Vitalik's new article: It's time to align the entire Ethereum ecosystem

The main challenge for Ethereum at present is to ensure that all projects work together to build an Ethereum ecosystem, rather than 138 incompatible territories.

Title: "Making Ethereum Alignment Legitimable" Author: Vitalik Buterin Compiled: Scof, ChainCatcher

In the Ethereum ecosystem, balance is the most important governance challenge - or more precisely, integrating decentralization and collaboration. The advantage of this ecosystem lies in the wide range of individuals and organizations - client teams, researchers, layer 2 network teams, application developers, local community groups - all working towards their respective visions of what Ethereum could become. The main challenge is to ensure that all projects work together to build an Ethereum ecosystem, rather than 138 incompatible territories.

To address this challenge, many people in the Ethereum ecosystem have proposed the concept of 'Ethereum consensus'. This may include consistency in values (such as open source, minimal centralization, support for public goods), technical consistency (such as collaborating with ecosystem wide standards), and economic consistency (such as using ETH as a token where possible). However, this concept has been poorly defined in history, which poses a risk of being controlled at the societal level: if consistency means having the right friends, then 'consistency' as a concept fails.

To address this issue, I believe the concept of consistency should be made clearer by breaking it down into specific attributes that can be represented by specific metrics. Everyone's list will be different, and indicators will inevitably change over time. However, I believe we already have some solid starting points.

Open source: There are two reasons why this is valuable: (i) the code can be checked to ensure security, and more importantly, (ii) it reduces the risk of proprietary locks and allows third parties to make improvements without permission. Not every part of every application needs to be completely open source, but the core infrastructure components that the ecosystem relies on should definitely be. The gold standards here are FSF Free Software Definition and OSI Open Source Definition.

Open standards: Strive to achieve interoperability with the Ethereum ecosystem and build upon open standards, whether they already exist (e.g. ERC-20, ERC-1271...) or are under development (e.g. account abstraction, cross L2 transfers, L1 and L2 lightweight client proofs, upcoming address format standards). If you want to introduce a new feature that existing standards cannot serve well, collaborate with others to write a new ERC. Applications and wallets can be rated based on the number of ERCs they are compatible with.

Decentralization and Security: Avoiding trust points, minimizing review vulnerabilities, and minimizing reliance on centralized infrastructure. The natural metrics are (i) The walkthrough test: if your team and server disappear tomorrow, can your application still be used, and (ii) Internal attack test: if your team attempts to attack the system itself, how much damage will it cause and how much damage will you inflict? An important formalization is the L2beat aggregation stage.

Positive sum: Targeting Ethereum: The success of the project should benefit the entire Ethereum community (e.g. ETH holders, Ethereum users), even if they are not part of the project's own ecosystem. Specific examples include using ETH as a token (thereby contributing to its network effects), making contributions to open source technology, and committing to donate a certain percentage of tokens or revenue to the Ethereum ecosystem as a public good. Facing a broader world: Ethereum aims to make the world a freer and more open place, enabling new forms of ownership and cooperation, and making positive contributions to the major challenges facing humanity. Has your project been completed? Examples include applications that bring sustainable value to a wider audience (such as financial inclusion), donating a certain percentage to public goods outside of Ethereum, and building technologies with practicality beyond cryptocurrency (such as financing mechanisms, general computer security), which are actually being used in these environments.

Obviously, the above standards are not applicable to every project. For layer 2 networks (L2s), wallets, decentralized social media applications, etc., the applicable metrics can vary greatly. Different indicators may also change in priority: two years ago, it was acceptable for Rollup to use a 'training wheel' as it was still in the 'early stages'; And today, we need to reach at least the first stage as soon as possible. Nowadays, the most obvious positive sum indicator is the commitment to donate a certain percentage of tokens, and more and more projects are doing so; In the future, we can also find indicators that clarify other aspects of positivity.

My ideal goal is to see more entities like L2beat emerge to track how well each project is meeting the above standards as well as those proposed by other communities. Projects should not compete to make the right friends, but should strive to maintain consistency as much as possible based on clear and understandable standards. The Ethereum Foundation should maintain a certain distance in this regard: we sponsor L2beat, but we should not become L2beat. Creating the next L2beat itself is a permissionless process.

This will also provide a clearer pathway for the Ethereum Foundation and other organizations (and individuals) who wish to support and participate in the ecosystem while maintaining neutrality to decide which projects to support and use. Every organization and individual can determine which standards they are most concerned about based on their own judgment, and select projects based in part on which projects best meet these standards. This makes it easier for the Ethereum Foundation and everyone else to be a part of the motivation to make the project more consistent.

Only with a clear definition of 'achievement' can elite management be achieved; Otherwise, you will have a (possibly exclusive and zero sum) social game. The best solution to the concern about 'who will supervise the supervisors' is not to pin all hope on an attempt to ensure that all influential people are angels, but through proven techniques such as decentralization. Dashboard organizations like L2beat, memory block browsers, and other ecosystem monitors are excellent examples of how this principle works in today's Ethereum ecosystem. If we can do more to make the different aspects of consistency clearer, without focusing on a single 'supervisor', we can make this concept more effective, fair, and inclusive, just as the Ethereum ecosystem pursues.

Original link, compiled: ChainCatcher