Each Ethereum L2 has a unique "soul".
By Vitalik Buterin
Compiled by: Peng Sun, Foresight News
In my recent article on the differences between L1 and L2 scaling, I ended up roughly concluding that the most important difference between the two approaches is not technical, but organizational (using the word in the same sense The field of "industrial organizations" is similar): it is not about what can be built, but about what will be built, because of how the boundaries between different parts of the ecosystem are drawn, and how this affects people's incentives and ability to act. In particular, an L2-centric ecosystem is inherently more diverse and more naturally drives different approaches to scaling, EVM design, and other technical features.
A key point I made in my last post was:
Since Ethereum is an L2-centric ecosystem, you have the freedom to independently build a sub-ecosystem with its own unique features while also being part of the larger Ethereum.
In this article I argue that this is not only true in terms of technology, but also in terms of culture. Blockchain not only has unique technical trade-offs, it also has a unique culture. A day after Ethereum and Ethereum Classic parted ways, the two chains are technically identical. But they were culturally distinct, which helped shape their different focuses, user bases and even technology stacks eight years later. The same goes for Ethereum and Bitcoin: In the beginning, Ethereum was roughly "Bitcoin with smart contracts," but a decade later, this series of differences has become even more profound.
In an old tweet, Kevin Pham compared what Bitcoin and Ethereum culture were like in 2017. Both cultures continue to evolve: since 2017, we’ve seen the rise and fall of the Laser Eyes movement (as well as the rise of movements like Ordinals), Ethereum has become L2-centric, and both cultures have become Be more mainstream. But there are still differences, and it's probably best to keep them that way.
What things does culture influence?
Culture has a similar effect to incentives—in fact, culture is part of the incentive system. It affects who is attracted to the ecosystem and who is repelled. It affects what people are motivated to do and what actions they can take. It affects what is considered legitimate - both in protocol design and at the ecosystem and application layer.
Blockchain culture has a significant impact on some particularly important areas, including:
Types of protocol changes – including quantity, quality and direction
The ability of the protocol to remain open, censorship-resistant, and decentralized
The ecosystem’s ability to attract high-quality protocol developers and researchers
Ecosystem’s ability to attract high-quality application developers
The ecosystem’s ability to attract users—both the number of users and the right types of users
The public legitimacy of the ecosystem in the eyes of external communities and actors
If you really value the decentralization of blockchain, even at the expense of inefficiency, then you need to pay attention not only to the extent to which today's technology achieves these goals, but also to the extent to which blockchain culture can achieve these goals. attach great importance to these goals. If a blockchain’s culture does not value curiosity and openness to new technologies, then it is likely to fail in both decentralization and speed because it will not be able to adopt new technologies like ZK-SNARKs, and These technologies can be more decentralized and faster. If the blockchain is understood by the public as a "casino chain" and has no other meaning, then it will be difficult to get non-casino applications on board. Even non-commercial core protocol developers and researchers will become harder to attract. Culture matters because culture is, at least in part, upstream of almost everything else.
The Culture of Ethereum
May 2024, Kenya, Ethereum Developer Exchange Meeting. Ethereum's core R&D ecosystem is one of Ethereum's subcultures, but it is also quite diverse and internally divided.
Researcher Paul Dylan-Ennis has spent a lot of time exploring and understanding the Ethereum subculture. He believes that there are three main subcultures of Ethereum:
Cryptopunk: Cryptopunk is committed to open source development and has a certain DIY or punk attitude. In the case of Ethereum, cypherpunks built the infrastructure and tools but were hands-off and neutral about how they were used. Historically, cypherpunks have explicitly emphasized privacy, but in Ethereum, privacy has not always been a priority, although... A new cypherpunk movement called lunpunk has emerged, advocating for privacy Put it first.
Regens: Many influential voices within Ethereum are committed to taking a regenerative or regenerative approach to building the technology. Building on Vitalik Buterin's interest in politics and social science, many regenerators engage in experiments in governance that aim to reinvigorate, improve or even replace contemporary institutions. This subculture is characterized by its experimental nature and interest in public goods.
Degens: Users driven purely by speculation and the accumulation of wealth at any cost, known as Degens. Degens are financial nihilists who focus on current trends and hype in order to luck out and escape the rat race of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Degens often takes extreme risks, but in an ironic, almost detached way.
There are more than just these three groups that matter, and you could even question the extent to which they are consistent groups: the profit-oriented group and the people who buy monkey pictures are culturally very different. The term “cryptopunks” here includes both those who are interested in end uses such as protecting people’s privacy and freedom, and those who are interested in using cutting-edge mathematics and cryptography without any strong ideology. But this classification is interesting as a first approximation.
An important feature of these three groups within Ethereum is that, due in large part to Ethereum’s flexibility as a developer platform (rather than just a currency), they each have access to some sort of arena where Subcultures can take action, not just talk. A rough approximation is:
Cypherpunks participate in core Ethereum research and development and write privacy software;
Regens conducts Gitcoin rounds, retroactive public goods funding, and various other non-financial applications;
Degens trade memecoins and NFTs and play games
In my opinion, this branch of culture would be of great benefit to Ethereum. Ethereum's core development culture values high-quality thinking on topics such as advanced cryptography, game theory, and increasingly software engineering, values freedom and independence, values cryptopunk ideals, and blockchain-based versions of these principles ( such as "immutability"), and an idealistic approach that focuses on values and soft power rather than hard power. These values are important and good; judging from the cultural influences I listed in the previous section, they make Ethereum good at (1), (2), (3), and to some extent (6) In a very good position. But they are incomplete: First, the above description puts little emphasis on the appeal to application developers and almost zero appeal to users: stability-oriented values help to provide those who " People using Ethereum provide confidence, but that’s about it. Cultural pluralism is a way out of this dilemma, allowing one subculture to focus on core development while another subculture focuses on developing the "edges" of the ecosystem. But this raises the question: Are there ways we can further enhance this cultural diversity?
Subcultures and L2
This is what I would say is perhaps the most underappreciated feature of L2: for a subculture, L2 is the ultimate action arena. L2 enables the emergence of subcultures with vast resources and feedback loops that force them to learn and adapt in order to function in the real world: attracting users and app developers, developing technology, and building global communities.
Perhaps the key feature of L2 here is that it is simultaneously (i) an ecosystem and (ii) organized around building something. Local meetup groups can form their own ecosystems and often have their own unique culture, but they have relatively limited resources and execution capabilities. Applications can have vast resources and execution capabilities, but they are just applications: you can use them, but you can't build on them. Uniswap is great, but the concept of "building on Unsiwap" is not nearly as strong as "building on Polygon."
Some specific ways in which L2 may and does ultimately achieve cultural specialization include:
Prefer user development or “business development”: a conscious effort to attract specific external actors (including individuals, businesses, and communities) to participate in the ecosystem.
Emphasis on diversity of values. Does your community focus more on "public goods", "quality technology", "Ethereum neutrality", "financial inclusion", "diversity", "scalability", or something else? Different L2s will give different answers.
Diversity of participants: What kind of people does the community attract? Does it place a special emphasis on certain demographic groups? Personality type? language? Continent?
Here are a few examples:
Optimism
zkSync
MegaETH
Starknet
Polygon has achieved success through partnerships with major companies and an increasingly premium ZK ecosystem. Optimism, which owns Base and World Chain, has a strong cultural interest in ideas like retroactive fundraising and token-based gerrymandering. Metis focuses on DAOs. Arbitrum has built a brand around high-quality developer tools and technology. Scroll is focused on “preserving the essence of Ethereum – trust-minimized, secure and open source.” Taiko emphasizes "seamless user experience", "alignment with the community", "safety first" and "people-oriented". Generally speaking, each Ethereum L2 has a unique "soul": Ethereum culture combined with its own unique style.
How can an L2-centric approach be successful?
The core value proposition of this L2-centric approach to culture is that it attempts to balance the benefits of diversity with collaboration, creating a range of distinct subcultures that still share some common values and build on key common ground Facilities collaborate to realize these values.
Ethereum is trying to diversify
Similar two-layer approaches have been attempted elsewhere. The most notable example I can think of is EOS’s DPoS system in 2017. EOS’s DPoS uses token holders to vote to decide which representatives will run the chain. These representatives will be responsible for building blocks and reaching consensus on other people’s blocks, and they will also receive a large number of tokens from the EOS issuance. In order to attract votes, representatives ended up doing a lot of community building, and many of these "nodes" (such as EOS New York, EOS Hong Kong) eventually became well-known brands.
This ended up being an unstable system because token voting was inherently unstable and some powerful people in the EOS ecosystem turned out to be greedy assholes who misappropriated large amounts of funds raised on behalf of the community for personal gain. But while it works, it also displays an amazing property: it creates powerful, highly autonomous sub-communities that are still working toward a common goal.
EOS New York One of the top block producers on EOS, it even writes quite a bit of open source infrastructure code
When this approach works successfully, it also creates a healthy competition. By default, communities like Ethereum naturally tend to unite those who have been in the community for a long time. The advantage of this is that as the community develops rapidly, it can help maintain the values of the community - even if there are adverse disturbances from the outside world, it can also reduce the possibility that Ethereum will no longer care about free speech or open source. However, it also risks shifting the focus away from technical capabilities and towards social gaming, allowing the “OG” veterans to remain entrenched even if they perform poorly, and limiting the culture’s ability to renew and evolve itself. With a healthy "subculture," these problems can be alleviated: entire new subcommunities can rise and fall, and those who succeed within the subcommunity can even begin to contribute to other aspects of Ethereum. In short, continuity brings less legitimacy and performance brings more.
We can also study the above story to identify possible weaknesses. Here are a few that come to mind:
Falling into the echo chamber effect: Essentially, the same failure pattern I talked about in my last post, but with a cultural aspect. L2 starts to look like separate universes, with little cross-penetration between them.
Stuck in a Monoculture: Whether due to shared human biases or shared economic motivations (or an overly uniform Ethereum culture), everyone ends up looking in similar places for applications to build, and perhaps even technology choices to make, while This is ultimately wrong. Another situation is when a single L2 or a small number of L2s become so entrenched that there is no longer an effective mechanism for newcomers and sub-communities to emerge.
Competition is skewed on the wrong vector: Tier 2 institutions that focus on use cases that succeed in some narrow economic sense at the expense of other goals appear to be successful and, over time, become increasingly The more communities move in this direction.
There are hardly any perfect answers to these questions; Ethereum is an ongoing experiment, and part of what excites me about this ecosystem is its willingness to tackle hard questions head-on. Many challenges stem from misaligned incentives; a natural solution to this problem is to create better incentives for collaboration across the ecosystem. The idea of creating a "Basic Infrastructure Guild" to complement the Protocol Guild that I mentioned in my last article is one option. Another option is to explicitly subsidize projects that multiple L2s choose to collaborate on (i.e. similar to quadratic financing, but with a focus on connecting ecosystems rather than connecting individuals). There’s a lot of value in trying to expand on these ideas and continuing to work toward leveraging Ethereum’s unique strengths as a diverse ecosystem.
Original link
This article is reprinted from Foresight News with permission
This article Ethereum founder Vitalik: Layer 2 is the cultural extension of Ethereum first appeared on Zombit.