Original from the Ethereum Foundation Global Policy & Strategy Team

Compiled by | Odaily Planet Daily Qin Xiaofeng (@QinXiaofeng 888 )

Editor's Note: On July 1st, the Ethereum Foundation's Global Policy & Strategy team released a policy guide for governments and institutions, positioning Ethereum as critical public infrastructure.

The report states that Ethereum has maintained uninterrupted operation since its launch in 2015, secured by approximately $76 billion in staked ETH as of March 2026, and possesses a geographically distributed validator network, multiple independent client implementations, and a vast developer ecosystem. The Foundation indicates that many current digital services rely on centralized intermediaries, posing risks such as single points of failure, cyberattacks, or political pressure. Ethereum's decentralized architecture is more suitable for applications like digital identity, public records, and asset tokenization. The report points to existing implementations such as Bhutan and Buenos Aires' decentralized identity initiatives and India's land registry project based on Ethereum, demonstrating that governments have begun exploring this technology.

Below is the full text of the Foundation's blog post, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily. Enjoy~

——————

Current global shifts make it unequivocally clear that we urgently need a shared, neutral digital public infrastructure that is not controlled by any single centralized entity. Designed as a public programmable network that does not rely on any single party, Ethereum is built to meet this need.

Today, the Ethereum Foundation Global Policy & Strategy (GPS) team officially launches "Ethereum for Governments and Institutions"—a guide for leaders in the public sector and institutions facing policy and deployment decisions. This report is a non-technical primer covering how Ethereum works, how it is governed, comparisons with other alternatives, and examples of its real-world deployment. This post introduces the report and answers the core question that prompted its creation: why digital infrastructure must be neutral, and why Ethereum is suited for this role.

Why We Need Neutral Digital Infrastructure

The digital systems underpinning the modern economy—including payments, identity verification, registries, and institutional record-keeping—are fragmented, proprietary, and held by a small number of intermediaries.

Using these systems creates single points of failure, concentrating operational risk. A cyberattack, regional service outage, or natural disaster affecting the centralized operator can bring the entire system to an instant halt.

Using these systems also means trusting these intermediaries and accepting their rules. These intermediaries have the ability, whether voluntarily or under external pressure, to unilaterally remove participants or change previously agreed-upon rules. What happens when an operator is no longer trustworthy? Or when counterparties clash over whose rules apply?

As more value moves online, these risks multiply, and the cracks in our digital foundation are widening. In recent years, we have experienced increasing cloud service outages paralyzing government services, financial systems being weaponized across borders, and major identity service breaches leading to privacy invasions and severe erosion of business confidence. These are not isolated anomalies but the routine reality of infrastructure bound to centralized control.

Patching the existing fragile foundation with better rules cannot fundamentally fix the problem. The only real answer is credibly neutral infrastructure—where the protocol itself enforces the rules, free from human discretion or external pressure—and that is precisely what Ethereum aims to be.

This report is a comprehensive primer on Ethereum and the broader blockchain ecosystem. It is tailored for governments and institutions evaluating digital infrastructure, offering the objective, rigorous analysis necessary for high-stakes decisions.

Evaluating Blockchains Based on Objective Metrics

There is a broad spectrum of blockchains with fundamental differences in technical architecture and governance structures. At one end are truly decentralized protocols. They are open and ownerless, operating like other public infrastructure everyone uses but no one controls, such as the internet. At the other end are effectively corporate products, controlled and ruled by a single company or a small group of insiders. These products can fail like businesses, and if something goes wrong, the insiders are accountable. This distinction has profound implications for policymakers and regulators. A blockchain's structure will determine whether it can serve as a credibly neutral public infrastructure for decades to come or must be treated as a corporate product with inherent liabilities and systemic risks.

A key goal of this report is to inform governments and institutions about critical factors to consider before making policy decisions or deploying products on a blockchain. A recently published OpenZeppelin report identified key differences among Layer 1 blockchains. Here are a few notes on Ethereum (all data is as of March 2026 unless otherwise noted):

• Uptime & Resilience: Ethereum has never experienced downtime since its launch in 2015 and has been extensively battle-tested. All other blockchains mentioned in the report have experienced between 1 and 7 downtime events, including a 19-hour halt for a major blockchain in 2023. Outages for centralized internet services continue to occur, but Ethereum's distinction is that it has never gone down.
• Economic Security: At the time of the OpenZeppelin report, Ethereum was secured by approximately $76 billion in staked ETH, with the cost to execute a fraudulent transaction estimated at around $50.7 billion, plus automatic on-chain slashing as a penalty. The corresponding costs for other blockchains are significantly lower, with many lacking automatic on-chain slashing as a deterrent.
• Validator Decentralization by Design: Ethereum's validators are distributed across continents and jurisdictions, with no single country holding a dominant share. This broad distribution stems partly from accessible participation thresholds. Anyone with consumer-grade hardware and 32 ETH can become a validator—a requirement far lower than all other blockchains assessed in the report. In contrast, many other Layer 1s require enterprise-grade infrastructure, deep Linux administration expertise, and near-perfect uptime, leading to validator concentration among well-capitalized operators. The result is that Ethereum's validator set is more diverse, more decentralized, and more difficult to capture than any other blockchain in the report.
• Software & 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 in different programming languages, significantly reducing the risk of network failure due to a single bug or flaw. No other Layer 1 blockchain in the report has a comparable degree of diversity. Most operate on a single client software, posing a significant network failure risk.
• Counterparty Risk: Because Ethereum has no operator, building applications on it does not introduce a new counterparty. No single party can change the rules, restrict access, reorder the network for commercial gain, or shut it down. The system's integrity does not depend on the continued solvency, goodwill, or strategic interests of any single entity. Most other Layer 1 blockchains do not meet this standard. For example, the foundation behind one 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 large blockchain controls approximately 42% of the token supply and extends this control to validator selection and node listings. These are precisely the kinds of counterparty exposures institutions are typically required to disclose, justify, and manage.
• Ecosystem Maturity, Developer Scale & Future Roadmap: The standards established by Ethereum have become the technical foundation upon which other blockchain ecosystems build. For governments and institutions, this means building applications on universal standards, enjoying unparalleled interoperability, and having greater flexibility for cross-chain migration if needed. It also means access to a mature ecosystem of tools, auditing firms, and compliance service providers. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) tech stack has over 11,000 developers, far exceeding the numbers for other chains mentioned in the report. This depth is reflected in the Ethereum community's follow-on work, including a post-quantum security roadmap built into the core protocol—not as an add-on—supported by dedicated research teams and public cryptography grant funds.

What This Means for Governments and Institutions

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

Many of these use cases are already emerging in practice. For instance, Bhutan and Buenos Aires anchor their decentralized digital identity systems on Ethereum, allowing users to own their identity and choose what data to share. Ethereum-based rails 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 pressing priorities: (1) choosing neutral infrastructure to maintain sovereignty while coordinating with other parties, and (2) exploring how to govern infrastructure that doesn't neatly fit existing regulatory models. These two decisions influence each other. A truly neutral network—with no control party that can be captured or coerced—enables a unique type of public sector deployment and also warrants a different regulatory approach than 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 infrastructures—including existing intermediated systems and other blockchains—in order to inform these decisions.

The report is now live. Please click here to view it.