Vitalik: How to align with Ethereum

Author: Vitalik, founder of Ethereum; Translator: 0xjs@黄金财经

One of the most important social challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem is balancing (or more accurately integrating) decentralization and cooperation.

The advantage of the ecosystem is that there are a variety of people and organizations - client teams, researchers, L2 teams, application developers, local community groups - all moving towards their own visions of Ethereum. The main challenge is to ensure that all these projects work together to build something that feels like an Ethereum ecosystem, rather than 138 incompatible feudal territories.

To address this challenge, Many people in the Ethereum ecosystem have proposed the concept of "Ethereum alignment". This can include value alignment (such as open source, minimizing centralization, supporting public products), technical alignment (such as working with ecosystem-wide standards), and economic alignment (such as using ETH as a token whenever possible). However, the concept has historically been poorly defined, which creates a risk of capture at the social layer: if alignment means having the right friends, then "alignment" as a concept fails. To address this, I think the concept of alignment should be made clearer, broken down into specific attributes that can be represented by specific metrics. Everyone's list will be different, and metrics are bound to change over time. However, I think we have some solid starting points.

Open source

Its value lies in two aspects: (i) the code can be checked to ensure security, and more importantly (ii) it reduces the risk of proprietary lock-in and enables permissionless third-party improvements. Not every part of every application needs to be fully open source, but the core infrastructure components that the ecosystem depends on absolutely should be. The gold standard here is the FSF Free Software Definition and the OSI Open Source Definition.

Open Standards

Strive for interoperability with the Ethereum ecosystem and build on open standards, both existing ones (e.g. ERC-20, ERC-1271, etc.) and those in development (e.g. account abstraction, cross-L2 transfers, L1 and L2 light client proofs, upcoming address format standards). If you want to introduce new features that are not well met by existing standards, work with others to write new ERCs. Applications and wallets can be rated based on which ERCs they are compatible with.

Decentralization and Security

Avoid trust points, minimize censorship vulnerabilities, and minimize reliance on centralized infrastructure. Natural metrics are (i) walkaway tests: if your team and servers disappear tomorrow, is your application still available, and (ii) internal attack tests: if your team itself tries to attack the system, how much damage would it cause, and how much harm can you cause? An important formalization is the L2beat Rollup stage.

Positive-Sum

Ethereum-oriented — The success of a 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 promoting its network effect), contributions to open source technologies, and pledging to donate a percentage of tokens or revenue to public goods within the scope of the Ethereum ecosystem.

For the Wider World — Ethereum aims to make the world a freer and more open place, enabling new forms of ownership and collaboration, and making positive contributions to important challenges facing humanity. Does your project do this? Examples include applications that bring sustainable value to a wider audience (e.g., financial inclusion), donations to public goods beyond Ethereum, and building practical technologies beyond crypto (e.g., financing mechanisms, general computer security) that are actually used in these contexts.

Ethereum node diagram, source ethernodes.org

Obviously, the above is not applicable to every project. The indicators for L2, wallets, decentralized social media applications, etc. look very different. The priority of different indicators may also change: two years ago, it was acceptable for Rollup to have "training wheels" because it was still "early stage"; today, we need to enter at least the first stage as soon as possible. Today, the clearest indicator of positive-sum is to commit to donating a certain percentage of tokens, and more and more projects are doing this; tomorrow we can find indicators that make other aspects of the positive-sum effect clear and understandable as well.

My ideal goal is that we see more entities like L2beat pop up to track how well individual projects meet the above criteria, as well as other criteria that the community proposes. Projects won’t compete to have the right friends, but rather to align as closely as possible to clear and understandable standards. The Ethereum Foundation should distance itself from most such projects: we fund L2beat, but we shouldn’t be L2beat. Building the next L2beat is a permissionless process in and of itself.

This will also provide a clearer path for the Ethereum Foundation, and other organizations (and individuals) interested in supporting and participating in the ecosystem while remaining neutral, to determine which projects to support and use. Each organization and individual can make their own judgment about the criteria they care most about, and select projects based on which projects best meet those criteria. This makes it easier for the Ethereum Foundation and everyone else to be part of incentivizing projects to be more aligned.

You can only be a meritocracy if merit is defined; otherwise, you have a (potentially exclusive and negative-sum) social game. The best way to address the “who’s watching the watchers” concern is not to go all in and try to ensure every influential person is an angel, but through time-tested techniques like separation of powers. “Dashboard organizations” like L2beat, block explorers, and other ecosystem monitors are great examples of this principle at work in the Ethereum ecosystem today.

If we do more to make the different aspects of alignment clear and understandable, rather than focusing on one “watcher,” we can make this concept more effective, fair, and inclusive, just as the Ethereum ecosystem strives to be.