Current global shifts clearly signal a critical need for shared, neutral digital public infrastructure outside the control of any single centralized actor. As a public, programmable network designed to operate without reliance on any single party, Ethereum was built to address precisely these needs.
Today, the Ethereum Foundation Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team is publishing “Ethereum for Governments and Institutions”a guide for public sector and institutional leaders facing policy and deployment decisions. The report is a non-technical primer covering how Ethereum works, how it is governed, how it compares with perceived alternatives, and where it is already being deployed. This post introduces the report and answers the core questions that motivated its development: why digital infrastructure needs to be neutral and why Ethereum is suited for the role.
Why we need neutral digital infrastructure
The digital systems that underpin modern economies, including payments, identity, registries, and institutional record-keeping are fragmented, proprietary, and in the hands of a small number of intermediaries.
Using these systems creates single points of failure, concentrating operational risk. A cyberattack, regional outage, or natural disaster affecting the centralized operator can take down the entire system at once.
Using these systems also requires trusting these intermediaries and accepting their rules. Whether by choice or under external pressure, these intermediaries retain the power to unilaterally remove participants and alter previously agreed rules. What happens when an operator can no longer be trusted? When counterparties clash over whose rules apply?
These risks multiply as more value gets put online, and as such, cracks in our digital foundation are widening. In recent years, we have experienced increasing instances of cloud outages taking down government services, financial systems weaponized across borders, and major identity providers breached resulting in invasions of personal privacy, and major losses in business confidence. This is not a series of isolated anomalies; it is the baseline reality for infrastructure tied to centralized control.
Patching the existing fragile foundation with better rules will not correct the issues. The only real answer is credibly neutral infrastructure where the protocol itself enforces the rules, free from human discretion or external pressure, this is what Ethereum was built for.
This report serves as a comprehensive primer on Ethereum and the broader blockchain landscape. Crafted for governments and institutions evaluating digital infrastructure, it provides the objective and rigorous analysis that high-stakes decisions demand.
Evaluating blockchains by objective metrics
Blockchains exist on a wide spectrum, varying fundamentally in their technical architecture and governance structures. At one end of the spectrum sit truly decentralized protocols. These are open, ownerless, and operate like other public infrastructure that everyone uses, but no one controls, like the internet. At the other end, sit blockchains that are effectively corporate products, controlled by a company or small group of insiders who set the rules. These products can fail the way companies fail and the insiders should bear responsibility if things go wrong. This distinction carries profound implications for policymakers and regulators. A blockchain’s structure will determine whether it can serve as credibly neutral public infrastructure for decades to come, or whether it must be treated like a corporate product with inherent accountability and systemic risks.
One of the key objectives of this report is to educate governments and institutions about factors that are critical to consider before making policy decisions or deploying products on blockchains. Some key differences between layer one blockchains were identified in a recently published OpenZeppelin Reporthere are a few points noted about Ethereum (all data is as of March 2026, except where otherwise stated):
Uptime and resilience: Ethereum has maintained uninterrupted uptime since its launch in 2015 and has been extensively battle-tested. All other blockchains in the report have had between one and seven outages, including a 19-hour halt on one major blockchain in 2023. Outages have also continuously occurred across centralized internet services, Ethereum is unique in that it has never gone down.
Economic security: At the time of the OpenZeppelin Report, Ethereum was secured by around 76 billion USD in staked ETH, and the cost to finalize a fraudulent transaction was approximately 50.7 billion USD, in addition to penalties in the form of automatic on-chain slashing. The equivalent cost on other blockchains was substantially lower, with many of them further lacking automatic on-chain slashing as a deterrent.
Decentralization of validators by design. Ethereum validators are distributed across continents and legal jurisdictions, with no single country hosting a dominant share. This breadth is partly a function of how accessible participation is. Anyone with a consumer-grade computer and 32 ETH can become a validator, which is substantially less onerous than all other blockchains reviewed in the report. Many of the other layer 1s, by contrast, require enterprise-grade infrastructure, deep Linux administration expertise, and near-perfect uptime, concentrating validation among well-capitalised operators. The result is a validator set on Ethereum that is more diverse, more decentralized, and harder to capture than any other blockchain included in the report.
Software and infrastructure diversity. Ethereum’s nodes and validators run across multiple cloud providers and physical servers, with no provider commanding a dominant share. The community maintains more than five independent software client implementations, developed by separate teams in different programming languages, materially reducing the risk of a one bug or failure taking down the network. No other layer 1 blockchain included in the report has a comparable degree of diversity. Most of them operate on a single client software, creating a major risk of network failure.
Counterparty risk. Because Ethereum has no operator, building on it does not introduce a new counterparty. No party can change the rules, restrict access, reprioritise the network for commercial advantage, or turn it off. The integrity of the system does not rest on the continued solvency, goodwill, or strategic interests of any single entity. Most other layer 1 blockchains do not meet this test. For instance, the foundation behind a blockchain identified in the OpenZeppelin Report shapes its validator ecosystem directly. Other blockchains have corporations exercising material influence over the chains. The OpenZeppelin Report identified that in one case, the corporation behind a major blockchain controls approximately 42% of the token supply, and extends that control to validator selection and node lists. These are the kinds of counterparty exposures that institutions are normally required to disclose, justify, and manage.
Ecosystem maturity, developer base, and forward roadmap. The standards established by Ethereum have become the technical foundation the rest of the blockchain ecosystem builds on. For governments and institutions, this means building on common standards, with unparalleled interoperability and greater flexibility to move between networks if needed. It also means access to a mature ecosystem of tools, libraries, audit firms, and compliance providers. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) stack has over 11,000 total developers, substantially more than the other chains included in the report. This depth shows up in the Ethereum community’s forward work which includes a post-quantum security roadmap built into the core protocol rather than offered as a bolt-on, supported by a dedicated research team and a public cryptographic prize fund.
What this means for governments and institutions
Public discourse often reduces Ethereum to a financial tool. That framing fails to account for Ethereum’s capacity as an open, neutral, programmable infrastructure for any system where multiple parties need to coordinate without a trusted intermediary. That includes trade settlement, asset issuance, identity, registries, attestations, public records, supply chain provenance, and tokenized markets.
Many of these use cases are already visible in practice. For instance, Bhutan and Buenos Aires anchored their decentralized digital identity system on Ethereum, enabling users to own their identity and choose the data they want to share. Ethereum-based rails have also been leveraged for managing land records, combating fraud and ensuring the immutability of public records in India.
For many other governments and institutional stakeholders, there are currently two pressing priorities (1) choosing the neutral infrastructure on which to coordinate with other parties while preserving their own sovereignty; and (2) working out how to govern this category of infrastructure that does not fit cleanly into existing regulatory models. These decisions inform each other. A network that is genuinely neutral, with no controlling party to capture or coerce, supports a unique class of public-sector deployment and calls for a different regulatory approach than one that carries such risks.
Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions is our effort to inform these decisions by helping stakeholders understand the Ethereum blockchain and how it differs from other infrastructures, including existing intermediated systems and other blockchains.
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