Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s tech newsletter covering the most important stories in blockchain. I’m Margaux Nijkerk, a reporter at CoinDesk.
We’re giving you a deeper look at the biggest trends, breakthroughs and debates shaping blockchain technology each week.
This week, we’re diving into the creation of EthLabs, and why it was launched during a period of transition for the Ethereum ecosystem.
EthLabs, Ethereum’s newest nonprofit research organization, has demurred at insinuations that it is attempting to replace a struggling Ethereum Foundation. Instead, its founders, former leaders of the foundation, argue it's a response to a changing Ethereum ecosystem, one where the foundation is narrowing its focus while new organizations step in to tackle broader adoption.
The timing of EthLabs' launch calls that into question.
The organization publicly unveiled itself just one day before there were major layoffs at Ethereum Foundation, and only a few days after co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang announced her resignation, adding to what has become a period of significant turnover at Ethereum's most influential institution. Since January, at least nine prominent members of the Ethereum Foundation have departed as the organization undergoes a broader strategic realignment.
For many observers, the departures have fueled questions about the foundation's future role and whether Ethereum's governance model is entering a new chapter. According to EthLabs executive director Ansgar Dietrichs, that transition is exactly why the organization was created.
"We looked around, didn't see anyone else stepping up," Dietrichs told CoinDesk in an interview. "After two months of that, we looked at each other and said, 'Well, if no one else is stepping up, then it has to be us.'"
Dietrichs, along with four other former Ethereum Foundation researchers and developers, some of whom left the foundation just this year to launch EthLabs, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing Ethereum's technical roadmap with a stronger emphasis on real-world adoption.
The creation comes as Dietrichs describes Ethereum as entering a fundamentally different phase of its evolution. "The decade of infrastructure build-out of Ethereum is coming to an end," he said. "Now it's much more about actual institutional adoption."
Over the past decade, Ethereum's developer community focused on building the foundational pieces of the network: from smart contracts and decentralized finance to scaling technologies and layer-2 networks. With those building blocks largely in place, Dietrichs believes the next challenge is ensuring Ethereum can support large-scale financial infrastructure.
"I don't think crypto and Ethereum will ever go back to a time like it was in the past," he said, arguing that the ecosystem has moved beyond the boom-and-bust cycles that previously defined it.
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