The Ethereum Foundation published its first formal governance document on March 13, 2026 — a mandate it calls the "EF Mandate" — and stored it permanently on the Ethereum blockchain.

What is the EF Mandate?

The document functions as part constitution, part manifesto. It commits the Foundation to four core principles it abbreviates as CROPS: Censorship Resistance, Open-Source development, Privacy, and Security, with a fifth pillar of seamless user experience.

The mandate is explicit: Ethereum must remain a neutral, permissionless settlement layer. The EF will fund and support work that moves in that direction, and will not support protocols that bake compliance, surveillance, or centralized choke points into the base layer.

What changes in practice?

The mandate ties to ongoing EF-backed projects: FOCIL (Fork Choice with Inclusion Lists) is designed to make censorship of valid transactions harder even under regulatory pressure. The Privacy Stewards (PSE) team is extending privacy tools from application-level features to stack-wide guarantees. A dedicated post-quantum research team is also named as a priority.

The document was first written for EF members, but the Foundation chose to release it publicly — and stored the canonical version on-chain via an Ethereum transaction.

Signal to builders and regulators

By putting values in writing, the EF is sending a deliberate message: support will flow to open, trust-minimized systems, not to chains with KYC hard-coded into L1. For developers, the Mandate functions as a funding filter. For regulators, it signals the Foundation will not redesign Ethereum's base layer to accommodate surveillance requirements.

The EF X post announcing the mandate collected over 670 likes and 116 retweets within hours of publication.