Ethereum Forms Three Major Power Centers, Commercialization Lifeline Held in the Hands of ETH Whales
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Ethereum Forms Three Major Power Centers, Commercialization Lifeline Held in the Hands of ETH Whales
The Foundation is responsible for legality and long-term protocol value, Ethlabs is responsible for ETH value capture and technical research and development, and Ethereum Institutional is responsible for enterprise business promotion.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Gino Matos
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
On July 1, Ethereum Institutional announced its establishment, consolidating the Ethereum Foundation's marketing efforts into a single team responsible for promoting Ethereum's tokenization and stablecoins to banks and asset management companies.
Ethlabs, unveiled a few days earlier, was formed by five former senior researchers from the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on two main directions: improving on-chain settlement efficiency and refining the ETH monetary narrative.
Bitmine, Sharplink, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin jointly provide funding for the two new organizations.
The launch of these two new institutions coincides with continued senior staff departures within the Ethereum Foundation. On June 18, Foundation Co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang announced her departure, following Tomasz Stańczak's resignation; in the past five months, at least eight executives have left the Ethereum Foundation.
As early as March 2026, the Ethereum Foundation released a new functional mandate, redefining its positioning: solely as the guardian of concepts such as self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy, and security, neither claiming to be the parent company of Ethereum nor holding final decision-making power over the protocol. This positioning deliberately leaves a business vacuum, with commercial implementation work handed over to external institutions.
Ethlabs undertakes the sectors of technical research and development and asset value narrative, responsible for improving underlying infrastructure, building a complete logic for ETH as a monetary asset, and alleviating institutional concerns about entering Ethereum. Ethereum Institutional is fully responsible for business liaison, converting industry interest into real implemented capital by building industry forums, maintaining institutional connections, and customizing promotion plans.
The core reason for the two teams operating independently from the Foundation is that the Foundation's neutral positioning cannot accommodate commercial work. If a neutral standard-setting institution simultaneously acts as an ETH promotion team and corporate sales department, it would directly damage its own credibility.
Thus, the three major power structures of Ethereum have taken shape. The Foundation is responsible for legitimacy and long-term protocol value, Ethlabs is responsible for ETH value capture and technical R&D, 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 managers, sovereign wealth funds, custodians, and market infrastructure service providers. The Ethereum Institutional Summit it organized gathered over 150 financial executives, with participating institutions managing total assets worth 250 trillion USD. Such massive industry resources are also the core reason for the official business split and the establishment of independent institutions rather than making it an affiliated business of the Foundation.
Handing over corporate business and ETH value promotion to external institutions solves the disconnection problem at the Foundation's execution level, while also meaning that giants holding massive amounts of ETH and huge balance sheets control the promotional channels facing Wall Street. Convenience and independence are two opposite directions, and Ethereum has chosen convenience.
Supporting Ethereum's Wall Street Layout are Holding Companies with Massive ETH
Bitmine currently holds 5.7 million ETH, accounting for 4.7% of the total ETH circulating supply; combined with cash and securities, its total asset size reaches 9.8 billion USD. Sharplink holds 886,725 ETH and added 10,000 ETH at an average price of 1,611 USD on June 28.
The two institutions collectively hold 6.59 million ETH, accounting for 5.46% of the 120.7 million total circulating supply; calculated at current prices, the total holding value is nearly 10.6 billion USD; Bitmine's own market cap is 6.55 billion USD, and Sharplink's market cap exceeds 1 billion USD.
Once this business split model proves successful, the two funding enterprises will benefit directly: more complete underlying infrastructure and more mature institutional business will lift ETH market demand; as both hold massive positions, even small ETH fluctuations will bring hundreds of millions of USD in asset book value changes. Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin simultaneously supports the two non-profit institutions, placing him at the core of this interest system, while Bitmine and Sharplink's financial returns are deeply bound to Ethereum ecosystem development.
PeerDAS has already gone live, capable of increasing Layer 2 data availability capacity by approximately ten times, while Glamsterdam, planned for launch in the second half of 2026, aims to achieve base layer scaling, parallel transaction processing, and larger block payloads.
An academic report from June 2026 shows that transaction throughput for the mainnet and Layer 2 networks has doubled; mainnet median fees dropped from over 2 USD to below 0.02 USD, and Layer 2 network fees decreased by over 95%, as low as 0.0015 USD.
The report also provides long-term performance predictions: before 2034, Ethereum mainnet transactions per second will still be less than 100; not until March 2029 will Layer 2 throughput surpass Solana, but by then Layer 2 fees will be far lower than competitors. Whether Ethereum can attract institutions depends almost entirely on Layer 2 scaling and the implementation of industry standards, which is precisely the core scope of Ethlabs' work.
Two ETH Price Trends Will Determine the Ultimate Direction of This Architecture
The bullish reason is that Ethereum already possesses a considerable scale. Ethereum currently carries a stablecoin market cap of 157 billion USD, accounting for over half of the global stablecoin total size; DeFi locked assets are 37.2 billion USD, accounting for 62% of the entire industry. RWA.xyz data shows Ethereum's tokenized real-world asset scale is 15.8 billion USD, with the total track summing to 31.52 billion USD, firmly ranking first among public chains.
Citibank predicts that the global tokenized real-world asset market will expand from the current 17 billion USD to 5.5 trillion USD by 2030, with a lower bound of 2.7 trillion and an upper bound of 8.2 trillion USD. If Ethlabs continues to iterate infrastructure and Ethereum Institutional can convert connections into actually deployed capital, holding giants like Bitmine and Sharplink will become early industry beneficiaries, Ethereum will become the default settlement layer for compliant digital assets, and ETH asset value will rise accordingly.
The bearish reason is firstly price; Citibank lowered ETH's 12-month target price from 3,175 USD to 2,240 USD, citing weak ETF demand and negative capital inflows, and set ETH's bear market scenario at 1,094 USD.
Standard Chartered's view is completely opposite, insisting that ETH is expected to reach 4,000 USD by the end of 2026. The huge divergence in expectations between the two institutions also reflects that the short-term market outlook is full of uncertainty.
If ETH remains weak long-term, and Bitmine and Sharplink stock prices continue to trade at a discount relative to held assets, the ability of the two enterprises to fund the two non-profit institutions will continue to shrink. Even if Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional can maintain operations, funding stability will decrease significantly, and the market will continuously question whether the core purpose of establishing the two institutions is to pump ETH prices rather than building truly usable institutional-grade infrastructure.
Regulatory levels favor bullish logic but cannot guarantee market rises. In 2025, the US "GENIUS Stablecoin Act" was implemented, building a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins; a consortium of Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase launched the Open USD stablecoin accordingly. Improved regulation will bring institutional settlement increments to all public chains, which is not an Ethereum-exclusive bonus. McKinsey's prediction is more conservative, with the token market size around 2 trillion USD by 2030, forming a sharp contrast with Citibank's high expectations, showing that there is huge divergence in industry growth space itself.
Conclusion
Ethereum solved the inherent contradiction between Foundation neutrality and commercialization by splitting business and establishing two independent institutions. However, all funding for the two institutions comes from enterprises holding massive amounts of ETH, so this architecture has both pros and cons.
On the positive side, professional institutions deepening infrastructure and connecting with Wall Street means Ethereum is expected to become the universal settlement underlying layer for tokenized finance; on the risk side, the ecosystem expansion system is completely bound to the balance sheets of holding giants, and ETH market performance directly determines funding supply. Both situations will exist simultaneously, and the ETH price one year later will determine which trend dominates.
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