A new nonprofit called Ethereum Institutional launched Wednesday. Its job? Help banks and asset managers get serious about Ethereum-based infrastructure — tokenization, stablecoins, the whole on-chain stack.
Backed by BitMine Immersion Technologies, SharpLink, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, the group will operate independently from the Ethereum Foundation. That’s intentional. The Foundation has been taking heat lately — leadership departures, 20% workforce cuts, a major reorganization. Last week also saw the launch of Ethlabs, a separate nonprofit R&D outfit created by former Foundation researchers.
Same supporters behind both. The groups say they’re complementary: Ethlabs works on protocol-layer innovation, Ethereum Institutional handles the institutional side — a credible counterpart to guide firms from evaluation to deployment at scale.
BitMine and SharpLink are Wall Street’s largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury firms. Consensys CEO Joe Lubin is anchoring funding alongside dozens of other contributors. (Disclosure: Lubin’s Consensys and BitMine Chairman Tom Lee are investors in Decrypt’s parent company.)
The message is clear. If these new orgs see themselves as Ethereum’s future, the Ethereum Foundation is being treated as the past. It’s been criticized for failing to boost ETH’s price or the network’s image. Former Foundation leaders have proposed plans to “save Ethereum” by allocating significant funds to raise ETH’s price — widely seen as digs at Vitalik Buterin.
ETH price? Still sagging.
