We believe disintermediation is one of the most effective ways to protect individual freedom.
Intermediaries concentrate power, which tempts them to abuse it and makes them targets for anyone who wants to use it against you. Custodians and issuers can steal or freeze your funds1–6. Payment processors and frontends can cut off your ability to transact7–12. Services that hold your personal information can leak it, sell it, or hand it over13–18. Even an honest intermediary is a single point of failure and a single point of pressure.
Blockchains and cryptography are our strongest tools for reducing this dependence. Ethereum is built for distributed verification: people can run full nodes locally, on consumer hardware, with open source and independently developed clients and tooling. Its public specifications and open governance process allow anyone to scrutinize the protocol and shape its future. But that alone does not eliminate intermediaries. Anyone can build on Ethereum, including applications that recreate the old dependencies.
As L2BEAT, we spent years exposing these dependencies across rollups, bridges, and data availability layers, and pushing projects to remove them. ETHBEAT brings the same scrutiny to the parts of Ethereum that benefit the most: where people depend on these guarantees, and where better options exist or are within reach. Our mission is to help people understand and reduce their dependence on intermediaries.
Research
We research how systems actually work and track how their guarantees change. We explain whom users must trust, what those parties can do, and whether users can still get out if everyone else walks away.
Recognize
We recognize applications that uphold censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security, so that people can find them and builders who preserve these properties gain users and support.
Develop standards
We develop standards with researchers, builders, and users, both for assessing systems and for building them better.
Build
And because cypherpunks write code, we build open source tools that put these principles into practice.
We don’t want to become another intermediary you have to trust. Our funding sources are public, and no one can pay for a more favourable assessment. We publish our methods, evidence, and reasoning so that anyone can check our work, challenge it, and build on it. We hold ourselves to the same scrutiny we apply to others.