As Scaling Accelerates, Ethereum Foundation Launches "Hardness" to Uphold Core Principles
- Core Viewpoint: The Ethereum Foundation has established "Hardness" as one of its core protocol priorities, aiming to ensure that Ethereum does not sacrifice its core properties—such as censorship resistance, privacy, security, and permissionlessness—or its long-term reliability while pursuing scalability and user experience improvements, through technical R&D and ecosystem collaboration.
- Key Elements:
- Hardness is a protocol-level commitment to Ethereum's core properties, ensuring the network can function as neutral infrastructure serving groups like journalists and sanctioned users even when centralized systems fail.
- Current scalability and usability upgrades may introduce centralized shortcuts; Hardness aims to prevent Ethereum from deviating from its core values while responding to demand.
- Specific work spans multiple technical areas, including network resilience, user protection, protocol-layer privacy, maintaining neutrality, post-quantum cryptography preparation, fallback recovery modes, and incident response mechanisms.
- The team will establish metrics to quantify the ecosystem's level of censorship resistance, the proportion of users engaging in private transactions, etc., ensuring improvements do not compromise security and decentralization.
Original Title: A Deeper Look at a New Protocol Cluster Priority: Hardness
Original Source: Ethereum Foundation
Original Compilation: TechFlow
Introduction: The Ethereum Foundation recently announced three major protocol cluster priorities: Scaling, User Experience (UX), and Hardness. The first two are easy to understand, but what is the third one?
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 content 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: Scaling, User Experience (UX), and Hardness.
Each addresses different needs for Ethereum's long-term success. Scaling ensures the network can handle global-level demand, UX ensures people can actually use it, and Hardness ensures that as Ethereum grows, it does not lose the core attributes that make it worth using.
Hardness refers to a system's ability to remain reliable in the future. The Hardness direction is a protocol-level commitment aimed at safeguarding Ethereum's core guarantees: open source, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionlessness, and trust minimization.
These principles have existed since Ethereum's inception.
Ethereum exists to provide neutral infrastructure for those who truly need it, even if that means being harder, slower, or less convenient. In practice, this means ensuring Ethereum continues to function when centralized systems fail.
Who needs this? Users in sanctioned countries, journalists protecting sources, organizations needing neutral settlement infrastructure, institutions looking to reduce counterparty risk.
Why Focus on Hardness Now
Ethereum is advancing major upgrades in throughput and usability. But each improvement could potentially be achieved by taking shortcuts, such as relying on centralized infrastructure or introducing trusted intermediaries.
Hardness exists to ensure that Ethereum, while responding to network demands, does not deviate from its core values.
Today, individuals and institutions rely on these guarantees from Ethereum not as ideals, but as necessities. This makes Hardness an increasingly critical area of focus.
What Does Hardness Look Like in Practice
Within the Ethereum Foundation, the Hardness direction is advanced by three individuals, each with a specific focus:
· Thomas Thiery: Censorship resistance and permissionlessness, focusing on the protocol layer.
· Fredrik Svantes: Security, with an emphasis on privacy and trust minimization.
· Parithosh Jayanthi: Infrastructure, upgrades, and the resilience of sensitive parts of the Ethereum protocol.
Hardness spans multiple domains:
Beyond technical research and development, part of the Hardness work involves helping more people understand and value these core attributes. The team also collaborates with work related to ZK, privacy, scaling, UX, and security (such as Trillion Dollar Security, which focuses more on the wallet and application layers) to ensure these improvements accelerate development without compromising security or decentralization.
Specific work includes:
Network Resilience: Improving tools, testing, and fuzzing to detect vulnerabilities early and ensure the network can recover quickly from failures.
User Protection: Reducing preventable fund losses due to phishing and malicious approvals.
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 edges to ensure the network remains neutral and resilient in the face of selective interference.
Long-term Preparedness: Post-quantum cryptography is not an immediate threat, but it is an inevitable one that must be prepared for in advance.
Fallback and Recovery Modes: As throughput increases, the protocol must have the ability to slow down and stabilize during anomalies, allowing the network to self-heal rather than cascade into failure.
Event Response Readiness: Developing shared, public emergency playbooks to enable the ecosystem to respond quickly and transparently in extreme scenarios.
Measuring Reality: Establishing metrics to measure the ecosystem's current level of censorship resistance, how many users can transact privately, where trust assumptions are quietly creeping in, and other related issues.
