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

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily Moni

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

— Bankless Founder David Hoffman

In May this year, David Hoffman publicly announced on social media that he had liquidated all 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 brew 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 laboratory, currently accepting donations in ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens.

What is Ethlabs?

According to the official website's introduction page, Ethlabs is a non-profit R&D lab for 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 created a common language for interaction among various networks. While private systems retain practical value, they are inherently limited by boundaries. The financial industry is now facing a similar inflection point. As value, assets, and markets become fully digitized, the world urgently needs a co-built and shared settlement infrastructure.

In this regard, Ethlabs argues that Ethereum has a unique advantage to serve as this universal, neutral foundation, enabling individuals, institutions, and various autonomous agents to transact without intermediaries. Ethlabs gives three reasons:

1. Ethereum's credible neutrality: A decade of stable and uninterrupted operation, minimal counterparty risk, and a foundation that cannot be unilaterally controlled by any institution, company, or individual.

2. ETH can serve as a benchmark asset: ETH is already a mature, programmable store of value, widely distributed over ten years with ample on-chain market liquidity, making it the most decentralized native asset within the Ethereum ecosystem.

3. Abundant developers and DeFi resources: Ethereum has formed an open trading market, credit system, exchange mechanisms, and collaborative ecosystem accessible to everyone.

Ethlabs positions itself as a bridge between frontier developers and the underlying protocol, translating the real-world 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 in connecting the Ethereum ecosystem: bridging the practical implementation needs from frontline developers with the underlying protocol that must support all applications.

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

What are the backgrounds of the 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. 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 bring extensive 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 corporate ETH treasury holder by volume, holding over 5.67 million ETH. It is also continuously building its own validator node infrastructure and launched its proprietary Ethereum validator node network, MAVAN, in March this year.

Sharplink is another ETH treasury company. In May, it partnered with Galaxy to launch the $125 million DeFi fund "Galaxy SharpLink Onchain Yield Fund," focusing on on-chain lending, liquidity provision, and other high-yield strategies.

Joe Lubin, founder of Consensys and co-founder of Ethereum, is a core funder in his personal capacity. David Hoffman has also publicly stated his support for Ethlabs' journey forward.

According to Ethlabs' official funding page, other institutional funders 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.

Is Ethlabs a signal of the Ethereum Foundation "splitting off"?

The timing of Ethlabs' establishment is noteworthy, as on the same day, Ethereum Foundation Chief Strategy Advisor Aerugo published a series of discussions on the Foundation's future execution direction, including evaluation criteria for "spinouts" from the Ethereum Foundation and when the Foundation should provide financial support.

According to Aerugo, spin-out projects need to meet the following conditions:

"Is this work core to the Ethereum Foundation's mission? Would the Foundation choose to do it internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no more suitable entity to host it? Can an external team execute it while avoiding increased risk of control, private interest extraction, opacity, or dependency?"

In fact, Ethlabs and the Ethereum Foundation have significant overlap in core research directions. Aerugo mentioned that eliminating MEV is "the next major battle in the cypherpunk war," listing it as a core protocol research direction for the Ethereum Foundation — an area where Dietrichs and Monnot have long specialized.

For now, the emergence of Ethlabs may not necessarily mean direct competition with the Ethereum Foundation. It more likely represents the Ethereum ecosystem's transition 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 for 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 their overlap in talent, funding, and technical directions increases, potential divergences may still arise in the future.

Ethlabs appears more as an organizational evolution during the maturation of the Ethereum ecosystem. The key in the future lies not in whether it will replace the Ethereum Foundation, but in whether multiple R&D organizations can form synergies to collectively propel Ethereum towards becoming a more competitive global on-chain settlement infrastructure.