Ethereum Unveils Trillion Dollar Security Initiative to ‘Bring the World Onchain’

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced the Trillion Dollar Security initiative, an ecosystem-wide push to upgrade Ethereum’s security.

The number comes from the goal of having billions of people comfortable enough with Ethereum’s security to store $1,000 onchain. It also seeks to make companies, institutions and governments comfortable storing more than $1 trillion inside a single smart contract or application.

“Being the most secure platform in the crypto ecosystem isn’t enough,” the EF said in a blog post on May 14. “Ethereum’s ambition is far greater: to be civilization-scale infrastructure that securely underpins the internet and global economy, surpassing the safety and trustworthiness of the world’s legacy systems.”

The new initiative comes amid Ether’s recent outperformance of the broader crypto market. ETH has surged 42% over the past week, according to CoinGecko.

The Trillion Dollar Security (1TS) initiative has three components: Mapping, execution and communication.

The first stage will involve mapping out the security strengths and possible attack vectors across every domain and layer of the Ethereum technology stack, including user experience (UX), wallet security, smart contracts, infrastructure, and protocol security.

After mapping comes fixing the areas needing improvement. The EF has promised to work closely with ecosystem members to make the needed short-term, high-priority fixes. It also promised to fund longer-term improvement initiatives.

Finally, the EF pledged to do a better job communicating about Ethereum’s security issues.

“Anyone should be able to evaluate Ethereum’s security standards and compare these against other blockchains and legacy systems,” the blog post said.

Management Team

The co-chairs of the project will be Fredrik Svantes, the protocol security lead and Josh Stark, a member of the EF management team.

Assisting them will be Security Alliance founder samczsun, who is also a security advisor to venture capital firm Paradigm.

Another team member is Mehdi Zerouali, co-founder and director of blockchain security and research company Sigma Prime.

Finally, there’s Zach Obront, co-founder of Etherealize, which works with financial institutions and other organizations to bridge the traditional financial world and the Ethereum ecosystem with services like tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) and helping navigate decentralized finance (DeFi).