Ethereum may eventually need to embrace intentional ossification as a feature, not a bug.

If a protocol is meant to become global settlement infrastructure — possibly lasting longer than any single institution — then perpetual redesign becomes a risk, not a strength. The hardest problems are governance capture, social fragmentation, and coordination failure over time.

A possible next evolutionary step for Ethereum could be something like an EIP that defines a hard final scope for the base protocol — a clearly bounded set of guarantees that, once achieved, become permanently locked. After that point, no more breaking protocol changes; only extensions, rollups, tooling, and application layers evolve on top.

In other words:
Treat the base layer more like a constitution than a product roadmap.

Before ossifying, the community could explicitly define:

• What the base layer must absolutely guarantee (security, neutrality, censorship resistance, settlement finality, cryptographic primitives).
• Which hard technical problems still need research before locking (scalability ceilings, cryptographic longevity, client diversity robustness, formal verification, network survivability assumptions).
• What timelines or milestones would justify declaring the base protocol “complete.”

Bitcoin arrived at ossification accidentally through governance gridlock. Ethereum could do it intentionally — transparently and with consensus.

The multi-client model already supports this direction: Ethereum is a protocol, not an implementation. No single team controls its evolution. Locking a well-defined base layer could further strengthen neutrality, long-term trust, and institutional adoption — exactly what you’d want if this infrastructure were ever used for planetary or interplanetary-scale coordination in the distant future.

Everything above the base layer — rollups, execution environments, domain-specific chains, automation systems — can keep evolving freely without destabilizing the core.

Ossification doesn’t mean stagnation. It means stability at the foundation.