Original Title: A Deeper Look at a New Protocol Cluster Priority: Hardness
Original Source: Ethereum Foundation
Original Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow
Deep Tide Introduction: The Ethereum Foundation recently announced three major protocol cluster priorities: scaling, user experience, and hardness. The first two are easy to understand, but what is the third?
Simply put, hardness is a protocol-level commitment to Ethereum's core attributes, including censorship resistance, privacy, security, and permissionlessness.
This article was written by three foundation members responsible for the hardness direction, detailing the specific work 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: scaling, user experience, and hardness.
Each of these addresses different needs for Ethereum's long-term success. Scaling ensures the network can accommodate global-level demand, user experience ensures people can actually use it, while hardness ensures that Ethereum retains the core attributes that make it worthwhile 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 minimal trust.
These principles have existed since Ethereum's inception.
Ethereum exists to provide neutral infrastructure to those who truly need it, even if that means it’s harder, slower, and less convenient. In practice, this means ensuring Ethereum continues to operate when centralized systems fail.
Who needs these? Users in sanctioned countries, journalists protecting sources, organizations needing neutral settlement infrastructure, and institutions wanting to reduce counterparty risk.
Why Focus on Hardness Now
Ethereum is advancing significant upgrades in throughput and availability. But every improvement might be achieved through shortcuts, such as centralized infrastructure or the introduction of trusted intermediaries.
The existence of hardness is to ensure that while Ethereum responds to network demands, it does not stray from its values.
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 Hardness Looks Like in Practice
Within the Ethereum Foundation, the hardness direction is led by three individuals, each with a focus:
· Thomas Thiery: Censorship resistance and permissionlessness, focusing on the protocol layer.
· Fredrik Svantes: Security, emphasizing privacy and minimal trust.
· Parithosh Jayanthi: Infrastructure, upgrades, and the resilience of sensitive parts of the Ethereum protocol.
Hardness spans multiple domains:
A part of the work in the hardness direction is to help more people understand and value these core attributes beyond technical development. The team will also collaborate with work related to ZK, privacy, scaling, user experience, and security (such as Trillion Dollar Security, which focuses more on wallets and application layers) to ensure these improvements do not compromise safety or decentralization while accelerating development.
Specific work includes:
Network Resilience: Improving tools, testing, and fuzz testing to detect vulnerabilities early and ensure the network can quickly recover in the event of a failure.
User Protection: Reducing preventable financial losses resulting from phishing and malicious authorizations.
Privacy: Promoting confidential transfers and anonymous broadcasting at the protocol layer, allowing users to obtain strong privacy guarantees 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 Mode: As throughput increases, the protocol must have the capability to slow down and stabilize in the event of anomalies, allowing the network to self-repair rather than cascading into failure.
Event 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 may have quietly seeped in.
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