Ethereum Foundation Publishes EF Mandate

The Ethereum Foundation released the EF Mandate today, a foundational document it says functions as part constitution, part manifesto. The 38-page document, published by the EF’s board today, March 13, as a PDF and on-chain, aims to articulate the “promise of Etheruem,” as well as the EF’s role in the ecosystem.

Per the Mandate, the EF defines its role not as Ethereum’s owner or ruler, but as a steward with one core mission: ensuring Ethereum becomes and stays a decentralized, resilient tool for user self-sovereignty.

The Mandate also reaffirms the definition of Ethereum as humanity’s “World Computer” as the ecosystem’s first “promise” — what the EF says represents a “common computational substrate that anyone can interact with trustlessly, permissionlessly, and persistently.” Ethereum’s second promise, per the EF Mandate, is to enable self-sovereign coordination at scale, without coercion or capture.

Per the document, the EF’s mandate consists of two main principles: ensuring Ethereum stay decentralized and resilient, specifically as a tool for self-sovereignty; secondly, “scaling the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty to users ready to
exercise it directly.”

The document states that a core aim of the EF within the first of its mandates is to ensure that Ethereum remain “CROPS” — censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure. This collection of properties, the EF says, is the non-negotiable baseline for all EF decisions for Ethereum, at both the protocol and application layers, per the Mandate.

“May the Foundation fall on its own sword if it fails to uphold its solemn promise to Ethereum,” an illustrated part of the EF Mandate reads.

Buterin Responds

Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, posted a detailed breakdown of the Mandate on X today, describing Ethereum’s as “a sanctuary technology” built to “preserve technological self-sovereignty” and “ensure that no single person, organization or ideology’s victory in cyberspace can be total.”

Buterin outlined the EF’s role as well, including developing “the zero option” at the Ethereum application layer — UX that “goes hard” on security, privacy, and respecting user agency — while leaving broader adoption-first efforts to outside players. “Such work has its natural home outside the EF,” he wrote.

The Mandate also formally enshrines passing the “walkaway test” as the EF’s norttart for Ethereum. Buterin first introduced the concept on Jan. 12, as The Defiant reported at the time.

The walkaway test refers to making sure Ethereum is robust and resilient enough to function and evolve even if the EF and the protocol’s core developers “disappeared tomorrow.” The Foundation frames its own diminishing relevance as the truest measure of success, arguing that despite what may sound like a contradiction, “we believe, and history shows us time and again, that the only way to grow a garden into something truly infinite is to choose subtraction,” referring to the eventual “subtraction” of the EF itself as steward of Ethereum.

“For we are building nothing less than the machinery of freedom — not just for today, but for the next thousand years,” the Mandate states in its closing section.

The release comes amid significant internal change at the EF, following leadership restructuring last summer, and more recently, executive departures.

“We are doubling down on Ethereum,” Buterin wrote in his X post today, “and are excited about its next chapter.”

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.