The original text comes fromEthereum Foundation Global Policy Strategy Team

Translation by｜Odaily Planet Daily Qin Xiaofeng（@QinXiaofeng888）

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 key public infrastructure.

The report states that Ethereum has maintained uninterrupted operation since its launch in 2015, securing safety with approximately $76 billion in staked ETH by March 2026, featuring a geographically diverse network of validators, multiple independent client implementations, and a large developer ecosystem. The foundation notes that many current digital services rely on centralized intermediaries, which pose risks such as single points of failure, network attacks, or political pressure. Ethereum's decentralized architecture is more suitable for applications like digital identity, public records, and asset tokenization. The report highlights real-world examples, such as the decentralized identity initiatives in Bhutan and Buenos Aires, and the Ethereum-based land registration project in India, demonstrating that governments have begun to explore this technology.

Below is the original text from the foundation's blog, translated by Odaily Planet Daily. Enjoy~

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The current global transformation clearly indicates a pressing need for a shared, neutral digital public infrastructure that is not controlled by any single centralized entity. Ethereum, designed to work without reliance on any single party, was created to meet these needs.

Today, the Ethereum Foundation's Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team officially released "Ethereum for Governments and Institutions" — a guide for public sector and institutional leaders facing policy and deployment decisions. This report is a non-technical introductory document covering how Ethereum works, how it is governed, its comparisons with other alternatives, and existing deployment cases. This article will introduce the report and answer the core questions that led to its creation: why digital infrastructure must be neutral, and why Ethereum is suited to fulfill this role.

Why We Need Neutral Digital Infrastructure

The digital systems underpinning the modern economy — including payments, identity verification, registration systems, and institutional record-keeping — are fragmented, proprietary, and controlled by a few intermediary organizations.

Using these systems creates single points of failure, concentrating operational risks. A cyberattack, regional service disruption, or natural disaster affecting a centralized operator could instantaneously cripple the entire system.

Utilizing these systems also necessitates trusting these intermediaries and accepting their rules. Whether voluntarily or under external pressure, these intermediaries have the power to unilaterally remove participants and change previously agreed-upon rules. What happens when operators are no longer trustworthy? How do conflicts arise based on whose rules apply to counterparties?

As more value is placed online, these risks are multiplying, and the cracks in our digital foundation are widening. In recent years, we have experienced increasing outages of cloud services leading to government service disruptions, financial systems used as cross-border weapons, and major identity verification service providers being breached, resulting in significant personal privacy violations and corporate confidence damage. These are not isolated anomalies but the normative reality facing infrastructure tied to centralized control.

Attempting to patch existing vulnerable foundations with better rules does not fundamentally correct the problem. The only real answer is trusted neutral infrastructure — in which the protocols themselves enforce the rules, unaffected by human discretion or external pressures — which is precisely Ethereum's construction goal.

This report is a comprehensive introductory read on Ethereum and the broader blockchain ecosystem. It is tailored for governments and institutions evaluating digital infrastructure and provides the objective and rigorous analysis needed for high-risk decisions.

Evaluating Blockchain Based on Objective Metrics

There exists a broad spectrum of blockchain technology, with fundamental differences in technical architecture and governance structures. At one end of the spectrum are truly decentralized protocols. They are open, ownerless, and operate similarly to other commonly used but uncontrolled public infrastructures, such as the internet. At the other end are de facto corporate products controlled by a company or a small group of insiders who dictate the rules. These products can fail like businesses do, and if problems arise, the insiders should be held accountable. This distinction has profound implications for policymakers and regulators. The structure of the blockchain will determine whether it can serve as a trusted neutral public infrastructure in the coming decades or must be viewed as a corporate product with inherent responsibilities and systemic risks.

One of the key goals of this report is to help governments and institutions understand the factors to consider when making policy decisions or deploying products on a blockchain. The recent OpenZeppelin report identified some key differences between first-layer blockchains, here are a few points regarding Ethereum (unless otherwise noted, all data is as of March 2026):

• Uptime and Resilience: Ethereum has never experienced an outage since its launch in 2015 and has undergone extensive battle testing. All other blockchains mentioned in the report have experienced between 1 to 7 outages, including a 19-hour pause of a major blockchain in 2023. Outages of centralized internet services continue to occur, while Ethereum's uniqueness lies in the fact that it has never gone down.
• Economic Security: At the time of the OpenZeppelin report's release, Ethereum was secured by approximately $76 billion in staked ETH, with the cost of completing a fraudulent transaction estimated at about $50.7 billion, plus automatic on-chain penalties (slashing) as punishment. The corresponding costs for other blockchains are significantly lower, many of which even lack automatic on-chain penalties as a deterrent.
• Decentralized Validator Design: Ethereum's validators are distributed across continents and different jurisdictions, with no single country holding a dominant share. This widespread distribution is partly due to the accessibility of the participation threshold. Anyone with a consumer-grade computer and 32 ETH can become a validator, which is a far lower requirement than any other blockchain assessed in the report. In contrast, many other Layer 1 blockchains require enterprise-grade infrastructure, deep Linux management expertise, and close to perfect uptime, resulting in validator concentration in capital-rich operators. As a result, Ethereum's validator set is more diverse, more decentralized, and harder to capture than any other blockchain discussed in the report.
• Diversity of Software and Infrastructure: Ethereum's nodes and validators run on multiple cloud service 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 various programming languages, significantly reducing the risk of network outages due to a single vulnerability or failure. No other Layer 1 blockchain in the report possesses a comparable level of diversity; they mostly run on a single client software, posing significant network fault risks.
• Counterparty Risk: Because Ethereum has no operators, building applications on it does not introduce new counterparties. No party can change the rules, restrict access, rearrange the network for commercial interests, or shut it down. The system's integrity does not depend on the ongoing solvency, goodwill, 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, a large blockchain's underlying enterprise controlled around 42% of the token supply and extended this control to validator selection and node lists. These are precisely the counterparty risks that institutions typically need to disclose, justify, and manage.
• Ecological Maturity, Developer Scale, and Future Roadmap: The standards established by Ethereum have become the technical foundation relied upon by other blockchain ecosystems. For governments and institutions, this means applications can be built on common standards, enjoying unparalleled interoperability and greater flexibility for inter-network migration when needed. It also means access to a mature toolkit, auditing firms, and compliance service provider ecosystems. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) tech stack boasts over 11,000 developers, far exceeding those of other chains discussed in the report. This depth is reflected in the Ethereum community's follow-up work, including a post-quantum security roadmap integrated into the core protocol, rather than as an add-on, supported by dedicated research teams and public cryptographic prize funds.

What This Means for Governments and Institutions

Public discussions often simplify Ethereum as a financial tool. This framework overlooks Ethereum's ability as an open, neutral, programmable infrastructure — suitable for any system that requires coordination among multiple parties without a trusted intermediary. This includes transaction settlement, asset issuance, identity verification, registration systems, proofs, public records, supply chain traceability, and tokenized markets.

Many of these use cases are already evident in practice. For example, Bhutan and Buenos Aires anchor their decentralized digital identity systems on Ethereum, enabling users to own their identities and choose what data they wish to share. Ethereum-based solutions have also been utilized 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) to choose a neutral infrastructure that maintains its sovereignty while coordinating with others; (2) to explore how to govern such infrastructure, which may not fully align with existing regulatory frameworks. These two decisions influence each other. A truly neutral network — free from capturable or coercible controls — supports a unique type of public sector deployment and requires regulatory approaches that distinguish it from networks with such risks.

"Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions" represents our effort to help stakeholders understand Ethereum blockchain and its differences from other infrastructures (including existing mediated systems and other blockchains), aiming to provide reference for these decisions.

The report has now been published; please click here to view.

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