Ethereum Foundation lays out use cases for governments, institutions in new policy guide

The Ethereum Foundation is making a fresh push to position Ethereum as critical public infrastructure for governments and institutions, publishing a new policy guide on Wednesday that argues the blockchain’s decentralized design makes it uniquely suited for sovereign digital systems.

In a Wednesday blog post, the Ethereum Foundation’s Global Policy Strategy (GPS) team introduced “Ethereum for Governments and Institutions,” a non-technical report aimed at policymakers and institutional decision-makers evaluating blockchain infrastructure. The report seeks to explain how Ethereum works, how it is governed and why the foundation believes it offers a more neutral alternative to both centralized digital systems and competing blockchain networks.

The foundation argues that many of today’s digital services, including payments, identity systems, registries and record-keeping, depend on centralized intermediaries that create operational and governance risks. According to the report, these systems can become single points of failure through outages, cyberattacks or political pressure, while also requiring users to trust centralized operators to maintain access and enforce rules.

To support its case, the report highlighted Ethereum’s technical track record, noting that the network has maintained uninterrupted uptime since launching in 2015. Citing a recent OpenZeppelin report, the foundation said Ethereum was secured by roughly $76 billion worth of staked ETH as of March 2026, while emphasizing its geographically distributed validator network, multiple independent client implementations and large developer ecosystem.

Beyond technical metrics, the report framed Ethereum as digital public infrastructure rather than simply a financial network. It pointed to existing deployments, including decentralized identity initiatives in Bhutan and Buenos Aires and Ethereum-based land registry projects in India, as examples of governments already experimenting with the technology.

The publication comes as governments around the world increasingly explore blockchain-based infrastructure for identity, asset tokenization and public records. The Ethereum Foundation said policymakers should distinguish between decentralized public blockchains and networks that remain controlled by corporations or foundations, arguing that governance structures will play a critical role in determining which platforms are suitable for long-term public sector use.

Read more: Ethereum gets a new nonprofit focused on institutional adoption