The Ethereum Foundation has added “Harden the L1” as a third core protocol priority for 2026, alongside scaling and user experience. The new track is aimed at preserving Ethereum’s base guarantees as the network grows, with a focus on censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionlessness and trust minimization.
A protocol priority centered on Ethereum’s core guarantees
In the Foundation’s outline, scaling addresses capacity and UX addresses usability. Hardness answers a different question: whether Ethereum can keep the properties that made it valuable in the first place while throughput and adoption keep rising. The Foundation describes Hardness as the ability of a system to remain reliable over time, and ties the effort to principles it says have existed since Ethereum’s beginning, including open source operation, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionlessness and minimized trust assumptions.
The Foundation also frames Ethereum as neutral infrastructure that should keep operating even when centralized systems fail. It points to users in sanctioned countries, journalists protecting sources, organizations that need neutral settlement rails, and institutions seeking lower counterparty risk as examples of groups that depend on these guarantees. This is not presented as an abstract ideal. It is described as a practical requirement.
Three researchers split the scope
The Hardness track is being led internally by Thomas Thiery, Fredrik Svantes and Parithosh Jayanthi. According to the Foundation, Thiery is focused on censorship resistance and permissionlessness at the protocol layer. Svantes covers security, with attention on privacy and trust minimization. Jayanthi is responsible for infrastructure, upgrades and resilience across sensitive parts of the Ethereum protocol.
The Foundation says the work spans multiple domains and will be coordinated with ongoing efforts in ZK, privacy, scaling, UX and security. It also draws a distinction with Trillion Dollar Security, which is said to be more focused on wallets and the application layer, while Hardness is aimed more directly at protocol design and the conditions needed to keep decentralization and security intact.
Privacy transfers, resilience testing and emergency response
The work items listed under Hardness are broad but concrete. They include network resilience, user protection, protocol-level privacy, neutrality at the network edge, long-term cryptographic preparation, fallback and recovery modes, incident response readiness and ecosystem-wide measurement. The Foundation says it plans to improve tooling, testing and fuzzing to catch vulnerabilities earlier and help the network recover faster when faults occur.
On user protection, the goal is to reduce preventable fund losses caused by phishing and malicious approvals. On privacy, the Foundation says it wants to push private transfers and anonymous broadcast mechanisms at the protocol layer so users can access stronger privacy protections without leaving L1. It also says single points of failure should be removed at the network edge to preserve neutrality under selective interference.
For the longer term, the Foundation explicitly mentions post-quantum cryptography. It says this is not an urgent threat today, but an unavoidable one that requires preparation. As throughput rises, Ethereum also needs the ability to slow down and stabilize during abnormal conditions so the network can recover instead of suffering cascading failures. The team is also working on a shared public emergency playbook and a set of metrics to track how censorship-resistant the ecosystem is, how many users can transact privately, and where trust assumptions may be entering the system.