Five former Etherlabs Foundation researchers have established independent, non-profit R & D institutions, supported by SharpLink, Bitmine, and the co-founder of Ethersy, CEO Joe Lubin. This has also shown a shift towards a more decentralized model of collaboration following the recent departure of several core members of the Foundation.

Supported by the company's holding camp.

On Monday, Ethlabs announced the launch. The funders include SharpLink Gaming, Bitmine Immmersion Technologies, Joe Lubin, and other institutions such as Anchorage Digital, Octant and SNZ. SharpLink and Bitmine are important players among current enterprise-level ETH holders.

According to the announcement, Ethlabs was headed by five former senior contributors to the Taifung Foundation, namely Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Gaspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf and Julian Ma. Several people have directed their research to cover such areas as expansion, data availability, protocol economic models and network finality.

It's more decentralized.

At the time of the establishment of this institution, the ETA Foundation was undergoing a round of personnel changes. Last week, Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director of the Foundation, indicated that he would relinquish his leadership. Julian Ma and Barnabé Monnot also left the Foundation earlier this year.

Against this background, proponents see Ethlabs as part of a “multipoint” development model. In other words, the follow-up research and development of the ETA will be pursued by a number of independent organizations, rather than continuing to rely heavily on the single organization of the Foundation.

Initial focus settlement and institutional uplink

Ethlabs indicated that the initial work would focus on three directions: increasing the speed of transaction settlement, expanding network capacity and improving the infrastructure for monetizing assets and stabilizing currencies in the institutional distribution chain.

  • The market share of the currency is about 53%.
  • It's almost half the size of a monetized real-estate market.
  • The results of the research will be published in public.

According to RWA.xyz data, the Ether is now a 53 per cent share of the stable currency market of about $30 billion, while bearing nearly half of the monetized real asset market of about $32 billion. Ethlabs indicated that the research agenda would remain independent through the external allotment process and that funding would be available for transparency reporting, but would not directly determine technical priorities.