Five former Ethereum Foundation researchers have launched Ethlabs, an independent non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum, on the same day the EF's Chief Strategy Advisor published a framework for evaluating and funding spinouts. The founding team includes 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, with the lab accepting ETH, stablecoins, and ERC-20 tokens.
The Team and Their Background
Dietrichs and Monnot are among the most cited Ethereum protocol researchers of the past decade. Dietrichs has been central to Ethereum's proposer-builder separation work, while 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 crystallizes the EF researcher exodus that The Defiant has tracked since early this year, with at least eight senior EF researchers and leaders announcing departures in 2026. Schwarz-Schilling, Rudolf, and Ma round out the team with backgrounds in economic modeling, consensus research, and applied cryptography.
The Thesis and Mission
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, arguing that finance is approaching a moment similar to when shared protocols made the internet global. Three pillars underpin the thesis: credible neutrality, ETH as the reference asset, and builders and DeFi. The lab describes its position as sitting between builders at the frontier and the protocol that must support them, translating user and developer needs into protocol work, shared standards, and shipped products.
Anchor Funders and Support
Bitmine, the largest corporate ETH treasury company by holdings, is an anchor funder. 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. Sharplink, another corporate ETH buyer, and Joe Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and Ethereum co-founder, are also anchor funders. Institutional contributors include 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 criteria for when external work warrants EF funding. Aerugo wrote that spinout work must meet a specific test: whether it is mandate-critical, whether the EF would do it internally if it had capacity, and whether the external party can execute without increasing capture risk or opacity. On central research themes, Ethlabs and the EF framework overlap directly, particularly on MEV elimination, which Aerugo described as 'the next major front in the cypherpunk war.' 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.'