Five former senior Ethereum Foundation researchers have started an independent nonprofit, Ethlabs, to keep working on Ethereum's core protocol. The launch was reported on June 23, 2026, and the backer list is the headline: Bitmine, Sharplink, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, alongside other contributors. It is the clearest sign yet that the companies hoarding ETH on their balance sheets now intend to pay for the research that keeps the chain running.
The five founders are Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabe Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma. All five were part of the Foundation's research bench before leaving. Their new organization positions itself as a "long-term, independent home" for protocol researchers, in Lubin's framing.
A response to the Foundation's drain
This does not land in a vacuum. It lands in a power vacuum that the Ethereum Foundation has been creating on purpose. SpendNode has been tracking the steady exit of senior Foundation staff, with at least eight leaving over five months, and the separate warning that core-dev funding could run dry within three to nine months. Ethlabs is the institutional answer to that problem.
Ethereum researcher David Hoffman put it bluntly: "The EF is intentionally leaving a power vacuum for new structures to step up." Ethlabs is one of those structures. Rather than a single foundation steering the roadmap and signing the checks, the model now splitting into being is a small foundation plus outside organizations funded by parties with money committed to ETH.
Treasury companies move from holding to funding
The two corporate backers are not random. Bitmine and Sharplink are the two largest public Ethereum treasury companies, firms whose entire pitch to shareholders is accumulating ETH. Bitmine has been pushing toward owning a meaningful slice of all circulating Ethereum, a plan SpendNode covered when it hit 92% of its target to control 5% of the supply.
For a company holding billions of dollars of ETH, the logic of funding core research is direct. The value of the treasury depends on the chain staying secure, scalable, and credible to institutions. Paying researchers to harden the protocol is, from that seat, a way to protect the asset. Sharplink framed the mission around demand it expects to arrive: Ethlabs "exists to ensure the network is ready to absorb" institutional flows tied to stablecoins, tokenization, and AI commerce.
No specific dollar figure was disclosed for the initial funding. That omission matters. A "long-term, independent home" needs a multi-year budget to be credible, and until the numbers are public, the durability of the commitment is a claim rather than a fact.
The independence question
A research body funded by ETH treasury companies invites an obvious question about whose interests guide the work. Joe Lubin, who co-founded Ethereum and runs Consensys, is also chairman of Sharplink, so the line between backer and beneficiary is not always clean. The pitch is independence; the funding is concentrated among parties with large, directional bets on ETH's price.
That is not automatically a problem. Open-source infrastructure has long been funded by companies that profit from it, and the work itself, client software, consensus research, scaling, is verifiable in public. But it is a different governance shape than a neutral foundation, and it is worth watching whether the research agenda tracks what the network needs or what the backers want it to prioritize.
The base layer that payment rails depend on
Ethereum is the base layer for most of the stablecoin and tokenized-asset activity that crypto payments ultimately settle on. The stablecoins behind many spending products, and the growing pile of tokenized funds and bonds, live on Ethereum or chains anchored to it. Who funds the people maintaining that base layer is not an abstract governance debate. It feeds into how reliable the rails stay for everyone building on top, including self-custody wallets and the cards that spend from them.
The market context is sober. As of June 23, 2026, ETH trades around $1,726, down 0.6% on the day and 2.9% on the week, with the broader Fear and Greed Index sitting at 22, firmly in "Fear." Bitcoin holds near $63,981. None of that moved on the Ethlabs news, and it should not have. This is a slow-burn structural story about who pays for Ethereum's future, not a price catalyst.
Overview
Five departed senior Ethereum Foundation researchers launched Ethlabs, an independent nonprofit for core protocol work, backed by Bitmine, Sharplink, and Joe Lubin. The move formalizes a shift the Foundation has invited: from one central body funding and steering Ethereum's roadmap to a network of outside organizations bankrolled by parties with large ETH positions. The mission is to ready the chain for stablecoin, tokenization, and institutional demand. The open questions are the size and length of the funding commitment, which has not been disclosed, and how independent research stays when its backers hold billions in the asset it serves.
