The Ethereum Foundation outlines the ethos and responsibilities within the new mandate.
The Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization that leads the development of the Ethereum ecosystem, published its work on Friday, confirming its role and the main pillars of Ethereum.
The Ethereum Foundation's two stated goals are for Ethereum to remain decentralized and for the protocol to achieve mass scalability, with users having “final say” over their onchain assets and data.
Censorship resistance, open source code, privacy, security and freedom-preserving technology are key features of Ethereum, the document said.
He said the Ethereum Foundation will minimize its role as much as possible and continue to focus on core protocol improvements, “long-term research,” cybersecurity and providing tools for Ethereum developers. The order said:
“Our ultimate goal is for Ethereum to pass the sidewalk test: the protocol and core application layers are strong and trustless so that even if the foundation and today's core developers are gone tomorrow, they will continue to work and evolve reliably.”
The Ethereum Foundation says it aims to focus on non-essential activities over time through a downsizing process.
The mandate follows a challenging year for the protocol, with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin saying that Ethereum's layer-2 network authentication system “doesn't make sense anymore” and many L2s are centralized projects.
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Buterin talks about a drastic change in how Ethereum scales
Buteirn said many Layer-2 networks feature centralized control points, including private trust networks and centralized chainsaws, and have no plans to transition to a fully decentralized model.
“The first vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new way,” Buterin said in February.
Buterin argued that a Layer-2 project that boasts 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) but relies on a multi-signature bridge to connect to the Layer-1 protocol is not decentralizing the Ethereum ecosystem.
Instead of acting as a hardening layer for Ethereum, the ecosystem's many layer-2 networks should be specialized, such as privacy, identity solutions, financial platforms and social media applications, Buterin said, which drew mixed comments from L2 projects.
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