Francesco D'Amato, a five-year veteran of Ethereum Foundation Research, announced today he's joining Ethlabs, the independent nonprofit R&D lab founded last month by his former EF colleagues.
• A heavyweight hire: D'Amato's fingerprints are on much of Ethereum's consensus-layer roadmap, e.g. single slot finality research, PeerDAS, MEV work, and censorship-resistance mechanisms like FOCIL. He's known for ranging across hard protocol problems.
• In his words: On the move, D'Amato wrote that for the first time in his Ethereum research career, there's "a credible shot" at serious protocol work happening outside the EF, which is a big statement from someone who spent half a decade inside the Foundation.
• Ethlabs' bench deepens: The lab was founded by senior ex-EF researchers including Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot, with backing from Bitmine, Sharplink, and Joe Lubin (the same trio anchoring this week's EthSystems launch). Their aim is to accelerate Ethereum as the settlement layer for the global economy while publishing research openly.
• The bigger migration: The move continues a talent flow out of the EF amid its downsizing and refocus this year, with spin-outs like Ethlabs, EthSystems, and Ethereum Institutional each claiming a lane that the leaner Foundation is vacating. As such, Ethereum's R&D scene is quietly restructuring from a single foundation into a network of specialized, well-funded nodes.