Written by: Gino Matos

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

On July 1, Ethereum Institutional announced its establishment, integrating the market promotion work of the Ethereum Foundation into one team, whose responsibility is to promote Ethereum's tokenization and stablecoin to banks and asset management companies.

A few days earlier, Ethlabs emerged, formed by five former senior researchers from the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on enhancing on-chain settlement efficiency and refining the ETH monetary narrative.

Bitmine, Sharplink, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin jointly funded the two new organizations.

The timing of the establishment of these two new institutions coincides with the continued loss of senior leaders within the Ethereum Foundation. On June 18, the foundation's co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang announced his departure, following Tomasz Stańczak's resignation, with at least eight executives having left the Ethereum Foundation in the past five months.

As early as March 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a new functional agenda, redefining its position: to act solely as a guardian of the principles of self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open source code, privacy, and security, no longer identifying itself as the parent company of Ethereum, nor possessing ultimate decision-making power over the protocol. This positioning deliberately leaves business gaps, handing over related commercial work to external institutions.

Ethlabs takes on the tech R&D and asset value narrative segment, responsible for improving underlying infrastructure and creating a complete logic for ETH as a currency asset, alleviating the concerns of institutions entering Ethereum. Ethereum Institutional is fully responsible for business connections, turning industry intentions into real landing funds by building industry forums, maintaining institutional relationships, and customizing promotional plans.

The two teams operate independently from the foundation, primarily because the foundation's neutral position cannot accommodate commercial work. If a neutral standard-setting body simultaneously acts as ETH's promotional team and a corporate sales department, it undermines its own credibility.

Thus, the three main power structures of Ethereum have formed. The foundation is responsible for legality and long-term agreement value, Ethlabs is responsible for ETH value acquisition and technology development, and Ethereum Institutional is responsible for corporate business promotion.

Ethereum Institutional revealed that the team has currently connected with over 500 tier-one banks, global asset management firms, sovereign funds, custodians, and market infrastructure service providers. Its hosted Ethereum Institutional Summit gathered over 150 financial executives, with the participating institutions managing a total asset scale of 250 trillion dollars. Such an immense industry resource is also the core reason for the official separation of business and the establishment of independent institutions rather than treating them as subsidiary businesses of the foundation.

Delegating corporate business and ETH value promotion to external institutions solves the disconnect at the execution level of the foundation while also meaning that giants holding massive ETH and significant balance sheets control the promotional voice towards Wall Street. Convenience and independence are two opposing directions, and Ethereum chose convenience.

Supporting Ethereum's Wall Street layout are the companies holding massive amounts of ETH

Bitmine currently holds 5.7 million ETH, accounting for 4.7% of the total circulating amount of ETH; combined with cash and securities, its total asset scale reaches 9.8 billion dollars. Sharplink holds 886,725 ETH and increased its holdings by 10,000 ETH at an average price of 1,611 dollars on June 28.

The two institutions combined hold 6.59 million ETH, accounting for 5.46% of the total circulation of 120.7 million ETH, with a total holding value of nearly 10.6 billion dollars at current prices; Bitmine's own market value is 6.55 billion dollars, and Sharplink's market value exceeds 1 billion dollars.

Once this business split model runs smoothly, the two investing companies will directly benefit: more complete underlying infrastructure and more mature institutional business will boost ETH market demand, and the large holdings of both will mean that slight fluctuations in ETH will lead to changes of hundreds of millions of dollars on their balance sheets. Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin supports both nonprofit institutions, placing him at the core of this interest system, while the financial gains of Bitmine and Sharplink are deeply tied to the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

PeerDAS has gone live, potentially increasing the data availability capacity of layer two networks by about ten times, while Glamsterdam, planned for launch in the second half of 2026, aims to achieve foundational layer expansion, parallel transaction processing, and larger block payloads.

A June 2026 academic report shows that the transaction throughput of the main network and layer two networks doubled; the median fee on the main network dropped from over 2 dollars to below 0.02 dollars, and the fee on the layer two networks decreased over 95%, down to 0.0015 dollars.

The report also provides long-term performance predictions: before 2034, the transaction processing capacity of the Ethereum main network will remain less than 100 transactions per second; until March 2029, the throughput of layer two networks will surpass Solana, but by then the layer two fees will be much lower than its competitors. Whether Ethereum can attract institutional entry almost entirely depends on layer two scaling and industry standards being realized, which is exactly the core work area of Ethlabs.

Two trends for ETH prices will determine the ultimate direction of this structure

The bullish argument is that Ethereum already has a considerable scale. Ethereum currently supports a stablecoin market value of 157 billion dollars, which occupies more than half of the total global stablecoin scale; DeFi locked assets total 37.2 billion dollars, representing 62% of the entire industry. According to RWA.xyz data, the tokenized real-world assets on Ethereum amount to 15.8 billion dollars, totaling 31.52 billion dollars across the entire sector, solidifying its position as the leader among public chains.

Citibank predicts that the global tokenized real asset market will expand from the current 17 billion dollars to 5.5 trillion dollars by 2030, with a lower range of 2.7 trillion and an upper range of 8.2 trillion dollars. If Ethlabs continues to iterate its infrastructure and Ethereum Institutional can convert its relationships into actual deployment funding, giants like Bitmine and Sharplink will become early beneficiaries in the industry, and Ethereum would also become the default settlement layer for compliant digital assets, with ETH asset values rising accordingly.

The bearish argument primarily revolves around price, with Citibank lowering ETH's 12-month target price from 3,175 dollars to 2,240 dollars due to weak ETF demand and negative fund inflows, setting a bear market scenario for ETH at 1,094 dollars.

Standard Chartered's view is completely opposite, insisting that ETH could reach 4,000 dollars by the end of 2026. The huge divergence in expectations between the two institutions also reflects significant uncertainty in the short-term market prospects.

If ETH maintains prolonged weakness, the stock prices of Bitmine and Sharplink will continue to be discounted relative to their held assets, and their ability to provide funding to the two nonprofit institutions will wane. Even if Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional can continue operations, the stability of their funding will sharply decline, and the market will continuously question whether the core purpose of establishing the two institutions is to drive up ETH prices rather than build real usable institutional-grade infrastructure.

Regulatory support is a bullish factor for the market logic but does not guarantee price increases. The U.S. "GENIUS Stablecoin Act" is set to create a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins in 2025; Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase jointly launched the Open USD stablecoin in response. Improved regulations will bring incremental institutional settlements to all public chains, which is not a unique benefit for Ethereum. McKinsey's forecast is more conservative, projecting the token market size at about 2 trillion dollars in the 2030s, a stark contrast to Citi's high expectations, indicating there are significant divergences in the industry's growth potential.

Conclusion

Ethereum has resolved the inherent contradiction between neutrality and commercialization of the foundation by splitting its business and establishing two independent institutions. However, both institutions are funded entirely by companies holding massive amounts of ETH, which means this structure carries both advantages and disadvantages.

On the positive side, professional institutions are deeply engaged in infrastructure and connecting to Wall Street, making it possible for Ethereum to become the general settlement layer for token finance; on the downside, the ecological expansion system is fully tethered to the balance sheets of large holders, directly influencing funding supply based on ETH market conditions. Both scenarios will coexist, and the price of ETH in a year will determine which trend dominates.