A group of large projects in the Ethereum ecosystem has announced the launch of the Ethereum Protocol Advocacy Alliance (EPAA) initiative. Its goal is to ensure proper regulation, protection of innovation, and blockchain neutrality.
The initiative has been joined by: Aave Labs, Aragon, Curve Finance, Lido Labs Foundation, Spark Foundation, The Graph Foundation, and Uniswap Foundation. According to the release, together they ensure the security of $100 billion worth of assets.
“Over the past decade, Ethereum developers have focused on creating global, sustainable, and proven systems. At the same time, centralized players have invested heavily in lobbying and gained enormous influence on policymaking. This imbalance has often led to the fact that the principles and technologies underlying the online infrastructure have been misunderstood or ignored,” the EPAA members said.
The new organization aims to act as an intermediary between developers and lawmakers, promoting relevant and transparent regulatory solutions. Among their priorities:
- protect blockchain neutrality. The group believes that noncustodial DeFi protocols should remain outside the legal field, as well as solution developers, who should not be judged only for writing code.
- using blockchain transparency as a basis for compliance. In particular, the EPAA requires that public networks are not classified as intermediaries.
- preserve the flexibility of innovation at the protocol level. Regulation should be neither too broad nor too rigid, limiting the emergence of new products.
- support public access to blockchain and protocols.
“Decentralization is the foundation of Ethereum’s reliability and sustainability, and with the EPAA, we are ensuring that the policy recognizes and protects this principle,” said Sam Kim, CLO of the Lido Labs Foundation.
According to the release, the EPAA will advance the above priorities through a number of efforts and activities. This includes technical expertise, interaction and consultation, and the development of practical solutions for the use of blockchain.
The organization will also cooperate with other advocacy groups, including the DeFi Education Fund, the Decentralization Research Center, and the European Crypto Initiative.
The Ethereum Foundation supported the project. Its co-executive director, Tomasz Stanczak, said the following:
“Initiatives such as EPAA reflect the growing realization that stakeholders in the Ethereum ecosystem have an important role to play in educating policymakers. The Ethereum Foundation supports the coordination of community advocacy efforts and applauds the work of the EPAA.”
This is not the first such group in the cryptocurrency community. In the run-up to the US elections in the fall of 2024, a group of major players in the field, including Coinbase, Kraken, and Ripple Labs, provided significant funding to the Fairshake Super PAC.
And in August 2025, it was reported that Bitcoin Magazine CEO David Bailey intends to raise up to $200 million to create a bitcoin advocacy group.