The Ethereum Foundation has officially published its core mandate, outlining its commitment to decentralization and user sovereignty. The document states the organization’s two primary goals are ensuring Ethereum remains decentralized and that users maintain ultimate control over their onchain assets while the protocol scales. It also pledges to uphold core properties like censorship resistance and open-source development, with the ultimate aim of making the ecosystem robust enough to function independently of the Foundation itself.
The Ethereum Foundation has published a formal mandate reaffirming its role and the core principles of the Ethereum ecosystem. The organization’s stated goals are ensuring Ethereum remains decentralized and that users have a “final say” over their onchain assets and data as the protocol achieves mass scale.
According to the mandate, censorship resistance, open source code, privacy, security, and freedom-preserving technology are the core properties to be upheld. The Foundation said it will focus on protocol upgrades, long-term research, cybersecurity, and developer tooling while minimizing its role over time.
“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 mandate stated. The organization aims to focus on tasks that become less necessary through a process of subtraction.
This clarification follows a period of scrutiny on Ethereum’s scaling approach. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently stated that the original vision for layer-2 networks “no longer makes sense,” arguing many are centralized projects with no plan for full decentralization.
Buterin said that a project relying on a multi-signature bridge while claiming high throughput is not scaling Ethereum in a decentralized way. He argued that instead of generic scaling, L2 networks should specialize in niches like privacy, identity, or finance, a view that drew mixed reactions from the L2 community.
