Ethereum Foundation Outlines Ethos and Responsibilities in New Mandate

The Ethereum Foundation, the non-profit organization that stewards the development of the Ethereum ecosystem, published its mandate on Friday, reaffirming its role and the core pillars of Ethereum.

The Ethereum Foundation’s two stated goals are that Ethereum remains decentralized and that users have a “final say” over their onchain assets and data, while the protocol achieves mass scale, according to the mandate.

Censorship resistance, open source code, privacy, security, and freedom-preserving technology are the core properties of Ethereum that will be upheld, the mandate, the document said.

The Ethereum Foundation said it will continue to focus on core protocol upgrades, “long-horizon research,” cybersecurity, and providing tooling for Ethereum’s developers, while minimizing its role as much as possible. The mandate said: 

“Our ultimate goal is for Ethereum to pass the walkaway test: its protocol and core application layers become robust and trustless enough that they would continue to reliably function and evolve even if the Foundation and today’s core developers disappeared tomorrow.”

The Ethereum Foundation said it aims to focus on tasks that become less necessary over time through a process of subtraction. 

The mandate follows a challenging year for the protocol, with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin saying that Ethereum’s approach to scaling through layer-2 networks “no longer makes sense,” and that many L2s are centralized projects. 

Related: AI ‘vibe coding’ could put Ethereum roadmap ahead of schedule: Vitalik Buterin 

Buterin says a drastic change in how Ethereum scales is needed

Buteirn said that many layer-2 networks feature centralized points of control, including private trusted networks and centralized sequencers, and have no plans to transition to a fully decentralized model.

“The original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path,” Buterin said in February. 

Buterin argued that a layer-2 project that boasts a throughput of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) but relies on a multi-signature bridge to interact with the layer-1 protocol is not scaling the Ethereum ecosystem in a decentralized way.

Instead of acting as scaling layers for Ethereum, the ecosystem’s many layer-2 networks should specialize in a niche such as privacy, identity solutions, finance platforms and social media applications, Buterin said, which drew mixed reactions from L2 projects.

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