Five former senior Ethereum Foundation researchers announced the launch of Ethlabs on June 22, 2026, an independent non-profit R&D lab focused on preparing Ethereum for institutional adoption.
The co-founders are Ansgar Dietrichs, serving as Executive Director, alongside Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma. They led finality research, scaling, data availability, EVM development, and protocol economics at the Foundation before departing to found the lab.
Funding and governance
Funding comes from Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), SharpLink Inc. (NASDAQ: SBET), and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. Anchorage Digital, Octant, and SNZ are additional backers. No funding figure has been publicly disclosed.
The governance structure separates funders from research decisions: contributions flow through an independent grants administrator, funders receive quarterly reporting and an annual audit, and leadership retains full authority over technical direction.
Research agenda
Four named research tracks run from the start: faster transaction settlement and native issuance; cross-chain interoperability; mainnet capacity expansion; and Ethereum's economic and monetary framework. The lab's stated mission is to make "Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy."
In the press release, Lubin described the lab's role: "Ethlabs will be instrumental in preparing the network for the next major wave of adoption, from institutional finance to agentic commerce, with the scale, security, interoperability and resilience that global institutions require."
Why now
The launch arrives as stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and institutional funds are increasingly settling on Ethereum. Ethlabs frames its independence from the Foundation and its backing by entities with direct on-chain exposure as the structural features that distinguish it from existing Ethereum research bodies.
