Ethereum has formed three major power centers, with the commercial lifeline held by large ETH holders.

Author: Gino Matos

Translation: Chopper, Foresight News

On July 1, Ethereum Institutional was announced, consolidating the Ethereum Foundation's marketing efforts into a single team responsible for promoting Ethereum's tokenization and stablecoins to banks and asset management companies.

Ethlabs, unveiled a few days earlier, was formed by five former senior researchers from the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on two directions: improving on-chain settlement efficiency and strengthening the monetary narrative of ETH.

Bitmine, Sharplink, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin jointly fund the two new organizations.

The establishment of these two new institutions coincides with a continuous outflow of senior executives from the Ethereum Foundation.

On June 18, Foundation co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang announced her departure, following Tomasz Stańczak's resignation. Over the past five months, at least eight senior executives have left the Ethereum Foundation.

The Ethereum Foundation had already released a new functional charter in March 2026, redefining its role: solely as a guardian of self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy, and security. It does not claim to be Ethereum's parent company nor hold final decision-making power over the protocol.

This positioning deliberately leaves a business gap, entrusting commercial implementation to external organizations.

Ethlabs takes on the technology R&D and asset value narrative, responsible for improving the underlying infrastructure and building the complete logic of ETH as a monetary asset, alleviating institutional concerns about entering Ethereum.

Ethereum Institutional is fully responsible for business development, building industry forums, maintaining institutional relationships, and customizing promotional strategies to convert industry interest into actual deployed capital.

The two teams operate independently of the Foundation primarily because its neutral positioning cannot accommodate commercial work.

If a neutral standard-setting body simultaneously acts as an ETH promotion team and a corporate sales department, it would directly undermine its own credibility.

Thus, the three-power structure of Ethereum has taken shape.

The Foundation is responsible for legitimacy and long-term protocol value, Ethlabs handles ETH value capture and technical R&D, and Ethereum Institutional manages corporate business promotion.

Ethereum Institutional revealed that the team has already connected with over 500 Tier 1 banks, global asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, custodians, and market infrastructure service providers.

The Ethereum Institutional Summit it organized gathered over 150 financial executives, with participating institutions managing a total of $250 trillion in assets.

Such massive industry resources are also the core reason for officially splitting off the business and establishing independent institutions rather than keeping them as subsidiary operations of the Foundation.

Entrusting corporate business and ETH value promotion to external institutions solves the disconnect in the Foundation's execution, but it also means that giants holding massive amounts of ETH and possessing enormous balance sheets control the promotional channels aimed at Wall Street.

Convenience and independence are two opposing directions, and Ethereum chose convenience.

Underpinning Ethereum's Wall Street strategy are the entities holding massive ETH positions.

Bitmine currently holds 5.7 million ETH, accounting for 4.7% of the total circulating ETH, and together with cash and marketable securities, its total assets amount to $9.8 billion.

Sharplink holds 886,725 ETH and added 10k ETH on June 28 at an average price of $1,611.

The two institutions collectively hold 6.59 million ETH, representing 5.46% of the total circulation of 120.7 million ETH. At current prices, the total value of their holdings is nearly $10.6 billion; Bitmine's own market cap is $6.55 billion, and Sharplink's market cap exceeds $1 billion.

Once this business separation model is proven, the two investing companies will directly benefit: improved underlying infrastructure and more mature institutional business will boost ETH market demand. With their massive holdings, even small fluctuations in ETH will result in billions of dollars in book value changes.

Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin supports both non-profit organizations, placing himself at the core of this interest system, while the financial returns of Bitmine and Sharplink are deeply tied to Ethereum's ecosystem development.

PeerDAS has been launched, increasing layer-2 network data availability capacity by about tenfold, while Glamsterdam, planned for launch in the second half of 2026, aims to achieve base-layer scaling, parallel transaction processing, and larger block payloads.

An academic report from June 2026 shows that transaction throughput on the mainnet and layer-2 networks doubled; the median mainnet fee dropped from above $2 to below $0.02, and layer-2 network fees fell by over 95% to as low as $0.0015.

The report also provides long-term performance projections: before 2034, the Ethereum mainnet will still handle fewer than 100 transactions per second; layer-2 throughput will not surpass Solana until March 2029, but by then layer-2 fees will be far lower than competitors.

Whether Ethereum can attract institutional participation depends almost entirely on layer-2 scaling and the implementation of industry standards, which is precisely Ethlabs' core scope of work.

Two trends in ETH price will determine the ultimate direction of this architecture.

The bullish rationale is that Ethereum already has considerable scale.

Ethereum currently supports a stablecoin market cap of $157 billion, accounting for over half of the global stablecoin total; DeFi total value locked is $37.2 billion, representing 62% of the entire industry.

RWA.xyz data shows Ethereum's tokenized real-world assets amount to $15.8 billion, with the entire sector totaling $31.52 billion, firmly ranking first among public chains.

Citibank predicts that the global tokenized real-world asset market will expand from the current $17 billion to $5.5 trillion by 2030, with a range of $2.7 trillion (lower bound) to $8.2 trillion (upper bound).

If Ethlabs continues to iterate infrastructure and Ethereum Institutional can convert its network into actual deployed capital, holding giants like Bitmine and Sharplink will become early beneficiaries, and Ethereum will become the default settlement layer for compliant digital assets, with the value of ETH rising accordingly.

The bearish reason first is price; Citibank lowered its 12-month target for ETH from $3,175 to $2,240, citing weak ETF demand and negative inflows, and set a bear case for ETH at $1,094.

Standard Chartered holds the opposite view, insisting that ETH could reach $4,000 by the end of 2026.

The huge divergence in expectations between the two institutions also reflects the uncertainty in the short-term market outlook.

If ETH remains weak for a long time, Bitmine and Sharplink's stock prices will continue to trade at a discount relative to their holdings, and their ability to fund the two non-profit organizations will keep shrinking.

Even if Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional can sustain operations, funding stability will significantly decline, and the market will constantly question whether the core purpose of these two institutions is to boost ETH price rather than building genuinely usable institutional-grade infrastructure.

Regulatory developments support the bullish narrative, but cannot guarantee price increases.

In 2025, the U.S. GENIUS Stablecoin Act was enacted, establishing a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins; Visa, Mastercard, and a Coinbase-led consortium subsequently launched the Open USD stablecoin.

Regulatory improvements will bring incremental institutional settlement to all public chains; this is not a unique benefit to Ethereum.

McKinsey's forecast is more conservative, predicting a tokenized market size of about $2 trillion by 2030, in stark contrast to Citibank's high expectations, highlighting the significant divergence in industry growth estimates.

Summary

By splitting its operations and establishing two independent institutions, Ethereum has resolved the inherent conflict between Foundation neutrality and commercialization.

However, both institutions are entirely funded by entities holding massive amounts of ETH, making this architecture a double-edged sword.

On the positive side, specialized institutions deep-diving into infrastructure and connecting with Wall Street give Ethereum the potential to become the universal settlement layer for tokenized finance;

On the risk side, the ecosystem expansion is fully tied to the balance sheets of holding giants, with ETH price directly determining capital supply.

Both scenarios will coexist, and the ETH price one year from now will determine which trend dominates.