Ethereum Foundation Says Neutrality Is Central to Government Digital Infrastructure

The Ethereum Foundation said neutrality is the most important consideration for governments and institutions building digital infrastructure, presenting Ethereum as an alternative for public digital infrastructure.

The foundation's global policy strategy team published a report on July 1 titled "Ethereum for Governments and Institutions." It lays out the criteria governments and institutions should consider when choosing blockchain infrastructure as tokenization spreads, and describes Ethereum's features.

The foundation said core digital systems including payments, identity verification and public records currently depend on a small number of centralized providers. That creates operational risk, the potential for censorship and single points of failure. Cyberattacks, service outages or geopolitical conflict could spread those risks across financial and public systems.

"Regulation alone cannot solve these problems in existing systems," the foundation said. "What is needed is credible, neutral infrastructure in which protocols, rather than individuals or specific institutions, enforce the rules. Ethereum was designed for that purpose."

The foundation said Ethereum has operated without a network outage since its 2015 launch and has built strong economic security on about $76 billion of staked assets. Validators are distributed across multiple countries and legal systems, while the network runs on diverse clients, making it difficult for any single company or country to control.

The foundation said tokenization will become foundational infrastructure across payments, asset issuance, digital identity, public records and supply-chain management. It cited Ethereum-based digital identity systems in Bhutan and Buenos Aires, Argentina, and said the network is also being used in India for land registries and public-record management.

"Governments and institutions are at a point where they must decide both which blockchain to adopt as public infrastructure and how to oversee it within a regulatory framework," the foundation said. "This report was prepared to provide objective criteria for those policy decisions."