Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily
As the author of the Ethereum white paper and co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik's every move has varying degrees of impact on the cryptocurrency industry. His speeches at various events are also regarded as one of the "industry weather vanes", and the projects he personally supports or mentions many times are also regarded as "Ethereum orthodox projects."
On August 7, Vitalik said: "From my point of view, both L1 and L2 confirm transactions within seconds, and the cost of each L2 transaction is less than $0.01. Farcaster, Lens, and Polymarket have performed amazingly over the past year, and we are beginning to enter the ZK ID and ZK voting stage." He not only consistently praised the development of the L2 network, but also highly affirmed popular products in other tracks.
Odaily Planet Daily will briefly sort out his past remarks in this article and interpret what Vitalik sees as the "masterpiece of cryptocurrency."
Crypto's hottest new kid on the block: Polymarket, the leader in the prediction market
In May this year, the prediction market Polymarket completed a $45 million Series B financing, led by Founders Fund and others, with participation from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others. Previously, General Catalyst led the company's Series A financing, with a financing amount of $25 million. Its earliest seed round of financing dates back to October 2020, when the project was just launched, with a financing amount of $4 million, led by Polychain Capital.
This also means that as the "hottest cryptocurrency" in 2024, Polymarket's total financing amount has reached 74 million US dollars. Combined with the previous decline in the cryptocurrency prediction market, this move can be called a "crypto miracle."
Among them, Vitalik's support for Polymarket is not only reflected in the investment of real money, but also in the many previous "support platforms" -
On July 2, Vitalik wrote: "Prediction markets and Community Notes are becoming the two flagship social cognitive technologies of the 2020s. The search for truth and democracy is based on open public participation rather than pre-selected elites. I want to see more of this technology." He then said that "the two are very complementary." This view was also endorsed by Musk.
At the end of July, Vitalik mentioned Polymarket again in his latest speech "The Next Decade of Ethereum", emphasizing: "In 2020, I paid $1,000 in transaction fees on Augur, and today the transaction cost on Polymarket is almost zero." He praised the latter's product.
This is not the first time that Vitalik has expressed his views on the prediction market track and products. As early as 2021, the second year after the election of the 46th President of the United States, Vitalik predicted that the prediction market will become an increasingly important Ethereum application.
It can be said that Vitalik’s insistence on “decentralization” and the game between culture and technology had already been predicted.
Polymarket X Platform Account Home Page
ENS: Vitalik’s most proud “non-financial application”
Previously, in the article "The Evolution of the Crypto Venture Capital Cycle (Part 1): Rebuilding a New World", we mentioned a series of "industry questions" raised by Vitalik in 2017. Compared with speculative financial applications, Vitalik pays more attention to many key issues including banking services, censorship-resistant commercial transactions, actual use case Dapps, actual interest rates, anti-inflation, and payment channels.
Compared with the speculative transactions that everyone in the cryptocurrency field is crazy about, he attaches more importance to the "practicality" of cryptocurrency, especially the Ethereum ecosystem. This is one of the reasons why "non-financial applications" such as ENS (Ethereum Domain Name Service) have been highly praised by Vitalik many times - his nickname on multiple social media platforms is vitalik.eth.
In addition to his own "widespread publicity" demonstrations, Vitalik also speaks out a lot.
On January 3rd, Vitalik said that “all L2s should run on (trustless, Merkle-proof-based) CCIP resolvers so that we can register, update, and read ENS subdomains directly on L2. ENS is important and it needs to be affordable for everyone.”
On May 21, Vitalik once again "strongly supported" ENS - in a discussion with others about sorters and intentions, he gave examples of his views on cross-L2 infrastructure and emphasized the three points of "key changes to token transfers, ENS, and smart contract wallets (individuals and organizations)". He mentioned that "we need an open decentralized protocol for quickly transferring assets from one L2 to another and integrating it into the default sending page of the wallet. Token transfers, ENS, and key changes to smart contract wallets are all easy to implement on L1, but difficult on L2. Light clients, basic reliability, and proof systems are also more secure/decentralized on L1, but far from enough on L2."
He then emphasized, “ENS is our most successful non-financial application, I don’t know why more people don’t care about it!”
It can be seen that Vitalik is very hurt by the "dust" of ENS. After all, most people only care about the price trend of ENS, not the actual use case of ENS.
It can be said that ENS embodies Vitalik’s expectations and hopes for “building an emerging Internet.”
ENS X Platform Account Home Page
Social Protocol: Lens and Farcaster are their favorites
In November 2022, after Musk launched the "blue tick restriction" after taking over Twitter, Vitalik posted, "I am eagerly trying Mastodon, Farcaster, Lens and other apps, and I will pay tribute to Lord Elon and pay him $8 a month... but only if these apps are available on non-iOS platforms. Let the best social win! There will be multiple winners!"
It can be seen that for a "network social giant", Vitalik was extremely dissatisfied with the platform changes brought about by Musk, so he tried niche social applications including Farcaster, Lens, Mammoth, etc.
In September 2023, Vitalik’s X account was hacked and a phishing link was posted to receive a free ConsenSys Proto Danksharding commemorative NFT, causing users to lose more than $690,000. Later, Vitalik stated on Farcaster that his X platform account had been SIM hijacked, probably because his mobile phone number was exposed when authenticating the blue V. He also said that he had uninstalled X and joined Farcaster, which can control account recovery through the Ethereum address.
In February of this year, in the comment section of DragonFly partner Haseeb’s tweet, Vitalik commented: “‘Bad GameFi is replacing fun with financial speculation. Blockchain games need to be as fun as games’ - I have said this many times. I believe that a similar situation exists in crypto social. Record a prediction: Farcaster and Lens will not be abandoned in 4 months or 1 year.”
In May, Vitalik once again expressed his optimism about Farcaster and Lens, saying, "Never forget the ultimate goal: to build a free, open, and trustworthy Internet. This cannot be achieved through theory and real-life role-playing alone. It requires the actual use of technology." In June, he responded to a tweet from Bloomberg podcast spokesperson Joe Weisenthal expressing disappointment in crypto culture, saying, "We are still here! And a lot of idealistic open Internet content has actually made great progress, such as Farcaster and Lens, etc."
There is no doubt that just as many people’s obsession is “betting on the next Ethereum”, “open Internet” is also one of Vitalik’s obsessions.
Summary: Ethereum’s original intention is social networking, transactions, and games
At the end of 2013, Vitalik mentioned in the Ethereum white paper: "I suggest designing a new Bitcoin. This new Bitcoin will be based on a general programming language and can be used to create a variety of applications, such as social, trading, games, etc." It can be said that he has always been a person who "combines knowledge and action", so in the more than ten years since the birth of Ethereum, the projects and products he supported and endorsed have always "stayed true to their original aspirations."
As Ethereum enters the “next decade”, products in these areas will continue to receive Vitalik’s close attention and become part of the “Ethereum legitimacy group.”
