Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that the cryptocurrency community still has not abandoned its idealistic initiatives.
In response to a thought-provoking post by Joe Weisenthal, the host of Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast, Buterin stated that the cryptocurrency community has moved forward with its vision of the open internet in the cryptocurrency world.
"Just thinking. It’s pretty crazy how much crypto culture has changed in the last 5-6. Bank then, you still had idealist hippies, talking about things like democracy on the blockchain, or UBIs, or open internet. Never hear about that anymore. Now 100% financial/meme coins stuff," Weisenthal wrote.
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However, Buterin named Farcaster, an Optimism-based protocol building social network with a sufficient level of decentralization, as one of the examples of initiatives. Despite having very few daily users, the blockchain-based social protocol managed to raise $150 million in funding earlier this year. In addition, Buterin also mentioned Lens Protocol, which is a decentralized social network where users can actually own their content.
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The Ethereum co-founder also singled out quadratic funding, a democratic way of funding that is based on quadratic voting. It makes it possible to distribute funding by taking into account the wishes of the broader cryptocurrency community. The Gitcoin Grants Program, a quarterly initiative run by Gitcoin, is one of the examples of initiatives that rely on the mathematically optimal way of funding. Buterin has also mentioned the concept of retroactive funding, which allows allocating funding to those projects that have already managed to prove their value.
To top that off, he has called attention to Zupass, a personal cryptocurrency manager that allows users not to reveal their entire identities, privacy-preserving ways to send Ethereum such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) as well as zero-knowledge voting.
Despite the meme coin frenzy, it seems like the Ethereum community is still aligned with the original ideals of decentralization and privacy.