🔬 ETHEREUM SHIFT: 🚀 D’Amato Joins Ethlabs To Speed Up Ethereum Francesco D’Amato leaves the Ethereum Foundation after five years to join Ethlabs, a new research organization created by former foundation researchers focused on advancing Ethereum’s core infrastructure. The protocol researcher will focus on one of Ethereum’s long-standing challenges: reducing transaction finality times, which currently take around 12 minutes under normal conditions. The goal is to achieve faster settlement while maintaining the network’s security and decentralization. During his time at the Ethereum Foundation, D’Amato worked on key areas including maximal extractable value (MEV), consensus mechanisms, data availability sampling and execution layer pricing, fields connected to Ethereum’s upcoming technical developments. Ethlabs emerges as an independent research hub backed by figures and companies across the Ethereum ecosystem, including Joe Lubin, Bitmine, SharpLink, Anchorage and Octant. The organization states that its research decisions will remain independent from corporate funding through an external grant management structure. The move comes as the Ethereum Foundation undergoes a major restructuring after cutting 54 positions, around 20% of its workforce, and dissolving its protocol support team. The departure of researchers toward independent organizations reflects a broader shift in Ethereum’s development model, where core innovation is increasingly distributed among specialized teams rather than concentrated within a single institution. The challenge ahead for Ethlabs and other emerging groups will be transforming research advances into practical improvements that help Ethereum remain competitive against faster Layer 1 networks.