TL;DR
Francesco D’Amato, a protocol researcher with five years at the Ethereum Foundation, announced his move to Ethlabs, a nonprofit laboratory founded by former colleagues from the same institution.
He shared the decision through a post on X, where he described the departure as difficult but timely: “Leaving that behind is hard, but after five years this moment of great change feels like the right one for a new beginning“.
Status update: I am moving from the Ethereum Foundation to Ethlabs @ethlabs_org, joining the team to accelerate protocol work in the age of Ethereum adoption.
In 5 years at EF Research, I have worked on research and specification of a wide range of Protocol R&D: mev, consensus,…
— Francesco (@fradamt) July 16, 2026
During his time at EF Research, D’Amato worked on maximal extractable value, consensus mechanisms, data availability sampling, and execution layer pricing, areas that form the technical core of several upcoming Ethereum upgrades.
At Ethlabs, the researcher will focus his work on reducing the transaction finality time of the network, a bottleneck that under normal conditions sits at around 12 minutes. That latency puts Ethereum at a disadvantage compared to newer layer-1 chains that settle operations in seconds. D’Amato noted his intention to help Ethereum “finalize much faster, as soon as possible”.
Ethlabs was founded in June 2026 by former researchers from the Ethereum Foundation Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma. Its backers include Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum, alongside Bitmine, SharpLink, Anchorage, and Octant. The organization states that research decisions are independent of corporate funding, with contributions managed by an external grants administrator.
D’Amato’s move to Ethlabs is part of a pattern that has become clear within the organization. The Ethereum Foundation cut 54 positions last month, approximately 20% of its staff, and dissolved its protocol support team, reorganizing remaining personnel into divisions focused on development, community, access, and institutional activity.
Meanwhile, other former Foundation employees launched EthSystems in early July, a for-profit company dedicated to confidential infrastructure for regulated financial institutions on Ethereum, also backed by Bitmine, SharpLink, and Lubin. Two independent organizations emerging within weeks, drawn from the same talent pool and with overlapping investors, represent a deliberate decentralization of the network’s research layer.
