Ethereum Foundation publishes mandate clarifying role and goals

The Ethereum Foundation just dropped its official mandate — basically a mission statement on steroids. The non-profit that shepherds Ethereum's development is putting its cards on the table: keep Ethereum decentralized AF and ensure users have ultimate control over their assets and data. Oh, and achieve mass scale without selling out.

Their core pillars? Censorship resistance, open source everything, privacy by default, ironclad security, and tech that preserves freedom — not the corporate kind. The Foundation says it'll focus on protocol upgrades, long-term R&D, cybersecurity, and dev tooling... while trying to make itself obsolete.

Translation: they want Ethereum to be so decentralized it could survive without them. They're calling it the 'subtraction' approach — doing less over time as the ecosystem matures.

This comes after a rough year where Vitalik Buterin admitted Ethereum's L2 scaling strategy 'no longer makes sense.' He called out many layer-2s for being centralized projects with private networks and centralized sequencers — and having zero plans to go fully decentralized.

Buterin's take: A layer-2 boasting 10,000 TPS but relying on a multi-sig bridge to Ethereum L1 isn't actually scaling Ethereum in a decentralized way. He wants L2s to specialize — privacy, identity, DeFi, social — instead of pretending to be general scaling solutions. The L2 builders had... mixed reactions.