Original sourceEthereum 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 a critical public infrastructure.

The report states that since its launch in 2015, Ethereum has operated continuously, secured by approximately $76 billion in staked ETH as of March 2026, featuring a geographically distributed validator network, multiple independent client implementations, and a large developer ecosystem. The foundation notes that many current digital services rely on centralized intermediaries, exposing them to risks such as single points of failure, cyberattacks, or political pressure—making Ethereum’s decentralized architecture better suited for applications like digital identity, public records, and asset tokenization. The report highlights real-world implementations such as decentralized identity initiatives in Bhutan and Buenos Aires, and India’s Ethereum-based land registry project, demonstrating that governments are already exploring this technology.

Below is the original foundation blog post, translated by Odaily Planet Daily. Enjoy～

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The current global transformation clearly shows that we urgently need a shared, neutral digital public infrastructure that is not controlled by any single centralized entity. As a public programmable network designed to operate without reliance on any single party, Ethereum was built precisely to meet these needs.

Today, the Ethereum Foundation’s Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team officially released Ethereum for Governments and Institutions—a guide designed for public sector and institutional leaders facing policy and deployment decisions. The report is a non-technical introductory document that covers how Ethereum works, how it is governed, how it compares to alternative solutions, and real-world deployment examples already in use. This article introduces the report and answers the core questions that motivated its creation: why digital infrastructure must be neutral, and why Ethereum is well-suited to fulfill this role.

The digital systems that underpin the modern economy—including payments, identity verification, registration systems, and institutional record-keeping—are fragmented, proprietary, and controlled by a small number of intermediaries.

Using these systems creates a single point of failure, concentrating operational risk. A cyberattack, regional service outage, or natural disaster affecting the centralized operator could cause the entire system to collapse instantly.

Using these systems also means trusting these intermediaries and accepting their rules. Whether voluntarily or under external pressure, these intermediaries have the unilateral ability to remove participants or alter previously agreed-upon rules. What happens when the operators are no longer trustworthy? How do we resolve conflicts when counterparties disagree on whose rules apply?

As more value is moved online, these risks are multiplying, 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 for cross-border attacks, and major identity verification providers being breached, leading to widespread privacy violations and severe damage to corporate confidence. This is not a series of isolated anomalies, but rather the常态 reality faced by infrastructure tied to centralized control.

Patching existing fragile foundations with better rules cannot fundamentally fix the problem. The only real solution is a trusted, neutral infrastructure—in which the protocol itself enforces rules, free from human discretion or external pressure—which is precisely what Ethereum was designed to achieve.

This report is a comprehensive introduction to Ethereum and the broader blockchain ecosystem, tailored for governments and institutions evaluating digital infrastructure, providing the objective, rigorous analysis needed for high-stakes decisions.

Blockchains exist along a broad spectrum, with fundamental differences in their technical architecture and governance structures. At one end are truly decentralized protocols—they are open, ownerless, and operate like other public infrastructure that everyone uses but no one controls, such as the internet. At the other end are essentially corporate products, controlled and governed by a single company or a small group of insiders. These products can fail like corporations, and when problems arise, the insiders must be held accountable. This distinction has profound implications for policymakers and regulators. The structure of a blockchain will determine whether it can serve as a trusted, neutral public infrastructure over the coming decades, or whether it must be viewed as a corporate product with inherent accountability and systemic risk.

One of the key objectives of this report is to help governments and institutions understand the critical factors to consider before making policy decisions or deploying products on a blockchain. The recently released OpenZeppelin report identifies several key differences among layer-one blockchains; below are some key points regarding Ethereum (all data current as of March 2026, unless otherwise noted):

• Uptime and resilience: Ethereum has never experienced an outage since its launch in 2015 and has undergone extensive real-world testing. All other blockchains mentioned in the report have experienced between one and seven outages, including a 19-hour pause of a major blockchain in 2023. Centralized internet services continue to experience outages, but Ethereum’s distinction lies in its never having suffered an outage.
• Economic security: At the time of the OpenZeppelin report, Ethereum was secured by approximately $76 billion in staked ETH, making the cost of executing a fraudulent transaction around $50.7 billion, in addition to automatic on-chain slashing as a penalty. The corresponding costs for other blockchains are significantly lower, and many lack automatic on-chain slashing as a deterrent.
• Validator decentralization design: Ethereum validators are distributed across continents and different 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 significantly lower than that of 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 centralization among well-capitalized operators. As a result, Ethereum’s validator set is more diverse, more decentralized, and harder to capture than that of any other blockchain in the report.
• Software and infrastructure diversity: Ethereum’s nodes and validators run across 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-wide failure due to a single vulnerability or bug. No other Layer 1 blockchain in the report exhibits a comparable level of diversity; most rely on a single client software, posing a significant risk of network failure.
• Counterparty risk: Since Ethereum has no operator, building applications on it does not introduce new counterparty risks. No single party can alter rules, restrict access, reorder the network for commercial gain, or shut it down. The system’s integrity does not depend on the ongoing solvency, good faith, or strategic interests of any single entity. Most other Layer 1 blockchains do not meet this standard. For example, the foundation behind a 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 corporation behind a major blockchain controlled approximately 42% of the token supply and extended this control to validator selection and node lists. These are precisely the counterparty risk exposures that institutions typically need to disclose, justify, and manage.
• Ecosystem maturity, developer scale, and future roadmap: Ethereum’s established standards have become the foundational technology upon which other blockchain ecosystems are built. For governments and institutions, this means applications can be constructed atop universal standards, enjoying unparalleled interoperability and greater flexibility for cross-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) tech stack boasts over 11,000 developers—far surpassing those on any other chain mentioned in this report. This depth is reflected in Ethereum community initiatives, including a post-quantum security roadmap embedded directly into the core protocol, supported by dedicated research teams and a public cryptography bounty fund.

Public discourse often reduces Ethereum to merely a financial tool. This framework overlooks Ethereum’s capacity as an open, neutral, and programmable infrastructure—suitable for any system requiring multiple parties to coordinate without trusted intermediaries. This includes transaction settlement, asset issuance, identity verification, registry systems, proofs, public records, supply chain provenance, and tokenized markets.

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

For many other government and institutional stakeholders, there are currently two urgent priorities: (1) selecting neutral infrastructure that maintains sovereignty while coordinating with other parties; and (2) exploring how to govern infrastructure that does not fully align with existing regulatory models. These two decisions influence each other. A truly neutral network—one without any control point that can be captured or coerced—enables a unique type of public sector deployment and requires regulatory approaches distinct from those applied to networks with 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, to inform these decisions.

The report has now been released; click here to view.