Ethereum Splits Into Three Hubs; Treasuries Back Two

Ethereum has reorganized into three distinct centers. The Ethereum Foundation remains the neutral steward of the protocol. Two outside groups, Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional, have taken on technical and commercial roles and operate separately from the Foundation.

Ethereum Institutional formally launched on July 1. The group folds about a year of the Foundation’s go-to-market work into a nonprofit that pitches tokenization and stablecoins to banks, custodians, asset managers and public companies. The organization reports it maintains relationships with more than 500 institutions and that an Institutional Ethereum Forum drew over 150 senior executives representing roughly $250 trillion in combined assets under management.

Ethlabs surfaced days before that launch. The group was formed by five former senior researchers from the Foundation and focuses on infrastructure readiness, faster settlement and arguments for ETH as a monetary instrument. Ethlabs’ public roadmap includes PeerDAS, already live, which increases data availability capacity for layer-2 networks, and Glamsterdam, a base-layer scaling project planned for the second half of 2026 aimed at parallel transaction processing and larger block payloads.

The Ethereum Foundation redefined its role in March 2026 to emphasize self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy and security, and to avoid acting as an advocacy or sales arm. That change, alongside departures inside the Foundation, opened space for outside groups to take on the commercial functions. Co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang resigned on June 18. Earlier exits include Tomasz Stańczak, and at least eight senior staff left over five months.

Funding and governance for Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional include major ETH-holding firms. Bitmine holds 5.70 million ETH and reports total assets including cash and marketable securities of about $9.8 billion. Sharplink holds 886,725 ETH and added 10,000 ETH on June 28 at an average price of $1,611. Combined, the two firms control roughly 6.59 million ETH, about 5.46% of the 120.7 million ETH supply cited by Bitmine. At prevailing prices those holdings are valued near $10.6 billion against Bitmine’s market capitalization of $6.55 billion and Sharplink’s market capitalization of over $1 billion.

Ethlabs focuses on technical standards and layer-2 execution, which its backers say are central to the institutional case for Ethereum. A June 2026 academic paper measured current effects: transaction throughput on mainnet and layer-2s has doubled, 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 projects mainnet throughput will remain below 100 transactions per second until 2034 and forecasts that layer-2 networks will overtake Solana’s throughput in March 2029, with lower median fees arriving by October 2026.

On-chain market context includes about $157 billion in stablecoin value on Ethereum, roughly $37.2 billion in DeFi deposits, and nearly $15.8 billion in tokenized real-world assets tracked on the chain. Analysts offer differing projections for tokenization: one forecast projects growth from about $17 billion today to $5.5 trillion by 2030 within a range of $2.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion, while another projects roughly $2 trillion by 2030.

Forecasters’ ETH price targets vary. One bank lowered its 12-month target to $2,240 and outlined a bear scenario at $1,094 against recent prices near $1,611. Another institution maintained a $4,000 target for the end of 2026. Treasury firms that fund the external groups hold ETH directly, so changes in ETH price affect their balance sheets and, by extension, their capacity to finance the nonprofits.

Ethereum’s new structure places protocol legitimacy and neutral standards with the Foundation, technical and monetary research with Ethlabs, and corporate distribution with Ethereum Institutional. Funding for the external organizations comes in part from large ETH treasuries. The organizations and their backers have described their roles and the projects they plan to pursue. Observers note the financial exposure of the treasury firms to ETH price moves and the implications for sustained funding availability.