Ethereum Foundation Launches "Hardness" with Dedicated Team to Protect Decentralization Baseline

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

Authors: @fredrik0x, @soispoke, @parithosh_j

Compiled by: Deep潮 TechFlow

Deep潮 Guide: Recently, the Ethereum Foundation announced three main protocol cluster priorities: scaling, user experience, and Hardness. The first two are straightforward—what is the third?

Simply put, 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.

Full Text:

What is Hardness

The Ethereum Foundation recently published a blog outlining three protocol cluster priorities: Scaling, User Experience (UX), and Hardness.

Each addresses different needs for Ethereum’s long-term success. Scaling ensures the network can handle global demand; UX makes it truly usable; and Hardness ensures that, as Ethereum grows, it doesn’t lose the core properties that make it valuable.

Hardness refers to a system’s ability to remain reliable in the future. It is a protocol-level commitment aimed at safeguarding Ethereum’s fundamental guarantees: open source, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionless operation, and minimal trust.

These principles have been part of Ethereum since its inception.

Ethereum exists to provide a neutral infrastructure for those who truly need it, even if that means it’s harder, slower, or less convenient. In practice, this means ensuring Ethereum can continue to operate even if centralized systems fail.

Who needs these guarantees? Users in sanctioned countries, journalists protecting sources, organizations requiring neutral settlement infrastructure, institutions seeking to reduce counterparty risk.

Why focus on Hardness now

Ethereum is advancing major upgrades in throughput and usability. But each improvement could be achieved through shortcuts, such as centralizing infrastructure or introducing trusted intermediaries.

Hardness exists to ensure that, while responding to network demands, Ethereum does not deviate from its core values.

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

What Hardness looks like in practice

Within the Ethereum Foundation, three people lead the Hardness effort, each with a focus:

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

Hardness spans multiple domains:

Beyond technical R&D, part of the work is helping more people understand and value these core properties. The team also collaborates with work on ZK, privacy, scaling, UX, and security (such as Trillion Dollar Security, which focuses more on wallets and application layers) to ensure these improvements accelerate without compromising security or decentralization.

Specific initiatives include:

Network Resilience: Improving tools, testing, and fuzzing to identify vulnerabilities early, ensuring quick recovery after failures.

User Protection: Reducing preventable fund losses caused by phishing and malicious approvals.

Privacy: Advancing confidential transfers and anonymous broadcasting at the protocol level, enabling users to gain strong privacy guarantees without leaving L1.

Maintaining Neutrality: Eliminating single points of failure at the network edge to keep the network neutral and resilient against selective interference.

Long-term Preparedness: Post-quantum cryptography is not an immediate threat but an unavoidable one; proactive preparation is essential.

Rollback and Recovery Modes: As throughput increases, protocols must be able to slow down and stabilize during anomalies, allowing the network to self-heal rather than cascade into failure.

Incident Response Readiness: Developing shared, public emergency manuals so the ecosystem can respond quickly and transparently in extreme scenarios.

Measuring Reality: Establishing metrics to assess the current level of censorship resistance, how many users can transact privately, where trust assumptions are subtly embedded, and other key indicators.