When Scaling Meets Speed, Ethereum Foundation Introduces "Hardness" to Safeguard the Base Layer

Original Title: A Deeper Look at a New Protocol Cluster Priority: Hardness

Original Source: Ethereum Foundation

Original Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Summary: The Ethereum Foundation recently announced three major protocol cluster priorities: Scalability, User Experience, and Hardness. The first two are easy to understand, but what is the third?

In simple terms, Hardness is a protocol-level commitment to Ethereum's core attributes, including censorship resistance, privacy, security, and permissionlessness.

This article, written by three foundation members responsible for the Hardness direction, explains in detail the specific work content and priorities of this direction. The full text is as follows:

What is Hardness

The Ethereum Foundation recently released a blog post outlining three protocol cluster priorities: Scalability, User Experience, and Hardness.

Each of these addresses different needs for 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 that Ethereum, in its growth, does not lose those core attributes that make it worth using.

Hardness refers to a system's ability to remain robust in the future. The Hardness direction is a protocol-level commitment with the goal of upholding Ethereum's core promises: open-source, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionlessness, and trust minimization.

These principles have been present since Ethereum's inception.

Ethereum exists to provide neutral infrastructure to those who truly need it, even if this means more difficulty, slower speeds, and inconvenience. In practice, this means ensuring Ethereum can still function when centralized systems fail.

Who needs these? Users from sanctioned countries, journalists protecting their sources, organizations needing neutral settlement infrastructure, institutions looking to reduce counterparty risk.

Why Focus on Hardness Now

Ethereum is advancing significant upgrades in throughput and availability. However, each improvement could potentially be achieved through shortcuts, such as leveraging centralized infrastructure or introducing trusted third parties.

The existence of Hardness is to ensure that Ethereum remains true to its values while responding to network demands.

Today, individuals and institutions rely on these Ethereum assurances not as ideals, but as necessities. This has made Hardness an increasingly critical focus area.

What Hardness Looks Like in Practice

Within the Ethereum Foundation, the Hardness direction is led by three individuals, each with their own focus:

· Thomas Thiery: Anticensorship and permissionlessness, focusing on the protocol layer

· Fredrik Svantes: Security, emphasizing privacy and trust minimization

· Parithosh Jayanthi: Infrastructure, upgrades, and resilience of critical Ethereum protocol components

Hardness spans across multiple domains:

In addition to technical R&D, part of the Hardness direction's work is to help more people understand and value these core attributes. The team also collaborates on ZK, privacy, scalability, user experience, and security-related efforts (such as Trillion Dollar Security, more focused on wallets and the application layer), ensuring that these improvements do not compromise security or decentralization while accelerating development.

Specific efforts include:

Network Resilience: Improving tools, testing, and fuzzing to identify vulnerabilities early and ensure the network can recover quickly in case of failures.

User Protection: Mitigating preventable fund losses due to phishing and malicious authorization.

Privacy: Advancing on-chain privacy-preserving transactions and anonymous broadcasts, allowing users to achieve strong privacy without leaving L1.

Maintaining Neutrality: Eliminating single points of failure at the network's edge to keep the network neutral and resilient in the face of selective disruptions.

Long-Term Readiness: Post-Quantum Cryptography is not a pressing threat at the moment, 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-heal rather than cascade into failure.

Event Response Readiness: Develop a shared publicly available emergency manual to enable the ecosystem to respond quickly and transparently in extreme scenarios.

Measure the Reality: Establish metrics to assess the ecosystem's current level of censorship resistance, how many users can transact privately, where trust assumptions are quietly creeping in, and other such issues.

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