The Ethereum Foundation, the non-profit organization guiding Ethereum's development, has released its mandate, reinforcing its core mission.
The foundation's two primary goals are to ensure Ethereum remains decentralized and that users retain ultimate control over their on-chain assets and data, while the protocol achieves mass scale.
Censorship resistance, open-source code, privacy, security, and freedom-preserving technology are highlighted as essential properties of Ethereum.
The foundation will continue to focus on core protocol upgrades, long-horizon research, cybersecurity, and developer tooling, aiming to minimize its own role over time. The ultimate objective is for Ethereum to be so robust and trustless that it can function and evolve independently of the foundation and current core developers.
This mandate arrives after a period of discussion regarding Ethereum's scaling strategy. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin has previously stated that the approach to scaling via layer-2 networks requires re-evaluation, as many current L2 solutions exhibit centralized characteristics and lack a clear path to full decentralization. Buterin suggests a shift towards L2 specialization in areas like privacy, identity, finance, and social media applications.