In brief
- Ethereum Institutional, a new nonprofit, will help Wall Street firms adopt Ethereum-based infrastructure.
- The group follows last week's launch of Ethlabs, another Ethereum nonprofit backed by many of the same supporters.
- Both initiatives come as the Ethereum Foundation faces mounting criticism, leadership departures, and a major restructuring.
A new nonprofit aimed at onboarding Wall Street to Ethereum launched Wednesday, marking the second major Ethereum-focused initiative backed in recent weeks by network co-founder Joe Lubin alongside top treasury firms BitMine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink.
Ethereum Institutional will serve as an independent point of contact for banks, asset managers, and other financial institutions seeking to get more involved with tokenization, stablecoins, and other on-chain financial infrastructure, according to an organization mission statement.
The organization said it will build on institutional engagement efforts previously led by the Ethereum Foundation, but will operate independently with funding from BitMine and SharpLink, Wall Street’s largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury firms.
Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin will also anchor the group’s funding, along with dozens of other individual and institutional contributors. (Disclaimer: Lubin, through his company Consensys, and BitMine Chairman Tom Lee are investors in Dastan, Decrypt’s parent company).
Wednesday’s launch follows the debut last week of Ethlabs, a separate nonprofit research and development organization created by former Ethereum Foundation researchers and backed by many of the same supporters.
“Together, Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional form complementary pillars of Ethereum’s next chapter,” entities involved in both endeavors said, “one advancing protocol-layer innovation and core infrastructure, the other ensuring institutions have a credible, dedicated counterpart to guide them from evaluation through deployment at scale.”
If these organizations see themselves as Ethereum’s future, the implication could be that the Ethereum Foundation is a remnant of the past. The longstanding nonprofit, which has quarterbacked the network’s technical development for years, has come under fire recently for failing to take proactive measures to bolster both ETH’s price and the network’s public image.
In the last few months, numerous Ethereum Foundation leaders have abandoned their posts. The organization then laid off 20% of its workforce last week and instituted a substantial reorganization.
Former linchpins of the Foundation have come out recently with proposals to “save Ethereum” by allocating significant funds towards the goal of increasing ETH’s long-sagging price. The moves were widely seen as digs at Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s idealistically minded co-founder and current steward.