“We looked around, didn’t see anyone else stepping up,” Dietrichs told CoinDesk in an interview. “After two months of that, we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, if no one else is stepping up, then it has to be us.'”
Dietrichs, along with four other former Ethereum Foundation researchers and developers, some of whom left the foundation just this year to launch EthLabs, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing Ethereum’s technical roadmap with a stronger emphasis on real-world adoption.
The creation comes as Dietrichs describes Ethereum as entering a fundamentally different phase of its evolution. “The decade of infrastructure build-out of Ethereum is coming to an end,” he said. “Now it’s much more about actual institutional adoption.”
Over the past decade, Ethereum’s developer community focused on building the foundational pieces of the network: from smart contracts and decentralized finance to scaling technologies and layer-2 networks. With those building blocks largely in place, Dietrichs believes the next challenge is ensuring Ethereum can support large-scale financial infrastructure.
“I don’t think crypto and Ethereum will ever go back to a time like it was in the past,” he said, arguing that the ecosystem has moved beyond the boom-and-bust cycles that previously defined it.
