The Ethereum Foundation Imploded. Now Two New Orgs — Backed by $11 Billion in ETH — Are Moving In.

Here’s a sentence you never expected to read: five of Ethereum’s top researchers quit the Foundation to build its replacement, and the backers holding $11 billion in ETH are funding it.

This isn’t a fork. This isn’t a DAO drama. This is Ethereum’s core brain trust walking out the door — and Wall Street walking in.

What Just Happened

On June 23, the Ethereum Foundation fired 54 people — roughly 20% of its total staff — and Vitalik Buterin announced a 40% budget cut. Both co-executive directors, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak, had already stepped down earlier this year. Nine days later, on July 1, two new organizations launched almost simultaneously.

EthLabs is a nonprofit R&D lab founded by five former EF senior researchers: Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma. These are not fringe contributors. These are the people who built Ethereum’s consensus mechanism, economic models, data availability architecture, and scaling roadmap. EthLabs is backed by Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), SharpLink (NASDAQ: SBET), Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, and ecosystem participants including Anchorage, Octant, and SNZ.

Ethereum Institutional is a second, separate nonprofit — positioned as the “dedicated institutional front door for Ethereum” — led by David Walsh, Marius Smith, and Matthew Dawson (former head of corporate outreach at the Ethereum Foundation). It launched with backing from Standard Chartered, Bitmine, SharpLink, and Lubin. Tom Lee of Fundstrat sits on the board. The organization is expanding immediately into New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Zurich, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Abu Dhabi.

Two orgs. Same backers. Launched the same day. This is not a coincidence.

The Part Nobody Is Saying Quietly Anymore

EthLabs backers have admitted — on the record — that EthLabs will compete with the Ethereum Foundation, not merely assist it.

“EthLabs is set to overlap with the EF and draw its densest talent,” one funder told The Defiant. Another said it would be “an honest, neutral counterpart” to the Foundation.

Call it what it is: the institutional version of a leadership coup. The EF still exists, still controls Ethereum’s endowment, and Vitalik still writes the blog posts. But the research capacity, the institutional relationships, and increasingly the ecosystem trust are migrating to entities backed by people with real financial stakes in Ethereum’s success.

Why $11 Billion Is Moving Now

Bitmine holds approximately 5.7 million ETH — roughly 4.7% of the entire supply. SharpLink holds about 876,000 ETH. The combined ETH treasury backing these two organizations exceeds $11 billion by the official press release figure. These are not passive believers in “Ethereum is good.” These are companies with billions on the line who decided that the Ethereum Foundation’s pace and priorities were no longer adequate.

Their thesis: Ethereum’s biggest unlock is not a price catalyst. It’s institutional settlement infrastructure. If banks can settle tokenized assets directly on Ethereum — bonds, funds, real-world assets, stablecoins — the demand for block space becomes structural and the ETH price becomes a function of financial system throughput. That’s a very different value proposition than “digital gold.”

That’s exactly what EthLabs is working on: faster transaction settlement, higher L1 throughput, and infrastructure that Fortune 500 treasury departments can actually depend on. And Ethereum Institutional is the BD arm that walks those same banks through the door.

ETH is currently trading approximately 67% below its 2025 peak. The people most exposed to that drawdown are now the ones funding Ethereum’s replacement management structure.

What EthLabs Is Actually Building

EthLabs’ initial research agenda targets three problems that have blocked institutional Ethereum adoption:

1. Settlement finality — institutional counterparties need legal and operational certainty that a transaction is final. Current Ethereum finality windows are workable but not bank-grade.
2. Throughput at scale — the L1 needs to handle volumes that match, or at least seriously approach, what SWIFT and Fedwire process daily.
3. Interoperability — the fragmentation across L2s is a compliance nightmare for regulated institutions. EthLabs will research bridging standards that work within existing financial regulation frameworks.

The funding structure is notable: an external grants administrator distributes funds, and funders receive quarterly reporting and annual audits but explicitly do not control the research agenda. That independence is the credibility model — EthLabs can’t be seen as a paid lobbying arm for BitMine’s ETH bag.

Who’s Getting Hired

While the Foundation contracts, both EthLabs and Ethereum Institutional are staffing up. The roles in demand:

• Protocol researchers — L1 scaling, finality design, MEV architecture, data availability
• ZK engineers — the EF shut its ZK research lab; EthLabs is expected to continue this work independently
• Institutional BD and ecosystem relations — Ethereum Institutional needs people who can speak to banks across eight cities simultaneously
• Standards and compliance specialists — bridging Ethereum’s architecture with banking regulators in the US, EU, and Asia-Pacific
• Tokenization engineers — the technical layer between RWA protocols and institutional custodians

If your CV says “Ethereum Foundation,” your phone is ringing. And not just from EthLabs — every bank that attended an Ethereum Foundation summit is now quietly asking who from that team is available.

Why This Matters for Crypto Jobs

The Ethereum Foundation’s model was always: pay researchers below-market to work on open-source protocol infrastructure for the good of the ecosystem. Vitalik called it the “endowment model” — live on a shrinking treasury, stay lean, focus on public goods.

That model is fracturing.

EthLabs and Ethereum Institutional have institutional funders, quarterly reporting, and real accountability. That means competitive compensation, defined career paths, and employment structures closer to a well-funded tech company than a public-goods nonprofit. As Standard Chartered, Bitmine, and SharpLink bring traditional institutional governance to Ethereum R&D, expect salaries in this category to converge toward what Consensys, Fireblocks, and bank blockchain teams pay — not what EF paid.

The Ethereum Foundation is shrinking. The Ethereum job market is expanding into territory that pays better and has clearer upside. For L1 protocol engineers, this is the best hiring moment in years.

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