Authors: @fredrik0x, @soispoke, @parithosh_j

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: The Ethereum Foundation recently announced three main protocol cluster priorities: scalability, user experience, and Hardness. The first two are easy to understand; what about the third one?

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

This article is written by three foundation members responsible for the Hardness direction, detailing the specific work content and priorities in this area.

The full text is as follows:

What is Hardness

The Ethereum Foundation recently published a blog outlining three protocol cluster priorities: scalability, user experience, and Hardness.

The three address different needs for Ethereum’s long-term success. Scalability ensures the network can handle global-level demands, user experience ensures people can actually use it, while Hardness ensures that Ethereum does not lose its core attributes that make it worth using as it grows.

Hardness refers to a system's ability to remain reliable in the future. The Hardness direction is a protocol-level commitment aimed at safeguarding Ethereum's core guarantees: open-source, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionlessness, and trust minimization.

These principles have existed since Ethereum's inception.

Ethereum's existence is to provide neutral infrastructure to those who truly need it, even if it means being harder, slower, and less convenient. In practice, this means ensuring Ethereum continues to operate when centralized systems fail.

Who needs this? 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 making significant upgrades in throughput and usability. However, every improvement could potentially be achieved by shortcuts, such as centralized infrastructure or introducing trusted intermediaries.

The existence of Hardness is to ensure that Ethereum does not stray from its values while responding to network demands.

Today, individuals and institutions rely on these guarantees from Ethereum, not as ideals but as necessities. This makes Hardness an increasingly critical focus area.

What Does Hardness Look Like in Practice

Within the Ethereum Foundation, the Hardness direction is advanced by three individuals, each with specific focuses:

• Thomas Thiery: Censorship resistance and permissionlessness, focusing on the protocol layer
• Fredrik Svantes: Security, with an emphasis on privacy and trust minimization
• Parithosh Jayanthi: Infrastructure, upgrades, and resilience of sensitive parts of the Ethereum protocol

Hardness spans multiple areas:

Aside from technological research and development, part of the Hardness direction's work is to help more people understand and value these core attributes. The team also collaborates with work related to ZK, privacy, scalability, user experience, and security (such as Trillion Dollar Security, focusing more on the wallet and application layer) to ensure that these improvements do not undermine security or decentralization while accelerating development.

Specific tasks include:

Network Resilience: Improving tools, testing, and fuzz testing to detect vulnerabilities early, ensuring the network can recover quickly when failures occur.

User Protection: Reducing preventable financial losses caused by phishing and malicious authorization.

Privacy: Advancing private transactions and anonymous broadcasting at the protocol layer, allowing users to obtain strong privacy protection without leaving L1.

Maintaining Neutrality: Eliminating single points of failure at the network edge to ensure the network remains neutral and resilient in the face of selective interference.

Long-term Preparation: Post-quantum cryptography is not an urgent threat now, but it is an inevitable threat that must be prepared for in advance.

Fallback and Recovery Modes: As throughput increases, the protocol must have the capability to slow down and stabilize when anomalies occur, allowing the network to self-repair instead of cascading failure.

Incident Response Readiness: Developing a shared public emergency manual to enable the ecosystem to respond quickly and transparently in extreme scenarios.

Measuring Reality: Establishing metrics to assess the current level of censorship resistance in the ecosystem, how many users can conduct private transactions, and where trust assumptions subtly infiltrate.