2,400 years ago, the Mohists built defensive siege engineering manuals and distributed them to every city in China.

The theory: if defensive knowledge is free and widely available, aggression becomes uneconomical.

Today the @ethereumfndn published the EF Mandate – a thousand-year document that names the Mohists as an intellectual ancestor of Ethereum's purpose: defensive infrastructure that’s open source and available to everyone.

The Mandate enshrines CROPS (censorship resistant, open source, private, secure) as non-negotiable properties and reminds us that – while the Ethereum Foundation helps steward a defensive protocol – it's the ecosystem’s responsibility to build defensively on top of it.

To do that well, we need to know how to fund the ecosystem sustainably.

And the Mohists showed us that this path is best navigated when knowledge is legible, composable, and freely shared 💚👇

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