The Ethereum Foundation, the nonprofit organization managing the development of the Ethereum ecosystem, published its mandate on Friday, reaffirming its role and Ethereum’s core pillars.
The Ethereum Foundation’s two stated goals are to keep Ethereum decentralized and to give users the “final say” over their assets and data in the supply chain as the protocol reaches mass scale, according to mandate.
Censorship resistance, open source code, privacy, security and freedom-preserving technology are the core properties of Ethereum that will be maintained, the document reads.
The Ethereum Foundation has stated that it will continue to focus on core protocol updates, “long-term research”, cybersecurity, and providing tools to Ethereum developers, while minimizing its role as much as possible. The mandate states:
“Our ultimate goal is for Ethereum to pass the test: its protocols and core application layers have become so robust and trustless that they will continue to function reliably and evolve even if the Foundation and today’s core developers disappear tomorrow.”
The Ethereum Foundation has stated that its goal is to focus on tasks that become less necessary over time through a process of subtraction.
The mandate comes after a challenging year for the protocol, with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stating that Ethereum’s approach to scaling on Layer 2 networks “no longer makes sense” and that many L2s are centralized projects.
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Buterin says there needs to be a drastic change in the way Ethereum scales
Buteirn said many Layer 2 networks have centralized control points, including private trusted networks and centralized sequencers, and have no plans to move to a fully decentralized model.
“The original vision of L2 and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense and we need a new path” – Buterin he said in February.
Buterin argued that the Layer 2 design, which boasts a throughput of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) but relies on a multi-signature bridge to interact with the Layer 1 protocol, does not scale the Ethereum ecosystem in a decentralized way.
Instead of acting as scaling layers for Ethereum, the ecosystem’s many Layer 2 networks should specialize in niches such as privacy solutions, identity solutions, financial platforms and social media applications, Buterin said, which was met with mixed reactions from L2 projects.
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