🔬 ETHEREUM UPDATE: 🚀 D’Amato Joins Ethlabs to Accelerate Ethereum Francesco D’Amato is leaving the Ethereum Foundation after five years to join Ethlabs, a new research organization founded by former foundation researchers focused on advancing Ethereum’s core infrastructure. The protocol researcher will focus on one of Ethereum’s longstanding challenges: reducing transaction finality times, which currently average around 12 minutes under normal conditions. The goal is to achieve faster settlement while preserving the network’s security and decentralization. During his tenure 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 directly tied to Ethereum’s upcoming technical upgrades. Ethlabs emerges as an independent research hub backed by prominent figures and companies within the Ethereum ecosystem, including Joe Lubin, Bitmine, SharpLink, Anchorage, and Octant. The organization asserts that its research decisions will remain independent of corporate funding through an external grant management structure. This move comes as the Ethereum Foundation undergoes major restructuring following the elimination of 54 positions—nearly 20% of its workforce—and the dissolution of its protocol support team. The departure of researchers toward independent organizations reflects a broader shift in Ethereum’s development model, where centralized innovation is increasingly distributed across specialized teams rather than concentrated within a single institution. The challenge for Ethlabs and other emerging groups will be to translate research advances into practical improvements that enable Ethereum to remain competitive against faster Layer 1 networks.