Authors: @fredrik0x, @soispoke, @parithosh_j
DeepFlow Tech
Shenchao Overview: The Ethereum Foundation recently announced its top three protocol cluster priorities: scaling, user experience, and Hardness. The first two are easy to understand—what is the third?
In simple terms, Hardness is a protocol-level commitment to Ethereum’s core properties, including censorship resistance, privacy, security, and permissionlessness.
This article, written by three foundation members responsible for the Hardness initiative, details the specific tasks and priorities of this direction.
The full text is as follows:
What is Hardness?
The Ethereum Foundation recently published a blog outlining three protocol cluster priorities: Scaling, UX, and Hardness.
Each of the three addresses different needs essential to Ethereum’s long-term success. Scalability ensures the network can handle global-level demand, user experience ensures people can actually use it, and hardness ensures Ethereum retains the core properties that make it valuable as it grows.
Hardness refers to a system’s ability to remain reliable in the future. The hardness direction represents a protocol-level commitment to uphold Ethereum’s core guarantees: open source, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionless access, and trust minimization.
These principles have existed since Ethereum's inception.
Ethereum exists to provide a neutral infrastructure for those who truly need it, even if that means being harder, slower, and less convenient. In practice, this means ensuring Ethereum continues to function even when centralized systems fail.
Who needs these? Users in sanctioned countries, journalists protecting their sources, organizations requiring neutral settlement infrastructure, and institutions seeking to reduce counterparty risk.
Why focus on Hardness now?
Ethereum is undergoing major upgrades to improve throughput and usability. However, each improvement could be achieved by taking shortcuts, such as centralizing infrastructure or introducing trusted intermediaries.
The purpose of hardness is to ensure that Ethereum stays true to its values while responding to network demands.
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 initiative is led by three individuals, each with distinct areas of focus:
- Thomas Thiery: Censorship-resistant and permissionless, focused on the protocol layer
- Fredrik Svantes: Security, with a focus on privacy and trust minimization
- Parithosh Jayanthi: Infrastructure, Upgrades, and Resilience of Ethereum Protocol-Sensitive Components
Hardness spans multiple fields:
In addition to technical development, a portion of the Hardness initiative involves helping more people understand and value these core properties. The team also collaborates with work in ZK, privacy, scalability, user experience, and security (such as Trillion Dollar Security, which focuses more on wallets and application layers) to ensure that these improvements enhance speed without compromising security or decentralization.
Specific responsibilities include:
Network resilience: Enhance tools, testing, and fuzzing to identify vulnerabilities early and ensure the network can recover quickly in the event of failures.
User Protection: Reduce preventable fund losses caused by phishing and malicious approvals.
Privacy: Enhance private transfers and anonymous broadcasting at the protocol level, enabling users to achieve strong privacy protections without leaving L1.
Maintain neutrality: Eliminate single points of failure at the network edge to ensure the network remains neutral and resilient in the face of selective interference.
Long-term preparation: Post-quantum cryptography is not an immediate threat, but it is an inevitable one that must be prepared for in advance.
Fallback and recovery mode: As throughput increases, the protocol must be able to slow down and stabilize in the event of anomalies, allowing the network to self-repair rather than experience cascading failures.
Incident Response Readiness: Develop a shared public incident response handbook to enable the ecosystem to respond quickly and transparently in extreme scenarios.
Measure reality: Establish metrics to assess the current level of censorship resistance in the ecosystem, how many users can transact privately, and where trust assumptions are quietly creeping in.