Ethlabs

On June 22, 2026, five former Ethereum Foundation researchers launched Ethlabs, a nonprofit R&D lab whose mission is to make Ethereum the global settlement layer.

Ethlabs' founding team, including Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot, is backed by Bitmine, SharpLink, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin and Anchorage, focusing on protocol scaling and institutional infrastructure.

On June 22, 2026, Ethlabs was announced in New York, co-founded by five former senior Ethereum Foundation researchers — Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma — with Dietrichs as executive director. Funding is led by Bitmine (NYSE: BMNR), Sharplink (NASDAQ: SBET) and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, with Anchorage, Octant and SNZ also participating; contributions flow through an independent grants administrator, funders have no influence over the research agenda, and reporting is quarterly with an annual audit.

Ethlabs' launch coincided with the 2026 talent drain at the Ethereum Foundation: five core members left in May alone and at least eight senior researchers departed during the year, including Tim Beiko, Alex Stokes, Trent Van Epps and co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak, while the foundation cut roughly 20% of roles and about 40% of its budget. Initial work covers faster settlement, native issuance, cross-chain interoperability, mainnet capacity and research into ETH's monetary properties; the founders' prior contributions span ePBS, MEV research, FOCIL (EIP-7805) and the 13-second fast confirmation rule.

Ethlabs is turning Ethereum's upgrade cadence from feature stacking into scope discipline: of 66 Hegotá proposals it keeps only two main lines, FOCIL and Quick Slots, explicitly rejecting EIP-8375 on MEV burning and EIP-8182 with its zero-knowledge dependency, so engineering capacity stays with clients and later architectural work. The trade-off reflects competitive pressure: builder concentration weakens the censorship-resistance story and 12-second slots look slow next to low-latency chains, making FOCIL and 10-second slots a fix for both narrative and performance. As an independent body created after research functions spun out, Ethlabs shapes client votes through public rankings, while Glamsterdam's slide to the fourth quarter shows its influence is still bounded by testnets and client readiness.

Ethlabs was founded in 2025 by five senior researchers from the Ethereum Foundation. Ansgar Dietrichs is executive director; he spent years on protocol economics at the Foundation, tracking fee markets and staking economics, contributed to the EIP-1559 debate, and now handles external communication and the research agenda.

Barnabé Monnot covers finality and MEV, having led the PBS and ePBS research line at the Foundation; Caspar Schwarz-Schilling covers the consensus layer with a focus on fork choice and proposer timing; Josh Rudolf covers data availability and worked on sampling arguments for Danksharding; Julian Ma covers the virtual machine and protocol economics after starting in compilers and formal verification. All five keep academic ties to the Foundation, publishing through papers, client specifications and working groups. Each researcher is paired with an engineering partner, and a part-time operator handles finance.

Ethlabs has seen significant team expansion recently. In June 2026, Barnabé Monnot, a former Ethereum Foundation researcher specializing in MEV and cryptoeconomic mechanism design, joined as Co-Founder.\n\nIn August 2026, Binji Pande, also an ex-Ethereum Foundation member, joined as Founding Member, and Mislav Javor joined as Builder, bringing engineering expertise. The team is evolving from a research-focused group into a broader ecosystem-building entity.