The Ethereum Foundation launches "Hardness," a dedicated team to safeguard the decentralized baseline

Authors: @fredrik0x, @soispoke, @parithosh_j

Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

Senchao Introduction: The Ethereum Foundation recently announced the three priority clusters for protocols: scalability, user experience, and Hardness. The first two are easy to understand; what is the third?

In simple terms, Hardness is a protocol-level commitment to Ethereum's core attributes, including censorship resistance, privacy, security, and permissionlessness.

This article is written by three foundation members responsible for the Hardness direction, detailing the specific work and priorities in this area.

The full text is as follows:

What is Hardness

The Ethereum Foundation recently published a blog outlining three protocol cluster priorities: scalability, user experience, and Hardness.

Each of these addresses different needs for Ethereum's long-term success. Scalability ensures the network can handle global-level demand, user experience ensures people can actually use it, and Hardness ensures that Ethereum does not lose the core attributes that make it worthwhile as it grows.

Hardness refers to a system's ability to remain reliable in the future. The Hardness direction is a protocol-level commitment aimed at preserving Ethereum's core guarantees: open-source, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionlessness, and minimal trust.

These principles have existed since the inception of Ethereum.

Ethereum exists to provide neutral infrastructure for those who truly need it, even if that means it is harder, slower, and less convenient. In practice, this means ensuring that Ethereum continues to operate when centralized systems fail.

Who needs these? Users in sanctioned countries, journalists protecting their sources, organizations needing neutral settlement infrastructure, and institutions looking to reduce counterparty risk.

Why focus on Hardness now

Ethereum is advancing significant upgrades in throughput and usability. However, each improvement could potentially be achieved through shortcuts, such as centralized infrastructure or introducing trusted intermediaries.

The existence of Hardness is to ensure that Ethereum does not deviate from its values while responding to network demands.

Today, individuals and institutions rely on these guarantees from Ethereum, not as ideals, but as necessities. This makes Hardness an increasingly critical focus area.

What does Hardness look like in practice

Within the Ethereum Foundation, the Hardness direction is advanced by three individuals, each with their own focus:

• Thomas Thiery: Censorship resistance and permissionlessness, focusing on the protocol layer
• Fredrik Svantes: Security, emphasizing privacy and minimal trust
• Parithosh Jayanthi: Infrastructure, upgrades, and resilience of sensitive parts of the Ethereum protocol

Hardness spans multiple areas:

In addition to technical research and development, part of the work in the Hardness direction is to help more people understand and value these core attributes. The team also collaborates with work related to ZK, privacy, scalability, user experience, and security (such as Trillion Dollar Security, which focuses more on wallets and application layers) to ensure that these improvements do not weaken security or decentralization while accelerating development.

Specific work includes:

Network Resilience: Improving tools, testing, and fuzz testing to identify vulnerabilities early and ensure the network can quickly recover from failures.

User Protection: Reducing preventable financial losses caused by phishing and malicious authorizations.

Privacy: Advancing private transactions and anonymous broadcasting at the protocol layer, allowing users to obtain strong privacy guarantees without leaving L1.

Maintaining Neutrality: Eliminating single points of failure at the network edge to ensure the network remains neutral and resilient in the face of selective interference.

Long-term Preparation: Post-quantum cryptography is not an urgent threat currently, but it is an inevitable threat that must be prepared for in advance.

Fallback and Recovery Modes: As throughput increases, the protocol must be capable of slowing down and stabilizing in the event of anomalies, allowing the network to self-repair rather than cascading into failure.

Incident Response Readiness: Developing a shared public emergency manual to enable the ecosystem to respond quickly and transparently in extreme scenarios.

Measuring Reality: Establishing metrics to assess the current level of censorship resistance in the ecosystem, how many users can conduct private transactions, and where trust assumptions may be quietly infiltrating.