Ethereum Splits Into Three: Foundation, Ethlabs, Institutional

Ethereum now has three organizational centers. The Ethereum Foundation retains a neutral stewardship role. Ethlabs, formed in late June by five former senior Foundation researchers, focuses on infrastructure readiness and arguments for ETH as a monetary instrument. Ethereum Institutional launched on July 1 as a public-facing nonprofit focused on corporate distribution and adoption of tokenization and stablecoins. Bitmine, Sharplink and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin provide funding to both new groups.

Ethlabs was created to work on technical standards, layer-2 improvements, and settlement speed. Ethereum Institutional consolidated about a year of the Foundation’s go-to-market activity into a standalone group for banks, asset managers, custodians and market infrastructure providers. The institutional group reports more than 500 industry relationships and said its recent Institutional Ethereum Forum convened roughly 150 senior executives representing about $250 trillion in combined assets under management.

The reorganization follows leadership changes at the Foundation. Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned as co-executive director on June 18, joining earlier departures including Tomasz Stańczak. The Foundation recorded at least eight senior exits over five months. A March 2026 mandate redefined the Foundation’s role as a steward of self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy and security, and stated it would not claim to be Ethereum’s parent or a final authority.

Funding links tie Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional to large ETH treasury holders. Bitmine reports holding 5.70 million ETH, about 4.7% of the cited total supply, and a balance sheet that includes cash and securities near $9.8 billion. Sharplink holds 886,725 ETH, including a 10,000 ETH purchase on June 28. Combined, the two firms hold roughly 6.59 million ETH, or about 5.46% of an approximately 120.7 million ETH supply, a stake valued near $10.6 billion at current prices.

Technical projects connected to the new organizations are already in motion. A live protocol called PeerDAS increased data availability capacity for layer-2 networks. A planned project, Glamsterdam, targets base-layer scaling and parallel transaction processing in the second half of 2026. An academic paper from June 2026 reported that throughput on mainnet and layer-2s has doubled so far, mainnet median fees fell from above $2 to below $0.02, and layer-2 median fees dropped more than 95% to about $0.0015. The paper projected mainnet throughput would remain below 100 transactions per second until 2034 and forecast layer-2 networks overtaking Solana’s throughput in March 2029.

Network and market metrics cited by the groups include about $157 billion in stablecoin value on Ethereum and roughly $37.2 billion in decentralized finance deposits. Forecasts for the broader tokenization market range from roughly $2 trillion to $5.5 trillion by 2030 in different scenarios. Recent institutional price targets vary: one bank lowered its 12-month ETH target to $2,240 with a downside scenario near $1,094, while another maintained a $4,000 target for the end of 2026.

If ETH prices remain weak and treasury-firm equities trade at discounts to underlying holdings, the ability of Bitmine and Sharplink to underwrite external nonprofits could decline. If infrastructure upgrades progress and corporate adoption increases, institutional demand for ETH could rise.