Ethereum Foundation Loses 20% of Staff as Ex-Researchers Launch Ethlabs

Published by James Harris on June 29, 2026June 29, 2026

Ethlabs, the nonprofit research organization founded largely by former Ethereum Foundation researchers, told the public on June 29 that its committed funding is sufficient to sustain operations and hire new talent for two to three years, without disclosing specific figures. The announcement came through a Q&A session responding to community questions gathered since the organization’s launch exactly one week earlier.

The timing of that launch is the detail that gives this story its shape. Ethlabs went live on June 22, the same day the Ethereum Foundation cut 54 positions, roughly 20% of its workforce, and co-director Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned after eight years. The five Ethlabs co-founders, Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma, are themselves part of the researcher exodus from the Foundation over the past year, and their collective work spans Ethereum’s finality mechanisms, scaling architecture, data availability layer, EVM, and protocol economics. The Foundation has been shedding institutional weight while Ethlabs has been absorbing the people who carried it. Whether that represents a healthy decentralization of Ethereum’s research capacity or a fragmentation of coordination is the question the ecosystem hasn’t answered yet.

Ethlabs calling itself “additional supporting power” rather than a replacement is a careful framing, but the personnel overlap makes that distinction harder to sustain over time.

The organization’s research is structured around three pillars: Chain (L1 execution scaling, blob capacity, transaction throughput), Platform (interoperability and the EVM roadmap), and Growth (adoption of mechanisms like the Fast Confirmation Rule across L2 networks and exchanges). That last pillar is the most immediately commercial, targeting a problem that directly affects user experience on every major L2 today. Current backers include Bitmine Immersion Technologies, SharpLink, Joe Lubin, Anchorage, Octant, and SNZ, with over 50 community partners also pledged according to Cryptopolitan. Bitmine has disclosed ETH holdings exceeding 5.4 million ETH, making the independence question non-trivial: funders with that kind of exposure benefit materially if Ethlabs research accelerates Ethereum adoption, even without formal influence over the roadmap.

Ethlabs has structured its governance to address exactly that conflict, using an independent grants administrator for screening and disbursement, and reserving all technical decisions for executive director Dietrichs and the leadership team. Funders receive quarterly updates and annual audits, nothing more. A community donation round is currently active, and the team has said it will announce additional backers before that round closes, though no timeline has been set for either a formal roadmap or specific milestones.