Original title: A Deeper Look at a New Protocol Cluster Priority: Hardness
Original source: Ethereum Foundation
Original article translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Deep Tide Guide:The Ethereum Foundation recently announced three protocol cluster priorities: scaling, user experience, and hardness. The first two are easy to understand, but what about the third?
Simply put, Hardness is a protocol-level commitment to Ethereum's core attributes, including censorship resistance, privacy, security, and permissionlessness.
This article, written by three foundation members responsible for the Hardness area, details the specific work and priorities in this area. The full text is as follows:
What is Hardness?
The Ethereum Foundation recently published a blog post outlining three protocol cluster priorities:Scaling, User Experience (UX), and Hardness.
Each of these three aspects addresses a different need for Ethereum's long-term success. Scaling ensures the network can handle global demand, user experience ensures people can actually use it, and Hardness ensures that Ethereum doesn't lose its core attributes that make it worthwhile as it grows.
Hardness refers to a system’s ability to remain reliable in the future.The Hardness approach is a protocol-level commitment aimed at upholding Ethereum's core guarantees: open source, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionless operation, and trust minimization.
These principles have existed since the inception of Ethereum.
Ethereum exists to provide neutral infrastructure for those who truly need it, even if it means being more difficult, slower, and less convenient. In practice, this means ensuring that Ethereum continues to function when centralized systems fail.
Who needs these? Users in sanctioned countries, journalists protecting their sources, organizations needing neutral settlement infrastructure, and institutions looking to reduce counterparty risk.
Why should we focus on Hardness now?
Ethereum is pushing forward with significant upgrades in throughput and availability. But each improvement could be achieved by taking shortcuts, such as centralizing infrastructure or introducing a trusted intermediary.
Hardness exists to ensure that Ethereum does not deviate 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 area of focus.
What does hardness look like in practice?
Within the Ethereum Foundation, the Hardness direction is being pushed forward by three people, each with their own focus:
Thomas Thiery:Resistance to censorship and lack of license, focusing on the protocol layer
Fredrik Svantes:Security, with a focus on privacy and minimizing trust.
Parithosh Jayanthi:Resilience of infrastructure, upgrades, and sensitive parts of the Ethereum protocol
Hardness spans multiple fields:
Beyond technological development, part of the Hardness initiative involves helping more people understand and value these core attributes. The team will also collaborate with ZK, privacy, scaling, user experience, and security-related projects (such as Trillion Dollar Security, which focuses more on wallets and application layers) to ensure that these improvements accelerate development without compromising security or decentralization.
Specific tasks include:
Network resilience:Improve tools, testing, and fuzzing to identify vulnerabilities early and ensure rapid network recovery in the event of a failure.
User protection:Reduce preventable financial losses caused by phishing and malicious authorization.
privacy:By advancing private transfers and anonymous broadcasts at the protocol layer, users can obtain strong privacy protection without leaving L1.
Maintaining neutrality:Eliminate 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 imminent threat, but it is an inevitable one that must be prepared for in advance.
Rollback and restore modes:As throughput increases, protocols must be able to slow down and stabilize when anomalies occur, allowing the network to self-heal rather than cascading down.
Event response ready:Develop shared, publicly available emergency response manuals to enable ecosystems to respond quickly and transparently in extreme scenarios.
Measuring reality:Establish metrics to measure the current censorship resistance of the ecosystem, how many users can conduct private transactions, and where trust assumptions are quietly infiltrating.
