Self-sovereignty

Ethereum's design goes to painstaking lengths to ensure that users can run an Ethereum L1 node on commodity consumer-grade hardware and residential Internet connections. Running your own node gives you several important benefits:

• Privacy: Because the wallet can work directly on your own hardware with no outside dependencies, the wallet can query data about the state of the chain without revealing private details such as your wallet address or IP address to a third-party RPC provider.
• Integrity: Relying on a third-party RPC provider means that this provider may return incorrect data about the state of the chain, tricking you into signing a transaction that ends up having a different effect than the one you intended. Your own L1 node will verify the integrity of the chain, so such attacks cannot occur when using a self-hosted node.
• Censorship resistance: Because an L1 node may broadcast transactions into a shared mempool directly to other nodes in the network, your transactions are not censorable by a third-party RPC provider that would otherwise act as an intermediary.
• No downtime: Because the L1 node is running on your own hardware, you are not at risk of losing funds or opportunities due to downtime from a third-party RPC provider.

Question: What if a wallet's dev team walked away or turned evil one day?

One of Ethereum's core promises as an Internet upgrade is to avoid the possibility for user lock-in of web2. This is achieved by ensuring accounts are permissionlessly portable across wallets.

Ensuring that accounts remain portable avoids wallets becoming lock-in vectors in web3. Permissionless account portability also keeps the wallet ecosystem healthy through open competition.

One of the core tenets of Ethereum is censorship resistance. This means that users must be able to reliably get transactions included onchain, without the ability for intermediaries to prevent this from happening.

This property is critical to ensure that all Ethereum participants are provided equal-opportunity, unfettered access to Ethereum, and to ensure that Ethereum is resilient to attackers that would want to prevent others from using Ethereum on such footing.

In order to uphold this property on Ethereum L2s, users must be able to force transactions to be included on L2 chains as well. Most L2s implement such functionality by allowing L2 transactions to be submitted on the L1, and enforcing that their sequencing logic must respect such L1 force-inclusion requests by including them on the L2 chain, typically within some fixed duration.

By verifying that the wallet supports L2 force-withdrawal transactions, this attribute verifies censorship resistance at both levels: L1 and L2.