Bitmine, Sharplink and Joe Lubin fund a new dedicated go-to-market organization built by Ethereum Foundation alumni
NEW YORK, July 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Ethereum Institutional, an independent non-profit organization, today announced its public launch as the dedicated institutional front door for the Ethereum ecosystem. The organization consolidates a year of institutional engagement work led by the Ethereum Foundation's go-to-market team, housing it in an independent organization with a sharper mission, broader geographic footprint and long-term funding. Bitmine Immersion Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: BMNR), Sharplink, Inc. (NASDAQ: SBET) and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin are anchoring the funding, along with dozens of individual and institutional contributors.
Ethereum Institutional exists so as the world's largest financial institutions make their foundational, long-lived platform decisions about tokenization, stablecoins and onchain market infrastructure, they engage Ethereum through a credible, neutral counterpart. Ethereum does not force a single rigid configuration, but lets institutions choose the approach that fits each use case, while deriving security from the world's most robust and reliable digital asset settlement layer.
This launch represents the second major independent steward organization for Ethereum's ecosystem unveiled in the last week, following the announcement of Ethlabs, a research and development lab also founded by former Ethereum Foundation leaders. Together, Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional form complementary pillars of Ethereum's next chapter: one advancing protocol-layer innovation and core infrastructure, the other ensuring institutions have a credible, dedicated counterpart to guide them from evaluation through deployment at scale. Ethereum Institutional brings ecosystem experience and unbiased expertise to the world's largest financial institutions.
The institutional adoption moment is now. Ethereum currently hosts roughly $180 billion of stablecoins on mainnet, approximately 60% of total stablecoin supply and roughly two-thirds of all tokenized real-world assets. Leading financial institutions across asset management, banking, payments, custody and market infrastructure are actively building on the network. Meanwhile, competing ecosystems have made institutional adoption their explicit commercial priority, each running well-funded business development organizations with dedicated mandates to land institutional deployments.
The platform decisions institutions are making in the next 12-24 months will set the topology of onchain finance for decades. Coordinated, credible representation now unifies the conversation, and supports expanding Ethereum's robust network, which benefits its existing and future users.
Ethereum Institutional launches with a proven track record and existing momentum: the team has built over 500 institutional relationships covering the global universe of Tier-1 banks, top-tier asset managers, sovereign institutions, custodians and market infrastructure providers. The team has established a thought leader gathering through the Institutional Ethereum Forum, which brought together more than 150 senior executives and Heads of Digital Assets from institutions representing roughly $250 trillion in combined assets under management.
Ethereum Institutional will operate along five focus areas from day one: Institutional Education and Engagement, Institutional Intelligence, ETH and Ecosystem Marketing, Standards and Best Practices and Institutional Events. Geographic coverage will expand from New York, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore into additional primary financial centers including Zurich, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Abu Dhabi, with dedicated institutional leads embedded in each region operating under a shared credibly neutral mandate.
Thomas "Tom" Lee, Chairman of Bitmine. "Financial institutions are making infrastructure decisions today that will shape capital markets for decades, and Ethereum is increasingly at the center of those conversations. Ethereum Institutional arrives at exactly the right moment, creating a trusted, independent home where institutions can engage with the ecosystem, develop standards and accelerate adoption. It's an important step toward making Ethereum the backbone of the next generation of global financial infrastructure."
Joseph Chalom, Chief Executive Officer of Sharplink. "I spent two decades helping the world's largest institutions adopt new technology, and I have rarely seen the conditions align the way they have for Ethereum. These institutions are moving from interest to action across tokenization, stablecoins and a new financial market infrastructure. Ethereum Institutional was built to meet them at exactly this moment."
Joe Lubin, Ethereum co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Consensys. "Ethereum has become the premier infrastructure for decentralized, verifiable, programmable trust. For more than a decade, the researchers, developers and ecosystem have focused on doing the hard work without cutting corners: making the network more scalable, more affordable, more usable, and protecting credible neutrality and censorship resistance via progressive rigorous decentralization. This is why it has been the first and prevailing choice for the majority of stablecoin activity, tokenized assets, DeFi and other onchain financial infrastructure. Traditional finance is already onboarding itself to Ethereum's decentralized rails. Ethereum Institutional will help accelerate this next major chapter, enabling institutions to engage at scale, promoting the openness and permissionless innovation that make the network uniquely powerful and valuable."
Concluding, David Walsh, Executive Director of Ethereum Institutional, said, "Ethereum's credible neutrality is one of its greatest strengths, but neutrality without representation can often be seen as silence. The Ethereum ecosystem needs a credible, independent counterpart institutions can engage with directly; someone financial leaders can call, brief their board with, and trust to come back with honest answers. Ethereum Institutional exists to be this dedicated counterpart. Our job is to translate institutional requirements into deployments that scale, and ultimately to make Ethereum the foundational layer for institutional finance."
Lee, Chalom and Walsh will serve as the members of the Board of Directors.
About Bitmine
Bitmine (NYSE: BMNR) is a Bitcoin miner with operations in the US. The company is deploying its excess capital to be the leading Ethereum Treasury company in the world, implementing an innovative digital asset strategy for institutional investors and public market participants. Guided by its philosophy of "the alchemy of 5%," the Company is committed to ETH as its primary treasury reserve asset, leveraging native protocol-level activities including staking and decentralized finance mechanisms. The Company launched MAVAN (Made-in America Validator Network), a dedicated staking infrastructure for Bitmine assets, in 2026.
About Sharplink
Sharplink (NASDAQ: SBET) is a leading institutional-grade Ethereum treasury platform designed to give public market investors smarter, more productive exposure to ETH. Ethereum underpins the majority of global stablecoin, tokenized real-world assets and decentralized finance settlement. Sharplink was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Miami, Florida. Learn more at sharplink.com.
About Ethereum Institutional
Ethereum Institutional is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to the institutional adoption of Ethereum. The organization functions as the neutral front door for institutions to enter the Ethereum ecosystem, working directly with banks, asset managers, custodians, market infrastructures, fintechs, and sovereign institutions to translate their requirements into on-chain deployments. The organization operates five focus areas: Institutional Education and Engagement, Institutional Intelligence, ETH and Ecosystem Marketing, Industry Discovery and Requirements, and Institutional Events. Learn more at ethereuminstitutional.org.
Forward-Looking Statement
This press release contains statements regarding anticipated institutional interest in Ethereum, research focus and roadmaps, governance arrangements, funding availability, and program scaling. These statements are based on current expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including market conditions for digital assets, regulatory changes, protocol-level developments, timing of institutional deployments, funding availability and general economic conditions. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this release and are not guarantees. Ethereum Institutional and its funders undertake no obligation to update them except as required by law. This press release is for informational purposes only.
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