The Ethereum Foundation published the EF Mandate on March 13, 2026, a document the organization describes as part constitution, part manifesto. It sets out the principles guiding every major decision the Foundation makes going forward.

The document does not just address internal teams. It carries an open message to the wider Ethereum ecosystem and, beyond it, to any builder who believes digital systems should remain open, private, and free.

CROPS Is the Non-Negotiable Core

At the center of the Mandate sits a four-property framework the Foundation calls CROPS: censorship resistance, open source and free as in freedom, privacy, and security. These four properties are described in the EF Mandate PDF as the “sine qua non” of all Ethereum development, meaning nothing built under the Foundation’s stewardship can trade them away.

User self-sovereignty is described as the ultimate reason Ethereum exists. A world where users hold final authority over their assets, identities, and choices. That is the goal. Every technical and organizational decision the Foundation makes is meant to point toward it.

The Foundation draws a hard line: a billion users inside a centralized system is not success. It is, in the Mandate’s words, a failure of mission.

The Foundation Defines What It Is Not

The EF Mandate dedicates an entire section to what the Foundation refuses to become. Not a corporation building consumer apps. Not a kingmaker picking winners among ecosystem projects. Not a regulator. Not a marketing agency running hype cycles. And not a casino encouraging dangerous financial risk-taking.

The document describes the Foundation’s actual role as stewardship through subtraction. Over time, the goal is for the Foundation to become less necessary, not more central. Ethereum’s resilience, the Mandate argues, depends on no single entity, including the Foundation itself, being indispensable to its continued operation.

That logic extends to a concept the Foundation calls the “walkaway test.” The protocol should be robust enough to continue functioning and evolving even if the Foundation and its current developers disappeared tomorrow.

A Thousand-Year Document, Published On-Chain

The Mandate is written with a deliberately long horizon. Not years or decades. The document explicitly frames its ambitions across a thousand-year span, acknowledging that principled standards erode over time like water wearing down stone. Starting from as high a standard as possible, the Foundation argues, slows that erosion across centuries.

The document now lives permanently on the Ethereum blockchain, where it can be read, reinterpreted, and remixed by anyone, forever. The Foundation publishes a canonical version for its own use, but the Mandate imposes no obligation on anyone else in the ecosystem.

The Foundation credited pcaversaccio, Tim Clancy, Lefteris, and mashbean among those who provided advice and feedback during its drafting. Tomo Saito and Shiro were thanked for their artistic interpretation of the text.

Stewardship, Not Authority

The Mandate is explicit that the EF is not Ethereum’s parent or final authority. Its role is to coordinate, provide substrate, and support anyone working toward the same mission without creating centralized bottlenecks or collapsing into a single point of control.

The Foundation also acknowledges past shortcomings directly, stating it has not always succeeded but committing that it will going forward. That kind of institutional self-reflection is baked into the Mandate as a requirement, not an exception.

The document closes with a reference borrowed from Dante, “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle,” and then came out to see the stars again. A pointed choice for an organization describing its work as building the machinery of freedom for the next thousand years.