Late-night sudden news! The Ethereum Foundation is shaken; a new camp, Ethlabs, enters with a billion-dollar consortium—can the story of $ETH’s “ultrasound” still continue?

June 22nd, five former core researchers of the Ethereum Foundation—Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, Julian Ma—officially announced the independent non-profit research and development laboratory Ethlabs, focusing on $ETH core protocol research and institutional infrastructure. The initial major backers include Ethereum treasury company BitMine (BMNR), Sharplink (SBET), as well as $ETH co-founder Joe Lubin, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams, Base lead Jesse Pollak, and over 50 community and ecosystem participants.

Ethlabs’s mission is straightforward to the point of suffocation: "Make $ETH the settlement layer for the global economy." The official statement lists four core beliefs: trustless neutrality, $ETH as a programmable store of value, open market value for DeFi, and turning these principles into real adoption. The five founders have all worked at EF for many years, deeply involved in core initiatives such as the Dencun upgrade (EIP-4844), PBS, censorship-resistant mechanisms like FOCIL, and the $ETH monetary economic framework.

On the EF side, staffing has been severely declining since early 2026. Co-Executive Director Tomasz Stańczak left at the end of February to pursue AI; another co-Executive Director, Hsiao-Wei Wang, also departed in mid-June due to "re-evaluating priorities." Key figures like Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps, Alex Stokes, and others have gradually left, with an overall loss of about 19 people. Currently, only Bastian Aue remains to handle executive roles at EF, with no succession plan or public timeline.

EF is very self-aware, actively characterizing itself as "returning to a more streamlined core mission." The latest execution plan, "EF Way," narrows focus to MEV mitigation, privacy protection, and $ETH payments, explicitly abandoning a full-stack coordination role. But beyond proactive adjustments, there are more urgent structural pressures. Former EF contributor Trent Van Epps warned that the "client incentive program" supporting over ten core clients like Geth, Erigon, Lighthouse expired in April 2026 and has not been renewed. He estimates the annual operational cost for core $ETH development is about $30 million; if this funding gap isn’t filled, problems will gradually surface within 3 to 9 months.

EF’s dilemma is that it has long borne functions that a decentralized protocol ideally shouldn’t concentrate in a single entity—serving as both researcher and funder, as well as spokesperson. As network scale expands, any pressure at any level can be amplified by the community into broader governance issues.

In 2021, EIP-1559 introduced a burn mechanism; in 2022, the Merge pushed issuance to historic lows. The narrative of "ultrasound money" became the most compelling story for $ETH: continuous deflation, censorship resistance, programmable value storage. This narrative reinforced itself during price rallies, forming a closed loop.

In March 2024, the Dencun upgrade activated EIP-4844, introducing a separate blob fee market, reducing L2 data availability costs by 10 to 100 times. A large migration of activity to L2s caused L1 base fees to plummet. Daily $ETH burns after the Merge dropped from thousands to a minimum of 53 on a single day in 2026, according to The Block data—the lowest ever. Meanwhile, staking issuance remains around 1,700 per day, with net issuance still positive. Ultrasound.money data shows the annualized net issuance rate has risen to about 0.8%, mainnet gas fees have dropped to 0.1 Gwei, and recent block burns are near zero. The "ultrasound money" narrative is temporarily invalid.

The fundamental contradiction is clear: the more successful $ETH’s L2 scaling strategy is, the less fee capture there is at L1, and the weaker the direct benefits for $ETH holders. Controversy follows. Critics argue that L2 is "vampiring" L1, with value flowing to L2 operators, dApp protocols, and stablecoin issuers, rather than $ETH holders. Supporters believe that $ETH’s role as the final settlement layer, security provider, and liquidity hub is irreplaceable, and that value will eventually return—though it takes time and new mechanisms.

In this context, Ethlabs has prioritized the "$ETH monetary economic framework" as one of its initial research focuses. The five founders were deeply involved in designing EIP-4844 and PBS, and they understand the boundaries of these mechanisms better than anyone.

The treasury company has begun to enter the scene. BitMine, led by Fundstrat chairman Tom Lee, is currently the most aggressive enterprise treasury company for $ETH, publicly aiming to hold 5% of circulating supply. As of June 21, 2026, BitMine held about 5.67 million $ETH, worth approximately $10.7 billion (at $1,733 per ETH), with 4.72M staked, making it the second-largest crypto treasury globally and the largest for $ETH. Sharplink, after completing a $425 million private placement in 2025, transitioned into an $ETH treasury company, with Joe Lubin as chairman. As of May 2026, Sharplink held about 869k $ETH, worth around $1.5 billion, making it the second-largest publicly listed $ETH treasury globally, with nearly all holdings staked.

The core logic behind these companies’ bets is: $ETH will become the neutral foundational layer for global financial settlement, with $ETH as the native reserve asset on this layer. Supporting Ethlabs aligns with this logic. These enterprise treasuries differ fundamentally from traditional Ethereum donors (like the Foundation or protocol treasuries) in that they hold large amounts of $ETH, and the health of the protocol layer and institutional adoption could influence $ETH’s price and thus their asset value and stock performance. Funding core R&D is a strategic support highly tied to their own asset value, not unconditional donations.

Ethlabs’s funding structure also isolates this purpose: managed by an independent funding management entity responsible for screening and allocation, with supporters receiving transparent reports and audits, but without interference in research directions or technical decisions. Joe Lubin publicly stated at Consensus 2026 that global economic tokenization is "inevitable," and endorsed the enterprise $ETH treasury model as "$ETH’s long-term permanent capital." He also warned that projects mimicking on weak tokens pose systemic risks.

In Ethlabs’s official statement, it says: "Ethlabs is independent, but $ETH is a shared project. We are just a node in a larger network of governance. This is the future of multi-node collaboration." The $ETH governance structure is shifting from a single centralized entity (EF) toward multiple independent, focused, and specialized "management nodes" working collaboratively. EF itself is actively promoting this shift, repositioning as a high-level coordinating and funding body, encouraging external entities to undertake specific research and development work.

Protocol research, client development, institutional adoption, and standards setting are inherently different tasks. They are best advanced by dedicated organizations working independently, which can improve efficiency and reduce systemic risks from single points of failure. Ethlabs’s fund isolation design fits this approach perfectly. But distributed collaboration also introduces new challenges: who will coordinate priority conflicts among multiple nodes? When Ethlabs’s research directions diverge from EF’s roadmap, can the community’s consensus mechanism effectively converge? Who will fill the $30 million client funding gap under the "multi-node" framework? Without sufficient coordination layers, the complexity of protocol governance could shift from "single-entity execution" to "multi-entity coordination costs." The experiment with $ETH is ongoing.

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