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Ethereum Foundation Mandate

Published March 13, 2026 by the Ethereum Foundation Board. Inscribed on-chain for permanent, immutable access.

This document preserves the full text of the EF Mandate as a pillar for Coop's alignment with Ethereum's mission. Coop is sovereignty-preserving coordination infrastructure, and the mandate articulates why that matters.

Quick Reference​

CROPS - Non-Negotiable Properties​

PropertyDefinition
Censorship ResistanceNo actor can selectively exclude valid use or break functionality
Open Source & FreeNo privileged code or hidden specifications; all work public and forkable
PrivacyUser data not exposed beyond necessity; maximal privacy as default
SecurityThings must do what they claim, no more and no less

Two Fundamental Principles​

  1. Self-Sovereignty: A user has the final say over their identities, assets, actions, and agents.
  2. Sovereignty-Preserving Coordination at Scale: Unstoppable self-sovereignty must become possible at the scale and form users want, without violating anyone else's.

Social Pillar​

  • Principled Alignment: Quality of principle-upholding resilience over quantity of users
  • Discipline: Truth-seeking, beauty-seeking; relevant timing over speed
  • Right Association: Work with those who share principles and spread them
  • Big Picture: Ethereum's future is bigger than crypto

Coop ↔ Mandate Alignment​

Coop embodies the mandate structurally, not just rhetorically:

Mandate PrincipleCoop Implementation
Self-sovereign identityPasskey-first, on-device credentials, no custodial provider
Censorship resistanceP2P sync via y-webrtc, no central server owns data
Privacy by defaultLocal-first, all data stays in browser until explicit publish
Open sourceFull monorepo, shared modules are pure functions, no proprietary layers
Security at boundariesZod validation, grant enforcement with expiry/replay protection
DisintermediationSafe smart accounts via passkey + ERC-4337, no wallet intermediary
Sovereignty-preserving coordinationCRDT shared state, explicit publish model, durable Filecoin archives
Walkaway testData survives in local exports + content-addressed Filecoin storage
Right associationBuilt for regenerative communities, knowledge commons, not extraction

Full Mandate Text​

I. ETHEREUM​

Ethereum was born out of a dream. A dream for freedom.

Not just for one, not just for many, but for all who are ready to grasp it with their own hands.

Its creators realized that the armamentarium of freedom was missing two vital tools: self-sovereign computation, and the computational ability to coordinate at scale without violating anyone else's own sacrosanct self-sovereignty.

Only if a user had the final say over their own computation - their data, their assets, their instructions, their identities, their agents, their essential digital gestalt, and the right to exit from any system that proves unfavorable to those things - would they have any chance in the brave new electronic world, of being able to live in the way they truly want and deserve.

If you want only self-sovereignty of computation, and do not need to coordinate, then you can run applications locally on your own machine - and in many situations this is the correct approach. If you want to coordinate, but do not mind being at the whims of centralized, unaccountable power, then we will only say that centralized platforms can often provide excellent user experience.

The value of Ethereum is precisely in the space of computational needs where we need both.

Money was the first application. Money requires coordination, because it has no meaning without someone else to recognize both the asset itself, and the blockchain as a living registry of who owns that asset. And money requires self-sovereignty, because the losses from having one's money arbitrarily inflated away, frozen or simply expropriated are so high.

Ether is a store of value and money, that also happens to be an application - and there have been, and will be, many, many more. This includes those imagined in the Ethereum Whitepaper, those described and built over the last twelve years, and others not yet conceived of - and Ethereum will be home to all of them.

Ethereum honors its first promise, to enable self-sovereignty, by being humanity's common computational substrate that anyone can interact with trustlessly, permissionlessly, and persistently.

This is what is meant by "The World Computer."

On this foundation Ethereum honors its second promise: allowing the infrastructures of self-sovereign coordination to arise and thrive in any form imaginable and expressible - unmolested, unimpeded, and undisturbed - without violating any individual's freedom.

Ethereum is meant to be a liberatory technology - not just from power relations that are imposed without true consent or where dissent imposes a heavy price, but even more importantly, from attempts to order reality itself in a way that leaves no alternative.

And the Ethereum Foundation exists to ensure Ethereum remains resilient enough to be so.

II. OUR ROLE​

The Ethereum Foundation is the original steward of the Ethereum project.

We helped grow Ethereum from its early days as a seedling software project into today's infinite garden that countless participants use to grow their own projects - and we did this by making deliberate, considered choices, with the aim of inspiring others to become fellow custodians of a vibrant, open, and infinite commons.

The underlying principles that led us to conceive of, invent, then steward Ethereum, and the unwavering belief that it is possible to build and maintain a better world without caprice or coercion - could have led to many destinations other than Ethereum, whether in computing, communications, artificial intelligence, education, health, expression in all its forms, and many other domains.

By asking ourselves "if we had these principles, and we operated in a different domain, what would we create?", then seeing what things in our existing world come closest, we can start to find our natural allies.

But to find dependable allies, not merely allies of convenience that remain for only one finite round of the infinite game, we need to be clear about what our principles are, and this document is where we express and enshrine them.

The Foundation is not the parent, owner, or ruler of Ethereum. We are not "the system" itself.

Our role is to coordinate, to provide substrate, and to offer context that helps anyone who shares our purpose to work together - without creating a centralizing bottleneck, and without collapsing into a monoculture that drifts toward goals misaligned with Ethereum's core promises.

The Foundation exists to ensure Ethereum becomes, and stays, a decentralized and resilient civilizational foundational infrastructure - part of the bedrock on which broader self-sovereignty can be built, alongside other requirements like clean air, water, energy, freedom of communication, and access to knowledge.

Our ultimate goal is for Ethereum to pass the walkaway test: its protocol and core application layers become robust and trustless enough that they would continue to reliably function and evolve even if the Foundation and today's core developers disappeared tomorrow.

We are a real non-profit - independent, with no other agenda. We reject temptations around flows of value, even when they are framed as reasonable rewards, or as necessary for alignment or self-perpetuation. We consider them antithetical to our mission and our legal constitution. These are slippery slopes to arbitrary extraction and insidious capture, with many such cases exemplified elsewhere. Our enduring assets are our legitimacy and virtue, and we will not risk or squander them.

Our bottom line is not profit, nor organizational growth, nor blind adoption at all costs. We support adoption insofar as it does not contravene our mandate.

Our bottom line is the mission of securing Ethereum's resilience.

Our primary and secondary measures of success are how much self-sovereignty, and how much sovereignty-preserving coordination at scale, Ethereum resiliently enables - both with and without the Foundation.

This document is primarily for members of the Foundation: a clarification of our pre-existing purpose, and a practical guide for translating mission and principles into action, in the context of not just being stewards of Ethereum but also fellow travelers on the path of freedom, empowerment, and human well-being.

We write it for the present onwards. We acknowledge we have not always succeeded in the past, but we will succeed going forward.

III. OUR MANDATE​

The Ethereum Foundation's mandate is twofold.

The first aim is to ensure Ethereum becomes and stays a decentralized and resilient tool for self-sovereignty: our first fundamental principle is that a user has the final say over their identities, assets, actions, and agents.

It is certain that Ethereum will be used in many other ways, but we believe applications only become truly meaningful if they rest on this inalienable foundation of user self-sovereignty.

It is therefore necessary for us to ensure that Ethereum upholds and contains the following properties:

  • Censorship Resistance
  • Open Source and Free, as in Freedom
  • Privacy
  • Security

We hold that these properties - CROPS - must remain, as an indivisible whole, the sine qua non of all Ethereum's development priorities, which cannot be displaced.

They are Ethereum's most important properties and are inseparable from its success.

Therefore, we ourselves must embody these properties as a guiding principle and prioritize them in all our decisions.

The second aim is scaling the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty to users ready to exercise it directly.

This is our second fundamental principle: that unstoppable self-sovereignty must become possible for those who choose it, at the scale and in the form that they want it, without violating anyone else's.

We believe that self-sovereignty is positive, is positive-sum, and that self-sovereignty at scale is the dominant positive-sum strategy.

We believe that self-sovereignty is competitively scalable without compromise on CROPS, and that sovereignty-preserving coordination at scale is possible.

We believe that self-sovereignty stacks on top of itself on multiple overlapping scales: individuals, families, local communities, enterprises, nations, religions, world-spanning internet communities all deserve their space to maintain their own internal accounting and to interact with each other on their own terms.

We further believe these views are shared by a critical mass of people. While Ethereum is permissionless, the Foundation will remain focused on working with those who share our vision and sense of mission.

We recognize that self-sovereignty itself is just one crucial component of a greater goal - namely, human empowerment and well-being - championed by loose coalitions of builders of a brighter future.

Only through being a decentralized and resilient self-sovereignty tool, imbued throughout with CROPS, and unstoppable at scale while preserving individual freedom, can Ethereum's essential nature be recognized: a secure, user-aligned World Computer that can be shared with all who want it.

And only through the Foundation enshrining its principles and vision for all to see, can it be most effective in ensuring Ethereum blossoms.

Our Mandate is written for a thousand-year horizon. Principled adherence is subject to drift and erosion over time - like water, standards tend to flow from high to low, and are far easier to lose than to regain. We are starting as high as we can, to slow any long-run erosion over centuries, so we do not expect any material compromise within our lifetimes.

IV. PRINCIPLES FOR ACTION​

Our Mandate rests on two pillars, each comprising four principles.

Everything we do - technical work both at the protocol layer and elsewhere, community support, and decision-making - must be derived from and answer to these twin pillars and their principles, with CROPS treated as non-negotiable.

Technical Pillar​

Censorship Resistance: No actor can selectively exclude valid use or break functionality, including by gaining durable, non-competitive control of any critical mechanisms.

All work must be architected to be maximally unstoppable and to function without incorporating centralized intermediaries or kill switches.

The provision of unstoppability should itself be censorship-resistant to avoid it becoming an anticompetitive and extractive game of selectively providing censorship-resistance to the compliant, to cartels, or to highest bidders without proper competition.

Censorship resistance also includes technical resistance to extra-technical pressure, such as social mores or legal restriction. The protocol relies on cryptographic guarantees for its resilience and neutrality, not on the temporal concerns of the political context. Our work must protect the protocol from attempts to replace fundamental physical properties with short-term brittle mechanisms to try to achieve the same thing.

Open Source and Free, as in Freedom: No privileged code or hidden specifications.

All work must be public and auditable: no proprietary "black boxes." All work must also be forkable: Ethereum's credibility depends on predictable exit paths, and systems that aren't open and free have unacceptable friction to forking.

Supported projects must pledge that they will not change their open source or copyleft license in the future. Permissive licenses are accepted, viral copyleft licenses are appreciated, but merely source-available licenses are not tolerated.

Privacy: User data is not exposed beyond necessity or against their interests.

We strongly advocate for maximal privacy to become the default for user data to the greatest extent possible: first in any tools that sit above the protocol that the Ethereum Foundation builds, and then ultimately in the protocol itself from the very core on out.

The purpose of privacy is to prevent structural power asymmetries from infringing on self-sovereignty and self-sovereign coordination. History shows us that the wielders of power, once they gain the ability to restrict or even de-normalize privacy, will never surrender the advantage they obtain. Hence, privacy must be permissionless and available to all.

Privacy is not about total concealment of everything. It is about freedom and true consent: to choose what information to disclose to whom, on one's own terms. In our day-to-day lives, we often disclose information, or prove claims about ourselves, to participate with others, or to build relationships on trust, gradually.

However, we believe that end users should always selectively negotiate their disclosures, and that this should only be supported on top of a base of freely available, unconditional privacy.

Security: Things must do what they claim to do, no more and no less.

Security is paramount. We advocate rigorous security design at both the protocol and application layers to prevent harm to users and preserve system integrity. We invest deeply in testing and verification, using multiple methods to specify desired properties and confirm that designs satisfy them.

Security requires simplicity, including responsible minimization of lines of code and external dependencies; a protocol is not "trustless" if only a small number of people can understand how it works and why it is secure. Work must be verifiable to many. Entirely new domains for the protocol must clear an extremely high necessity threshold, and do so legibly.

Security also means governance minimization; no social layer should override protocol guarantees lightly.

Security additionally means passing the walkaway test, not just for the protocol, but also for users: self-sovereignty means a user should not be forced into frequent, complex migrations that create unintended risks.

True security protects both system and users from technical failure, social entrapment, and coercion.

We must always remember that the ultimate goal is for Ethereum to pass the walkaway test. Achieving this needs, among other things, intermediary minimization and structural decentralization, and the best way to achieve that is to build with our CROPS principles in mind.

Social Pillar​

Principled Alignment: Our first principle is that we are principled in our work.

We focus on work which embodies our principles and not on work which allows private capture or uncompetitive user extraction.

We value the quality of principle-upholding resilience over the quantity of users or the optimization-for-value of design.

A billion users in a centralized silo is not a success; designing around the enshrinement of centralized extraction pipelines in the protocol is not a success; it is a failure of mission.

Discipline: We care about doing it right and doing it well.

We are truth-seeking and beauty-seeking in our work. We demand technical rigor, excellence, and creativity.

We choose relevant timing over either going fast or going slow, which may include not acting at all. We share research and results quickly; we make sure what we ship is mission-critically reliable.

We exercise courage to make hard, potentially unpopular, decisions based on principled assessments rather than market pressure or institutional comfort. We accept that rejecting and reforming compromised defaults is part of our work. We defend our decisions with patience and truthfulness.

We also admit when we get things - particularly big things - wrong, with humility, grace, and an honest and clear explanation of why our views have changed and what our new views are.

We pair high standards with kindness: resilient systems are built by people who can disagree clearly without cruelty and who can stay curious when under pressure.

Right Association: Who we work with is itself a principled choice.

We prioritize working with individuals and teams who share our principles, spread them, and make their work legible through comprehensive and open documentation even in challenging conditions.

For projects dependent on support from the Foundation, we prefer to work more closely with those who also actively work to achieve independence from us.

Right association also means we prefer to focus on individuals, teams, and projects that share our principles but operate in different domains, over those individuals, teams, and projects who are in crypto, but operate according to a very different set of standards.

Big Picture: We remember that Ethereum's future is bigger than its present.

Our horizon is broader than crypto: Ethereum's promise only holds if it serves self-sovereignty beyond any one subculture, asset class, or industry.

The World Computer is decentralized infrastructure for permissionless compute, communication, and association, and it naturally connects to builders who uphold those freedoms: open source projects, privacy and cryptography researchers, civil liberties defenders, educators and public-interest technologists, builders of resilient local communities, and the quiet maintainers of civilization who keep essential systems and traditions running.

We remember that we require of them no aesthetic conformity, only principled alignment: when people share the instinct to keep systems forkable, censorship resistant, private, and secure, we treat them as fellow travelers of the path and fellow stewards of the infinite garden.

Our loose coalition does not need to be put together. It is together.

V. CARRYING OUT THE WORK​

Approach​

Our operating approach can be summarized as a process of subtraction for resilience.

Ethereum is more resilient when it can continue to provide self-sovereignty and sovereignty-preserving coordination at scale without depending on us to guide it.

We therefore have a bias toward work that makes us less necessary over time, through a framework that guides our approach:

The Only-EF Rule: We focus on critical tasks that have no other natural home and that no other ecosystem actor can or will reliably undertake. This includes but is not limited to: core protocol upgrades and long-horizon research, neutral multi-client specs and tests, public-good security work, crisis coordination, preventing chokepoints, and core dev tooling and documentation where no sustainable owner exists. We check that these tasks are actually critical.

Handoff for Ecosystem Maturity: As soon as a function or role can be successfully managed by an aligned community actor, we facilitate that transition, so capability and responsibility diffuse through our ecosystem rather than concentrate in one place.

Independent Inspiration and Reliability: We work across varied domains rather than in a narrowly hierarchical manner - the glue that connects us is our mission, not our structure. We hire individuals who are deeply aligned with the mission. We prize those individuals who operate with high integrity and flexibility, as in our experience, they have been the most effective in rapidly changing conditions and are the most reliable during uncertainty.

Compounding Effects: We prioritize efforts that are as far upstream and high leverage as possible, by making sure the research, documentation, coordination, and infrastructure we support can be freely reused, extended, and operated independently. This can include supporting shared primitives, specifications, tooling, and evaluation methods that reduce avoidable friction and create network effects for those who share our principles. When we work downstream, it is on making CROPS-native affordances competitive and viable for adoption.

Subtraction as Success: Our goal is to reduce the Foundation's relative influence over time. This is not retreat or sabotage. Subtraction is rather a process of ensuring Ethereum's maturity: a trajectory of growth with decentralization, robust enough to outgrow and outlast us, however long this may take.

Subtraction will occur either way, so we choose success.

Limits​

The Foundation does not build for everyone. We contribute technical expertise and provide underlying support so those aligned with Ethereum's self-sovereignty mission - and its potential for sovereignty-preserving coordination at scale - can build Ethereum and build on Ethereum, and so that they in turn can build for everyone.

  • We are NOT a Corporate
  • We are NOT a Kingmaker
  • We are NOT an Accreditation Body
  • We are NOT a Product Studio
  • We are NOT a Marketing Agency
  • We are NOT the Boss
  • We are NOT a Government or Regulatory Body
  • We are NOT a Casino
  • We are NOT Opportunists

Tradeoff Considerations​

Our priority, and the default path for decisions, in line with our mandate and the Only-EF Rule, is the CROPS-native approach. CROPS-adherence is a compounding force: it produces usable self-sovereignty tools and escape hatches, and sets durable precedents others can later follow.

Adoption can be earned over time, but principled ground once ceded is far harder to regain.

The guiding question is: does this make Ethereum and its users less susceptible to capture over time, or does it normalize capture in exchange for reach?

We believe that de-totalization - building toward a world in which no organization, system, or moral order has total dominance over any individual life - is the most reliably good aim.

VI. RESOLVING QUANDARIES​

Five timeless tensions the EF expects to face:

  1. When two technically credible paths compete, pick the one that removes points of leverage, not the one that can be shipped faster.
  2. When designing or judging a proposal, think through higher-order effects beyond the layer at hand, and avoid capture points being displaced as externalities.
  3. When considering adversarial user environments, default to empowering user agency, not weakening it. The goal is not to sanitize the environment; it is to keep users sovereign inside it.
  4. Where a use case involves intermediation, minimize barriers to entry and maximize competitiveness, while aiming to eliminate the need for intermediaries entirely.
  5. When deciding which teams to back, look past short-term output and social cues, and judge patterns of choices and revealed preferences.

VII. THE FUTURE​

Ethereum rejects the idea that there is no alternative.

Ethereum is not a weapon for either side of this conflict, and its stewards are not a partisan faction within it. Ethereum is a tool that countless people - individuals, families, and communities - are independently using to build resilient sanctuaries from this contest of power: shelters from ideological psychodrama, where anyone capable of taking refuge can live neither oppressed nor oppressing, and where they can be left to their pursuits of happiness.

Our closest collaborators include those working directly on privacy, verifiability, and programmable cryptography. In the middle distance are our neighbors working on open silicon, alternative networks and allied efforts. And on the horizon are our friends working for clean air, and for regenerative and sustainable habitats and permaculture; for freedom of speech and expression, and the freedom to associate and dissociate voluntarily; for forkable technology transfer; free open source collaboration in science, software, hardware, health, and elsewhere, and a thousand other known and unknown things we trust them to build without asking first.

Alternatives exist. Trust hope, embrace resilience.

VIII. CLOSING​

Our work is not about capturing markets, corporates, or states, nor about helping them extract or capture.

We are here to uncapture the individual, and to entrench their freedoms of association.

We are here to provide the infrastructure that enables a voice for those forms of cooperation, organization, and community that go unrecognized within existing hierarchies and systems.

We provide the tools and the digital space needed for this civilization-scale project, one that is open to anyone willing to claim self-sovereignty with their own hands, that is available to everyone, especially those with nothing to lose but their barbed wire fences.

The Foundation exists to prevent Ethereum - more accurately, the promise of Ethereum - from being rugged; to prevent Ethereum rugging those who are relying on it to build their own sanctuaries; to make sure that it embodies the shared principles from which Ethereum descends, upholding and advancing them rather than letting them down.

Ethereum is for far more than crypto. The World Computer must rise and take its rightful place as a shining star in the constellation of technologies that underpin human freedom and flourishing.

For we are building nothing less than the machinery of freedom - not just for today, but for the next thousand years.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

Resources & References​

Official Sources​

Ecosystem Support & Grants​

Public Goods Funding​

  • Gitcoin: Quadratic funding rounds for public goods
  • Octant: Ecosystem funding balancing individual and community benefit
  • Giveth: Zero-fee donation platform for regenerative projects

Vitalik Buterin - Related Writing​

EF Organizational Context​

Coverage & Analysis​