Five Former EF Researchers Launch Ethlabs, an Independent Non-Profit R&D Lab for Ethereum

Five former Ethereum Foundation researchers have launched Ethlabs, an independent non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum, on the same day the EF's own Chief Strategy Advisor published a framework describing how spinouts from the foundation should be evaluated and funded.

The lab's founding team is Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma, all former EF researchers. Anchor funders listed on the site are Bitmine, Sharplink, and Consensys founder Joe Lubin. The lab accepts ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens at eth-labs.eth (0xEa98...7d79).

Ethlabs Founders

Dietrichs and Monnot are among the most cited Ethereum protocol researchers of the past decade. Dietrichs has been a central figure in Ethereum's proposer-builder separation work; Monnot is known for research on MEV and cryptoeconomic mechanism design through the EF's robust incentives group. Their departure to form an independent lab is a concrete crystallization of the EF researcher exodus The Defiant has tracked since early this year.

At least eight senior EF researchers and leaders announced departures in 2026, with calls in the community for a new organization more tightly focused on Ethereum's protocol development and price competitiveness. That story followed the departure of Josh Stark and Trent Van Epps, two long-time EF contributors who announced they were leaving the foundation. Schwarz-Schilling, Rudolf, and Ma round out the Ethlabs founding team with backgrounds in economic modeling, consensus research, and applied cryptography.

The Thesis

Ethlabs' thesis page frames the project around a single fork in the road for the global economy: a fragmented multi-chain world versus Ethereum as a universal settlement layer. The lab backs the latter. "The internet became global because shared protocols created a common language between networks," the thesis reads. "Finance is approaching a similar moment."

Three pillars underpin the thesis. First, credible neutrality: "Ten years of uptime and the lowest counterparty risk. Ground that cannot be pulled away by any one country, institution, company, or person." Second, ETH as the reference asset: "The most valuable, programmable store of value. A decade of broad distribution, deep liquidity in onchain markets, and maximally trustless asset on Ethereum." Third, builders and DeFi: markets, credit, exchange, and coordination open to anyone.

The lab describes its position as sitting between builders at the frontier and the protocol that must support them, translating what users, applications, wallets, L2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, and core developers actually need into protocol work, shared standards, infrastructure, and shipped products.

Anchor Funders

Bitmine is the largest corporate ETH treasury company by holdings. The Defiant reported in June that Bitmine purchased 126,971 ETH for approximately $207 million in a single week, lifting its total treasury to 5.54 million ETH. Bitmine has also been building out its own validator infrastructure: the company launched its proprietary Ethereum validator network MAVAN in March.

Sharplink is another corporate ETH buyer. Galaxy agreed in May to manage a $125 million DeFi yield fund seeded by Sharplink's ETH treasury. Joe Lubin is the founder of ConsenSys and an Ethereum co-founder. His involvement as an individual anchor funder sits alongside the two treasury companies as a distinct form of personal institutional commitment.

The funding page also lists institutional contributors SNZ, Octant, and Anchorage Digital, alongside investor Konstantin Lomashuk. Community supporters include Hayden Adams of Uniswap, Jesse Pollak of Base, Danny Ryan of Etherealize, Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation, Tim Beiko, and Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly, among roughly 50 named contributors.

EF Spinout Moment

The timing of Ethlabs' launch is notable. On the same day, Aerugo, the EF's Chief Strategy Advisor, published a six-part execution thread setting out the foundation's new mandate, including a section explicitly on EF spinouts and the criteria for when external work warrants EF funding.

Aerugo wrote that spinout work must meet a specific test: "Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do this work internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence?"

On the central research themes, Ethlabs and the EF framework overlap directly. Aerugo's thread described MEV elimination as "the next major front in the cypherpunk war," placing it at the center of the EF's core protocol agenda. That is precisely the territory where Dietrichs and Monnot built their research careers. Ethlabs describes itself as "independent but Ethereum is a shared project" and positions its role as "one node in a much larger network of stewards."