Introduction
Through early 2026, core people left the Ethereum Foundation one after another. Danny Ryan, who led the move to proof of stake, was among the contributors who resigned or stepped back from protocol coordination and core research. The scale of the departures was unprecedented, and it set off unease and argument inside the community. Some critics charged that the Foundation had become preoccupied with ideology at the expense of tokenomics and competitiveness.
With ETH underperforming and researchers leaving, the Foundation published The Ethereum Foundation Mandate. It defines Ethereum as a world computer: decentralized infrastructure for permissionless computation, communication, and association. It also names CROPS, censorship and capture resistance, open source and freedom, privacy, and security, as principles that cannot be traded away under any circumstances.
Behind that declaration sits a decade of success and the challenges that success produced. The vast financial market built on the network demanded efficiency and yield, and core infrastructure began concentrating in a few hands. At the same time states, regulators, and traditional finance worked to bring Ethereum inside existing institutional order. The problem Ethereum faced was its own success.
The community answered with three responses. Public goods funding redirects resources toward work the market does not reward. The CROPS principles mark the line that holds under pressure. And the infinite garden reframes what kind of game Ethereum is playing at all. The three operate on different layers: resources, norms, and culture.
Their limits are clear. None of them is enforced the way the protocol’s consensus rules are. But the absence of enforcement is not the same as powerlessness. This report traces what the world computer was, what pressures its success invited, and why norms and culture that no one can enforce turn out to be the hardest thing for a competitor to copy.
Read the full report (PDF)
