of large ETH holders

Original Author: Gino Matos

Original Compilation: Chopper, Foresight News

On July 1st, Ethereum Institutional was launched, consolidating the Ethereum Foundation's marketing efforts into a single team tasked with promoting Ethereum's tokenization and stablecoins to banks and asset management firms.

Ethlabs, which debuted a few days earlier, was founded by five former senior researchers from the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on two main directions: improving on-chain settlement efficiency and perfecting the monetary narrative of ETH.

Bitmine, Sharplink, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin jointly provided funding for both new organizations.

The establishment of these two new entities coincides with a period of ongoing high-level departures within the Ethereum Foundation. On June 18th, the Foundation's co-Executive Director, Hsiao-Wei Wang, announced her resignation, following Tomasz Stańczak's earlier resignation. At least eight senior executives have left the Ethereum Foundation in the past five months.

Back in March 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a new functional mandate, redefining its role: solely as a guardian of self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy, and security values. It stated it does not consider itself the parent company of Ethereum, nor does it hold final decision-making power over the protocol. This positioning deliberately creates a business void, with commercial implementation-related work to be handled by external organizations.

Ethlabs takes on the technical research & development and asset value narrative sectors, responsible for perfecting the underlying infrastructure and building the complete logic of ETH as a monetary asset, thereby alleviating institutional concerns about entering the Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum Institutional is fully responsible for business development, converting industry interest into actual deployed capital by establishing industry forums, maintaining institutional relationships, and tailoring promotional strategies.

The core reason both teams operate independently of the Foundation is that the Foundation's neutral positioning cannot accommodate commercial work. If a neutral standard-setting body were to simultaneously act as an ETH promotional team and a corporate sales department, it would directly undermine its own credibility.

Thus, the three-fold power structure of Ethereum has taken shape. The Foundation is responsible for legitimacy and long-term protocol value, Ethlabs handles value capture and technical development for ETH, and Ethereum Institutional manages corporate business promotion.

Ethereum Institutional revealed that its team has already engaged with over 500 top-tier banks, global asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, custodians, and market infrastructure providers. Its hosted Ethereum Institutional Summit brought together over 150 senior finance executives from institutions managing a total of $250 trillion in assets. This vast industry resource pool is also the core reason the official Ethereum entity chose to spin off these business functions into independent organizations, rather than keeping them as subsidiary operations under the Foundation.

Outsourcing corporate business and ETH value promotion to external organizations resolves the disconnect at the Foundation's execution level. However, it also means that giants holding massive amounts of ETH and possessing enormous balance sheets now control the promotional channel targeting Wall Street. Convenience and independence are opposing directions, and Ethereum has chosen convenience.

Underpinning Ethereum's Wall Street strategy are enterprises holding massive amounts of ETH

Bitmine currently holds 5.7 million ETH, accounting for 4.7% of the total circulating supply. Combined with its cash and marketable securities, its total asset size reaches $9.8 billion. Sharplink holds 886,725 ETH and added 10,000 ETH on June 28th at an average price of $1,611.

Together, the two institutions hold 6.59 million ETH, representing 5.46% of the 120.7 million circulating supply. At current prices, the total value of their holdings is nearly $10.6 billion. Bitmine's market cap is $6.55 billion, while Sharplink's market cap exceeds $1 billion.

If this business separation model proves successful, the two funding enterprises will directly benefit: improved underlying infrastructure and more mature institutional business practices will boost market demand for ETH. Given the huge size of their holdings, even minor fluctuations in ETH price can lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in changes to their asset books. Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin supports both non-profit organizations, placing himself at the core of this interest system, while the financial returns of Bitmine and Sharplink are deeply tied to the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

PeerDAS has already been launched, which can roughly tenfold the data availability capacity of Layer 2 networks. Meanwhile, Glamsterdam, planned for release in the second half of 2026, aims to achieve base layer scaling, parallel transaction processing, and larger block payloads.

An academic report from June 2026 showed that transaction throughput on the mainnet and Layer 2 networks has doubled. The median mainnet fee dropped from over $2 to below $0.02, and Layer 2 fees fell by over 95% to as low as $0.0015.

The report also provides long-term performance forecasts: before 2034, the Ethereum mainnet's transactions per second will still be under 100; Layer 2 throughput will only surpass Solana by March 2029, but by then, Layer 2 fees will be far lower than its competitors. Whether Ethereum can attract institutional entry relies almost entirely on Layer 2 scaling and the implementation of industry standards, which is precisely the core work scope of Ethlabs.

Two potential ETH price trajectories will determine the ultimate direction of this architecture

The bullish case is that Ethereum already possesses considerable scale. Ethereum currently hosts $157 billion in stablecoin market cap, accounting for over half of the global stablecoin total. DeFi total value locked stands at $37.2 billion, representing 62% of the entire industry. RWA.xyz data shows $15.8 billion in tokenized real-world assets on Ethereum, out of a total of $31.52 billion across the entire track, solidly ranking it first among public chains.

Citi Bank predicts the global tokenized real-world asset market will expand from its current $17 billion to between $2.7 trillion and $8.2 trillion by 2030, with a midpoint of $5.5 trillion. If Ethlabs continues to iterate on infrastructure and Ethereum Institutional can convert its network of relationships into actual deployed capital, large holders like Bitmine and Sharplink will become early beneficiaries of the industry, and Ethereum could become the default settlement layer for compliant digital assets, with the value of the ETH asset rising accordingly.

The bearish case starts with price. Citi Bank lowered its 12-month target price for ETH from $3,175 to $2,240, citing weak ETF demand and negative fund flows, and set a bear case scenario for ETH at $1,094.

Standard Chartered holds the opposite view, insisting ETH could reach $4,000 by the end of 2026. The significant divergence in expectations between the two major institutions reflects the high uncertainty in the short-term market outlook.

If ETH maintains a weak trend for an extended period, the share prices of Bitmine and Sharplink may continue to trade at a discount relative to their asset holdings, continuously shrinking the ability of the two enterprises to fund the two non-profit organizations. Even if Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional can maintain operations, their funding stability would significantly decrease, and the market would constantly question whether the core purpose of establishing the two institutions was to pump ETH prices rather than to build genuinely usable, institutional-grade infrastructure.

Regulatory developments favor a bullish narrative, but cannot guarantee a price rally. The passage of the U.S. GENIUS Stablecoin Act in 2025 established a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins. Subsequently, a consortium including Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase launched the Open USD stablecoin. Improved regulation will bring incremental institutional settlement volume to all public chains, not just Ethereum. McKinsey's forecast is more conservative, estimating the tokenized market size at around $2 trillion by 2030, a stark contrast to Citi's high expectations, highlighting the significant disagreement about the industry's growth potential.

Conclusion

By splitting its business functions and establishing two independent organizations, Ethereum has resolved the inherent conflict between the Foundation's neutrality and commercialization. However, the funding for both institutions comes entirely from enterprises holding massive amounts of ETH, making this architecture a double-edged sword.

On the positive side, with specialized institutions focusing on infrastructure and engaging with Wall Street, Ethereum has the potential to become the universal settlement layer for tokenized finance. On the risk side, the entire ecosystem expansion system is fully tied to the balance sheets of major ETH holders, with the ETH price directly determining the funding supply. Both scenarios will exist simultaneously; the price of ETH one year from now will determine which trend becomes dominant.