Current global changes clearly signal the critical need for a shared and neutral digital public infrastructure, beyond the control of a single centralized actor. As a programmable public network designed to operate without reliance on any single party, Ethereum was designed to meet precisely these needs.
Today, the Ethereum Foundation’s Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team released “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 explaining how Ethereum works, how it is governed, how it compares to perceived alternatives, and where it is already deployed. This article introduces the report and answers the fundamental questions that motivated its development: why digital infrastructure must be neutral and why Ethereum is suited to this role.
Why we need neutral digital infrastructure
The digital systems that underpin modern economies, including payments, identity, ledgers and institutional record-keeping, are fragmented, proprietary and in the hands of a small number of intermediaries.
The use of these systems creates single points of failure, concentrating operational risks. A cyberattack, regional outage, or natural disaster affecting the centralized operator can take down the entire system in one fell swoop.
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 change previously agreed rules. What happens when you can no longer trust an operator? When counterparties clash over which rules apply?
These risks multiply as more value comes online and, as a result, the cracks in our digital foundation deepen. In recent years, we have seen increasing cases of cloud outages that shut down government services, financial systems weaponized across borders, and breaches of major identity providers, leading to privacy breaches and significant losses of trust in businesses. This is not a series of isolated anomalies; this is the basic reality for infrastructures linked to centralized control.
Correcting existing weak foundations with better rules will not solve the problems. The only real answer is a credibly neutral infrastructure where the protocol itself enforces the rules, without human discretion or outside pressure, which is what Ethereum was built for.
This report serves as a comprehensive introduction to Ethereum and the broader blockchain landscape. Designed for governments and institutions evaluating digital infrastructure, it provides the objective, rigorous analysis required for high-stakes decisions.
Evaluation of blockchains by objective measures
Blockchains exist across a broad spectrum, varying fundamentally in their technical architecture and governance structures. At one end of the spectrum are truly decentralized protocols. These are open, ownerless and function like other public infrastructures that everyone uses but no one controls, such as the Internet. At the other end are blockchains which are effectively enterprise products, controlled by a company or a small group of insiders who set the rules. These products can fail the same way businesses fail and insiders should take responsibility if things go wrong. This distinction has profound implications for policymakers and regulators. The structure of a blockchain will determine whether it can serve as a credible, neutral public infrastructure for decades to come, or whether it should be treated as a corporate product with inherent liability and systemic risks.
One of the main objectives of this report is to inform governments and institutions on the essential factors to consider before making policy decisions or deploying products on blockchains. Some key differences between layer-one blockchains have been identified in a recently published OpenZeppelin report. Here are some points noted about Ethereum (all data as of March 2026 unless otherwise noted):
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Availability and resilience: Ethereum has maintained uninterrupted availability since its launch in 2015 and has been extensively battle tested. Every other blockchain in the report experienced between one and seven outages, including a 19-hour outage on a major blockchain in 2023. Outages have also occurred continuously on centralized internet services, Ethereum is unique in that it has never gone down.
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Economic security: At the time of the OpenZeppelin report, Ethereum was secured by approximately USD 76 billion worth of ETH staked, and the cost to complete a fraudulent transaction was approximately USD 50.7 billion, in addition to penalties in the form of automatic on-chain reduction. The equivalent cost on other blockchains was significantly lower, with many also lacking automatic on-chain reduction as a deterrent.
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Decentralization of validators by design. Ethereum validators are spread across multiple continents and jurisdictions, with no single country holding a dominant share. This extent depends in part on the degree of accessibility of participation. Anyone with a consumer computer and 32 ETH can become a validator, which is significantly less expensive than all other blockchains examined in the report. In contrast, many of the other Layer 1s require enterprise-grade infrastructure, deep Linux administration expertise, and near-perfect availability, concentrating validation among well-capitalized operators. The result is a validator installed on Ethereum that is more diverse, more decentralized, and harder to capture than any other blockchain included in the report.
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Diversity of software and infrastructure. Ethereum nodes and validators run on multiple cloud providers and physical servers, with no single provider having a dominant share. The community maintains more than five independent client software implementations, developed by separate teams in different programming languages, significantly reducing the risk of a bug or glitch causing the network to go down. No other layer 1 blockchain included in the report has a comparable degree of diversity. Most of them run on a single client software, creating a major risk of network outage.
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Counterparty risk. Since Ethereum does not have an operator, relying on it does not introduce a new counterparty. No party can change the rules, restrict access, reprioritize the network for commercial purposes, or disable it. The integrity of the system does not rely on the continued solvency, goodwill, or strategic interests of any single entity. Most other layer 1 blockchains do not meet this test. For example, the foundations of a blockchain identified in the OpenZeppelin report directly shape its ecosystem of validators. In other blockchains, companies exert material influence over the chains. The OpenZeppelin report identified that in one case the company behind a major blockchain controls approximately 42% of the token supply and extends this control to validator selection and node lists. These are the type of counterparty exposures that institutions are normally required to disclose, account for and manage.
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Ecosystem maturity, developer base and future roadmap. The standards established by Ethereum have become the technical foundation upon which the rest of the blockchain ecosystem relies. For governments and institutions, this means relying on common standards, with unprecedented interoperability and greater flexibility to move from one network to another if necessary. It also means access to a mature ecosystem of tools, libraries, auditing firms and compliance providers. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) stack has over 11,000 developers in total, significantly more than the other chains included in the report. This depth is evident in the Ethereum community’s advanced work, which includes a post-quantum security roadmap integrated into the main protocol rather than offered as an add-on, supported by a dedicated research team and a public crypto price fund.
What this means for governments and institutions
Public discourse often reduces Ethereum to a financial tool. This framework ignores Ethereum’s capability as an open, neutral, and programmable infrastructure for any system where multiple parties must coordinate without a trusted intermediary. This includes trade settlement, asset issuance, identity, ledgers, attestations, public records, supply chain provenance, and tokenized marketplaces.
Many of these use cases are already visible in practice. For example, Bhutan and Buenos Aires have anchored their decentralized digital identity systems on Ethereum, allowing users to own their identity and choose what data they want to share. Ethereum-based rails have also been leveraged to manage land records, combat fraud, and ensure immutability of public records in India.
For many other governments and institutional actors, 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) determine how to govern this category of infrastructure that does not fit clearly into existing regulatory models. These decisions inform each other. A truly neutral network, with no controlling parties 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 It is our effort to inform these decisions by helping stakeholders understand the Ethereum blockchain and how it differs from other infrastructure, including existing intermediated systems and other blockchains.
It is available now here.
