Ethereum Foundation Launches "Hardness" New Direction: Censorship Resistance, Privacy, and Post-Quantum Security All at Once

Ethereum Foundation Updates Protocol Priorities for 2026, Officially Establishing the Third Core Focus “Harden the L1,” Divided Among Three Researchers to Ensure Ethereum Maintains Its Core Commitments to Censorship Resistance, Privacy, and Security Amid Rapid Scalability. This article is based on the Ethereum Foundation’s publication “Protocol Priorities Update for 2026,” edited, translated, and organized by Dongqu.
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Table of Contents

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• What is Hardness?
• The Three Responsible Leaders and Their Roles
• Specific Work Scope

Recently, the Ethereum Foundation announced three major protocol cluster priorities: Scaling, User Experience, and Hardness. The first two are straightforward, but what is the third?
Simply put, Hardness is a protocol-level commitment to Ethereum’s core properties, including censorship resistance, privacy, security, and permissionlessness.
This article is written by three Foundation members responsible for the Hardness direction, detailing the specific work and priorities within this focus 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 (UX), and Hardness.
Each addresses different needs for Ethereum’s long-term success. Scaling ensures the network can handle global demand; UX ensures people can actually use it; and Hardness guarantees that Ethereum retains its core attributes during growth.
Hardness refers to a system’s ability to remain reliable in the future. It is a protocol-level promise aimed at safeguarding Ethereum’s fundamental guarantees: open source, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionless operation, and minimal trust.
These principles have existed since Ethereum’s inception.
Ethereum exists to provide neutral infrastructure for those who truly need it, even if that means it becomes harder, slower, or less convenient. In practice, this means ensuring Ethereum can operate even if centralized systems fail.
Who needs these guarantees? Users in sanctioned countries, journalists protecting sources, organizations requiring neutral settlement infrastructure, institutions seeking to reduce counterparty risk.
Ethereum is pushing major upgrades in throughput and usability. But each improvement could be achieved via shortcuts, such as centralizing infrastructure or introducing trusted intermediaries.
Hardness exists to ensure that Ethereum responds to network demands without deviating from its values.
Today, individuals and institutions rely on these guarantees not as ideals but as necessities. This makes Hardness an increasingly critical focus area.

The Three Responsible Leaders and Their Roles

Within the Ethereum Foundation, the Hardness focus is led by three individuals, each with their own emphasis:
· Thomas Thiery: Censorship resistance and permissionlessness, focusing on protocol layer
· Fredrik Svantes: Security, with an emphasis on privacy and trust minimization
· Parithosh Jayanthi: Infrastructure, upgrades, and resilience of sensitive parts of the Ethereum protocol
Hardness spans multiple domains:
Beyond technical R&D, part of the work involves helping more people understand and value these core attributes. The team also collaborates with work on ZK, privacy, scaling, UX, and security (such as Trillion Dollar Security, which focuses more on wallets and application layers) to ensure these improvements accelerate development without compromising security or decentralization.

Specific Work Scope

The specific tasks include:
Network Resilience: Improving tools, testing, and fuzzing to detect vulnerabilities early, ensuring quick recovery during failures.
User Protection: Reducing preventable fund losses from phishing and malicious approvals.
Privacy: Advancing confidential transfers and anonymous broadcasting at the protocol level, enabling users to gain strong privacy without leaving L1.
Maintaining Neutrality: Eliminating single points of failure at network edges to ensure neutrality and resilience against selective interference.
Long-term Preparedness: Post-quantum cryptography is not an immediate threat but an unavoidable one, requiring early preparation.
Rollback and Recovery Modes: As throughput increases, protocols must be able to slow down and stabilize during anomalies, allowing the network to self-heal rather than cascade collapse.
Incident Response Readiness: Developing shared public emergency manuals to enable the ecosystem to respond quickly and transparently in extreme scenarios.
Metrics and Reality: Establishing indicators to measure current censorship resistance, the number of users able to transact privately, and where trust assumptions may have subtly crept in.