The Case for a Second Ethereum R&D Lab

When I wrote about Ethlabs last week, my piece talked about the what. Namely the basics of the new organization, and how it's a new independent R&D lab co-founded by former Ethereum Foundation luminaries like Ansgar Dietrichs and Caspar Schwarz-Schilling.

That said, both Ansgar and Caspar just came on the podcast to cover the why of the org and their thinking around it. It's one of the best conversations about Ethereum's direction I've heard in a while.

The core thesis, as Ansgar laid it out early in the convo, is that Ethereum is at an evolutionary crossroads. The network's first 10 years were about infra, bringing assets onchain, figuring out how DeFi protocols should work, and etc. All of that is done, more or less, as we now have the fundamental rails.

Now the question is whether Ethereum will become a central node that the global economy routes through, or whether we end up in a fragmented multichain world. Ansgar said it will be one or the other, and it's not inevitable which way will win.

Tackling this crux head-on is the strategic case for Ethlabs's existence. The EF, per its new mandate, is doubling down on CROPS, i.e. censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security, the foundational properties that give Ethereum credible neutrality. Ethlabs exists to complement that vision, not compete with it. In Caspar's framing the EF maintains what makes Ethereum Ethereum, and Ethlabs will work to scale that to the world.

The work streams

In the episode, Ansgar sketched out Ethlabs's focus areas across three buckets:

• Chain — Anything core protocol, including a push for L1 scaling that Ansgar has been pushing on for a while now. The upcoming Amsterdam hardfork, per the convo, should deliver something like ~4x throughput gains, and Ansgar's broader north star is a permanent 3x-per-year scaling trajectory for Ethereum going forward.
• Platform — Here will come the work that stems from the intersection between the chain and apps. This is where interoperability lives, and both Ansgar and Caspar were emphatic that Ethereum cannot be the central settlement node of the global economy if the UX of moving assets across L2s remains as fragmented as it is today. The superpower of a "United Chains of Ethereum," as Ansgar put it, only materializes if being in that bundle is an obvious no-brainer for any chain launching today. Right now, it isn't.
• Growth — The newest and most explicitly market-facing area of Ethlabs, this area of effort will focus on understanding what DeFi builders, Wall Street, and other finance-adjacent builders actually need from Ethereum, and then propagating those needs back upstream into research and EIPs.

On ETH the asset

One of the more interesting threads in the episode was the discussion around ETH specifically, an area where the EF has historically been reticent.

As Ansgar argued, Ethereum and ETH can only win together, which means every protocol development decision needs to account for its effect on ETH's role and value accrual. He draws the Bitcoin comparison deliberately: Bitcoin's success is partly a matter of inevitability, as there's an aura around it that it will simply be there. That's what Ethereum, and ETH, need to build.

On the funding and longevity side, Caspar was candid that the org's accountability structure is quite intentional. Ethlabs has solid two-to-three-year runway and a starting team of five, with ambitious but lean hiring plans. Their plan for continued funding is to deliver impactful work, then come back to the community in a year and ask if their track record justifies further support.

Ansgar noted this accountability loop was a deliberate hedge against the classic nonprofit failure mode of drifting toward irrelevance without any real-world forcing function.

Alas, can Ethlabs pull off their plans and make a difference? We'll see, though it does seem clear to me that this group of Ethereum diehards is uniquely suited for the work they've set out for themselves. They're poised to have a big impact, and that's something everyone in Ethereum can root for. For now, catch up on all their thinking in our latest episode, out now for everyone!

Ethlabs: The New Org to Make Ethereum Win | Ansgar & Caspar on Bankless

Ethereum has a new R&D lab, and its mission is blunt: make Ethereum and ETH win.

BanklessBankless