Ethlabs, a new Ethereum research lab backed by the network’s two largest corporate holders, launched this week with a pitch to complement the Ethereum Foundation.
Its own funders concede it will also compete as Ethlabs is “playing to win.”
“I think they will be complementary,” Joseph Chalom, chief executive of Sharplink and a former longtime BlackRock executive, said of Ethlabs and the Foundation on a livestream The Defiant hosted this week. He then added that the two would “over time” be “in some ways overlapping,” with “the densest talent” concentrated at Ethlabs.
Where the Mandates Meet
The overlap is visible in what each group says it will do. The Foundation reorganized this week into five units, including a protocol layer focused on scaling and hardening Ethereum’s base layer and an institutional layer aimed at enterprise adoption. Ethlabs describes its own work in nearly the same terms: faster settlement, cross-chain interoperability and readiness for institutional and AI-driven activity. Both invoke credible neutrality and censorship resistance.
Victor Bunin, a protocol specialist at Coinbase who is listed as an Ethlabs contributor, said the rivalry is built into how Ethereum ships code.
“There’s a natural competition between every single EIP, every single effort that goes into it,” he said, using the shorthand for Ethereum Improvement Proposals. Each network upgrade holds only so many changes, he said, so independent groups end up competing for the same slots.
The launch is the clearest sign yet that Ethereum is betting on a fragmented, multi-organization model of development. That is a deliberate contrast with rival blockchains such as Solana, where a single foundation drives the roadmap, the funding and the marketing. Supporters say spreading the work across independent groups keeps Ethereum harder to capture or censor. The risk is slower, messier coordination as several well-funded teams pull in different directions over a fixed upgrade schedule. For a network worth about $194 billion, the open question is which model better serves the institutions now moving onchain.
A Bet on Many Hands
Not everyone building Ethlabs is convinced the model is the right one. Bunin, despite backing the lab, said he would prefer a single organization closely attuned to its users.
“I actually don’t like the structure,” he said. He called the Foundation’s retreat from the network’s most pressing problems “a little bit of a failure,” arguing the EF has chosen to work on what it wants rather than what users are asking for.
Chalom defended the fragmented approach. He likened it to Winston Churchill’s description of democracy as the least-bad system: imperfect and harder to coordinate, but genuinely censorship-resistant and impossible for any single party to override. He said Ethereum has run without downtime since its 2015 launch, a record he argued more centralized chains cannot claim.
Big Backers, No Number
The structural debate sits on top of a money problem. Trent Van Epps, who coordinated Ethereum Foundation core development until April, warned last week that the network’s core development faces a funding gap within three to nine months, as the Foundation’s treasury cuts and the expiry of its four-year client-funding program converge. He estimated core development costs about $30 million a year.
Bitmine chairman Tom Lee, whose firm is now an Ethlabs anchor, dismissed the warning, putting the odds of a crisis at “zero chance” and arguing that profit-seeking corporate stakers, not the Foundation, will underwrite Ethereum’s future. It’s nw clear Lee was referring to Ethlabs.
The squeeze tightened this week. The Foundation said it would cut its 2026 budget by about 40% and eliminate 54 jobs, or roughly 20% of its staff. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin framed the cuts as a deliberate shift to an endowment model, lowering annual spending from about 15% of the treasury toward 5% by 2030.
$ETH fell about 3% over the past 24 hours, underperforming a 2.6% slide in Bitcoin, according to CoinGecko, and trades roughly 67% below its August 2025 record.
Against that backdrop, Ethlabs arrives with heavyweight support. Bitmine Immersion Technologies, which holds about 5.7 million $ETH, and Sharplink, which holds roughly 876,000 $ETH, anchored the funding alongside Lubin. Neither the lab nor its backers stated the total funding behinf Ethlabs. The only public figure is the contributor wallet Ethlabs listed, eth-labs.eth, which held about 49 $ETH, or roughly $80,000, as of this week.
Pressed for a dollar figure, Chalom declined to give one.
“Trust us on this,” he said, describing “multi-year funding” drawn partly from the staking rewards on the backers’ $ETH and partly from personal contributions. “This is not here to fund five people for a year,” he said. He said Ethlabs would operate as a nonprofit with annual outside audits and openly published research.
“If you can’t audit it, you can’t trust it,” he said.
‘Alignment,’ or Capture?
The funding model raises a question the Foundation’s structure was built to avoid: whether backers who are themselves large $ETH holders could steer development toward their own interests. The interests are tightly linked. Lubin, an Ethlabs anchor in his own right, chairs Sharplink, and Chalom previously led digital assets at BlackRock, whose iShares Ethereum Trust is the largest US spot-$ETH fund.
Chalom said the design prevents capture. Backers hold observer seats and can verify how money is spent but cannot direct research, amend governance or block disbursements, he said. Board seats rotate among independent members, neither Sharplink nor Bitmine chairman Tom Lee sits on the board, and grants are administered externally. “This is the opposite of a conflict of interest,” he said. “It’s an alignment of interest.”
Bunin argued capture is impractical regardless. A proposal that plainly favored one party “would never even pass the sniff test” with client teams and the wider community, he said.
The deeper tension is one Ethereum has wrestled with before: what is best for $ETH the asset is not always what is best for the protocol. The decision to push activity onto Layer 2 networks lowered fees and weakened the fee burn that underpinned the case for $ETH as scarce, “ultrasound” money. Daily base-layer fees that once ran near $30 million have spent much of 2026 in the single-digit millions. Both Chalom and Bunin said Ethereum has to win as a network before the token can, and Ethlabs says it will keep prioritizing adoption and scaling over near-term value capture — the same path the Foundation has taken.
A Foundation Pulling Back
Ethlabs is the most prominent product of a broader unwinding at the Foundation. At least eight senior figures have left this year, including both co-executive directors: Tomasz Stańczak departed in February and Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned this month, leaving board member Bastian Aue as effectively the sole executive director. A mandate the Foundation published in March recast it from Ethereum’s primary steward to one of several, and this week’s reorganization sorted it into five units and wound down its privacy and scaling research lab.
Lubin has described the shift as a move toward multiple “steward nodes” sharing responsibility for the network. Chalom said Ethlabs is the first of several private-sector initiatives that would be announced “over the next several weeks.”
The First Test
The first real test comes with Glamsterdam, Ethereum’s next major upgrade, now in final testnet preparation and targeted for the second half of the year. It centers on changes to how blocks are built and executed, the base-layer scaling work that both the Foundation and Ethlabs claim as a priority and the first place their roadmaps will meet a finite upgrade queue.
