“I looked around and saw no one else step up,” Dietrichs told CoinDesk in an interview. “Then two months later we looked at each other and said, ‘If no one else is going to stand up, it’s us.'”
Dietrichs and four other former Ethereum Foundation researchers and developers, some of whom left the foundation this year, just started EthLabs, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing Ethereum’s technology roadmap with an emphasis on real-world adoption.
The creation comes as Dietrichs describes Ethereum as entering a fundamentally different stage of its evolution. “The decade of building infrastructure with Ethereum is coming to an end,” he said. “Now, actual institutional adoption is important.”
Over the past decade, Ethereum’s developer community has focused on building the foundational parts of the network, from smart contracts and decentralized finance to scaling technologies and layer 2 networks. With these building blocks mostly in place, Dietrichs believes the next challenge is to ensure that Ethereum can support large-scale financial infrastructure.
“I don’t think cryptocurrencies and Ethereum will ever go back to what they were in the past,” he said, arguing that the ecosystem has moved beyond the boom-and-bust cycles that were previously defined.
