Original text fromEthereum Foundation Global Policy Strategy Team

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily, Qin Xiaofeng (@QinXiaofeng 888 )

Editor's Note:On July 1, the Ethereum Foundation's Global Policy Strategy team released a policy guide for governments and institutions, positioning Ethereum as critical public infrastructure.

The report states that Ethereum has operated uninterrupted since its launch in 2015, secured by approximately $76 billion in staked ETH as of March 2026, with a geographically diverse validator network, multiple independent client implementations, and a vast developer ecosystem. The Foundation notes that many current digital services rely on centralized intermediaries, which pose risks such as single points of failure, cyberattacks, or political pressure. Ethereum's decentralized architecture is more suitable for applications like digital identity, public records, and asset tokenization. The report cites existing use cases, including decentralized identity initiatives in Bhutan and Buenos Aires, and an Ethereum-based land registry project in India, demonstrating that governments have already begun exploring the technology.

The following is the original blog post from the Foundation, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily. Enjoy~

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Current global transformations clearly indicate an urgent need for a shared, neutral digital public infrastructure that is not controlled by any single centralized entity. Designed as a public programmable network that does not depend on any single party, Ethereum was built precisely to meet these needs.

Today, the Ethereum Foundation's Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team officially releases "Ethereum for Governments and Institutions"—a guide for public sector and institutional leaders facing policy and deployment decisions. This report is a non-technical primer covering how Ethereum works, its governance, how it compares to other alternatives, and its existing real-world deployment cases. This article will introduce the report and answer the core question that prompted its creation: Why must digital infrastructure be neutral, and why is Ethereum suited for this role?

Why We Need Neutral Digital Infrastructure

The digital systems underpinning modern economies—including payments, identity verification, registries, and institutional record-keeping—are fragmented, proprietary, and controlled by a handful of intermediaries.

Using these systems creates single points of failure, thereby concentrating operational risk. A cyberattack, regional service outage, or natural disaster affecting the centralized operator can instantly paralyze the entire system.

Using these systems also means trusting these intermediaries and accepting their rules. Whether voluntarily or under external pressure, these intermediaries have the power to unilaterally remove participants or change previously agreed-upon rules. What happens when an operator is no longer trustworthy? What happens when counterparties conflict over whose rules apply?

As more value is placed online, these risks multiply, and the cracks in our digital foundation are widening. In recent years, we have witnessed increasing cloud service outages paralyzing government services, financial systems being weaponized across borders, and large identity service providers being hacked, leading to personal privacy violations and severely damaged business confidence. These are not a series of isolated anomalies but the normal reality of infrastructure tied to centralized control.

Patching the existing fragile foundation with better rules cannot fundamentally correct the problem. The only real answer is credibly neutral infrastructure—where the protocol itself enforces the rules, immune to human discretion or external pressure—which is precisely what Ethereum aims to build.

This report is a comprehensive primer on Ethereum and the broader blockchain ecosystem. Tailored for governments and institutions evaluating digital infrastructure, it provides the objective, rigorous analysis needed for high-stakes decisions.

Evaluating Blockchains Based on Objective Metrics

Blockchains exist on a broad spectrum, with fundamental differences in technical architecture and governance structures. At one end of the spectrum are truly decentralized protocols. They are open, ownerless, and operate similarly to other public infrastructure used by everyone but controlled by no one, like the internet. At the other end are essentially enterprise products, controlled by a single company or a small group of insiders who make the rules. These products can fail like a company, and insiders should bear responsibility if things go wrong. This distinction has profound implications for policymakers and regulators. A blockchain's structure will determine whether it can function as credibly neutral public infrastructure for decades or must be treated as an enterprise product with inherent liabilities and systemic risks.

One of the key objectives of this report is to help governments and institutions understand the important factors to consider before making policy decisions or deploying products on a blockchain. In a recently released OpenZeppelin report, key differences between Layer 1 blockchains were identified. Below are some points regarding Ethereum (all data as of March 2026 unless otherwise noted):

• Uptime and Resilience: Ethereum has never experienced a downtime since its launch in 2015 and has undergone extensive real-world testing. All other blockchains covered in the report have experienced between 1 and 7 downtimes, including a 19-hour halt of one major blockchain in 2023. Uptime incidents for centralized internet services also occur persistently, but Ethereum is unique in that it has never gone down.
• Economic Security: At the time of the OpenZeppelin report, Ethereum was secured by approximately $76 billion in staked ETH, with the cost to execute a fraudulent transaction estimated at around $50.7 billion, in addition to automatic on-chain slashing penalties. Corresponding costs for other blockchains are significantly lower, with many even lacking automatic on-chain slashing as a deterrent.
• Design for Validator Decentralization: Ethereum's validators are distributed across continents and jurisdictions, with no single country holding a dominant share. This broad distribution is partly due to the accessibility of participation requirements. Anyone with a consumer-grade computer and 32 ETH can become a validator, a requirement far lower than all other blockchains assessed in the report. In contrast, many other Layer 1 blockchains require enterprise-grade infrastructure, deep Linux administration expertise, and near-perfect uptime, leading to validator concentration among well-capitalized operators. As a result, Ethereum's validator set is more diverse, more decentralized, and harder to capture than any other blockchain in the report.
• Software and Infrastructure Diversity: Ethereum's nodes and validators run on multiple cloud providers and physical servers, with no single provider holding a dominant share. The community maintains over five independent software client implementations, developed by different teams using different programming languages, significantly reducing the risk of network paralysis from a single bug or failure. No other Layer 1 blockchain in the report has a comparable degree of diversity. Most run on a single client software, posing a significant network failure risk.
• Counterparty Risk: Since Ethereum has no operator, building applications on it does not introduce new counterparties. No single party can change the rules, restrict access, reorder the network for commercial gain, or shut it down. The integrity of the system does not depend on the continued solvency, goodwill, or strategic interests of any single entity. Most other Layer 1 blockchains do not meet this standard. For example, the foundation behind one blockchain mentioned in the OpenZeppelin report directly shapes its validator ecosystem. Other blockchains have corporate entities exerting substantial influence over the chain. The OpenZeppelin report notes that in one case, the company behind a major blockchain controlled approximately 42% of the token supply, extending this control to validator selection and node lists. These are precisely the types of counterparty risk exposures that institutions typically need to disclose, justify, and manage.
• Ecosystem Maturity, Developer Scale, and Future Roadmap: The standards established by Ethereum have become the technical foundation upon which other blockchain ecosystems are built. For governments and institutions, this means building applications on top of common standards, enjoying unparalleled interoperability, and having greater flexibility for inter-network migration when needed. It also means access to a mature ecosystem of tools, auditing firms, and compliance service providers. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) technology stack has over 11,000 developers, far surpassing other chains covered in the report. This depth is evident in the Ethereum community's ongoing work, including a post-quantum security roadmap built into the core protocol rather than as an add-on, supported by dedicated research teams and a public cryptography bounty fund.

What This Means for Governments and Institutions

Public discourse often simplifies Ethereum to a financial tool. This framework overlooks Ethereum's capability as an open, neutral, programmable infrastructure—suitable for any system requiring multiple parties to coordinate without a trusted intermediary. This includes transaction settlement, asset issuance, identity verification, registries, proofs, public records, supply chain traceability, and tokenized markets.

Many of these use cases are already being demonstrated in practice. For instance, Bhutan and Buenos Aires anchor their decentralized digital identity systems on Ethereum, enabling users to own their identities and choose what data to share. Ethereum-based rails are also being used to manage land records, combat fraud, and ensure the immutability of public records in India.

For many other governments and institutional stakeholders, two urgent priorities currently exist: (1) choosing neutral infrastructure that allows them to maintain sovereignty while coordinating with other parties, and (2) exploring how to govern such infrastructure that does not neatly fit into existing regulatory models. These two decisions are interdependent. A truly neutral network—without a control point that can be captured or coerced—supports a unique type of public sector deployment and requires a different regulatory approach compared to networks carrying such risks.

"Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions" is our effort to help stakeholders understand the Ethereum blockchain and how it differs from other infrastructure (including existing intermediated systems and other blockchains), aiming to inform these decisions.

The report is now available; please click here to access it.