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

Original Author: Gino Matos

Original Translation: Chopper, Foresight News

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

Ethlabs, which debuted a few days earlier, was founded by five former senior Ethereum Foundation researchers, 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 the two new organizations.

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

The Ethereum Foundation released a new functional manifesto as early as March 2026, redefining its role: solely as a guardian of self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy, and security, no longer referring to itself as Ethereum's parent company or holding ultimate decision-making power over the protocol. This positioning deliberately leaves a business vacuum, delegating commercial implementation tasks to external organizations.

Ethlabs takes on the technological development and asset value narrative, responsible for perfecting the underlying infrastructure and building the complete logic of ETH as a monetary asset, addressing concerns of institutions entering Ethereum. Ethereum Institutional is fully responsible for business development, translating industry interest into real deployed capital by building industry forums, maintaining institutional relationships, and tailoring promotional plans.

The core reason for the two teams operating independently from the Foundation is that the Foundation's neutral positioning cannot accommodate commercial work. A neutral standard-setting body acting simultaneously as an ETH promotional team and an enterprise sales department would directly undermine its own credibility.

Thus, the tripartite power structure of Ethereum is taking shape. The Foundation is responsible for legitimacy and long-term protocol value, Ethlabs for ETH value capture and technological R&D, and Ethereum Institutional for enterprise business promotion.

Ethereum Institutional revealed that the team has already connected with over 500 Tier 1 banks, global asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, custodians, and market infrastructure providers. Its hosted Ethereum Institutional Summit brought together more than 150 senior financial executives, with participating institutions managing a total of $250 trillion in assets. Such vast industry resources are also the core reason for the official business split and the creation of independent institutions, rather than keeping them as a subsidiary function of the Foundation.

Delegating enterprise business and ETH value promotion to external institutions solves the execution disconnect at the Foundation level. However, it also means that giants holding massive amounts of ETH and boasting huge balance sheets control the promotional channels directed at Wall Street. Convenience and independence are opposing directions, and Ethereum has chosen convenience.

Supporting Ethereum's Wall Street Strategy: Enterprises Holding Massive ETH Reserves

Bitmine currently holds 5.7 million ETH, accounting for 4.7% of the total ETH circulating supply. Combined with cash and marketable securities, its total assets amount to $9.8 billion. Sharplink holds 886,725 ETH and added 10,000 ETH on June 28 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. Valued at current prices, their total holdings are worth nearly $10.6 billion. Bitmine itself has a market cap of $6.55 billion, while Sharplink's market cap exceeds $1 billion.

If this business split model proves successful, the two funding enterprises will directly benefit: better underlying infrastructure and more mature institutional business will boost market demand for ETH. Given their massive holdings, even small fluctuations in ETH price would result in hundreds of millions of dollars in book value changes to their assets. Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, backing both non-profit organizations, sits at the core of this interest system, with Bitmine and Sharplink's financial returns deeply tied to the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

PeerDAS has already launched, capable of increasing the data availability capacity of Layer 2 networks approximately tenfold. The planned Glamsterdam upgrade, slated for the second half of 2026, aims to achieve base layer scaling, parallel transaction processing, and larger block payloads.

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

The report also provides long-term performance projections: Ethereum's mainnet will still handle fewer than 100 transactions per second by 2034; and it won't be until March 2029 that Layer 2 throughput surpasses Solana, although Layer 2 fees will be significantly lower than its competitor by then. Ethereum's ability to attract institutional entry depends almost entirely on Layer 2 scaling and the implementation of industry standards, which is precisely the core scope of Ethlabs' work.

Two Scenarios for the ETH Price Will Determine the Final Outcome of This Structure

The bullish argument is that Ethereum already possesses considerable scale. Ethereum currently hosts $157 billion in stablecoin market capitalization, accounting for over half of the global stablecoin supply. DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) 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, with the total across the whole sector reaching $31.52 billion, firmly placing it first among public chains.

Citibank predicts the global market for tokenized real-world assets will expand from its current $17 billion to $5.5 trillion by 2030, with a range of $2.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion. If Ethlabs can continuously iterate infrastructure and Ethereum Institutional can translate its network of relationships into actual deployed capital, holding giants like Bitmine and Sharplink will become early beneficiaries of the industry. Ethereum would become the default settlement layer for compliant digital assets, and the value of ETH as an asset would correspondingly increase.

The bearish argument starts with price. Citibank has lowered its 12-month price target for ETH from $3,175 to $2,240, citing weak ETF demand and negative inflows, setting a bearish scenario for ETH at $1,094.

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

If ETH remains weak for an extended period, the stock prices of Bitmine and Sharplink will continue to trade at a discount relative to their asset holdings, and their capacity to provide funding to the two non-profit organizations will shrink. Even if Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional can sustain operations, the stability of their funding would significantly decrease. The market would continuously question whether the core purpose of establishing these two institutions is to boost the ETH price, rather than building genuinely usable institutional-grade infrastructure.

Regulatory developments are bullish for the overall narrative but cannot guarantee a market rally. The US GENIUS Stablecoin Act was passed in 2025, establishing a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins. A consortium including Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase subsequently launched the Open USD stablecoin. Improved regulation will bring incremental institutional settlement volume to all public chains; this is not a benefit exclusive to Ethereum. McKinsey's forecast is more conservative, estimating the tokenization market size at around $2 trillion by 2030, a stark contrast to Citibank's high expectations, highlighting significant disagreement about the industry's growth potential.

Summary

By splitting its business and establishing two independent institutions, Ethereum has resolved the inherent conflict between the Foundation's neutrality and commercialization. However, the funding for both new institutions comes entirely from enterprises holding massive amounts of ETH, creating a structure with both advantages and disadvantages.

On the positive side, with specialized institutions focusing on infrastructure and engaging Wall Street, Ethereum has the potential to become the universal settlement base layer for tokenized finance. On the risk side, the entire expansion system is completely tied to the balance sheets of the ETH-holding giants, meaning the ETH price directly dictates the supply of capital. Both scenarios will coexist. The price of ETH a year from now will determine which trend ultimately dominates.