What does Buterin think of the future ecosystem of Ethereum?

In the Ethereum ecosystem, balance is a paramount governance challenge—or, more accurately, integrating decentralization and cooperation.

The advantage of this ecosystem is that there is a wide range of individuals and organizations – client teams, researchers, layer 2 teams, application developers, local community groups – all working towards their own vision of what Ethereum could be. Vision effort.

The main challenge is ensuring that all projects work together to build one Ethereum ecosystem, rather than 138 incompatible fiefdoms.

In order to solve this challenge, many people in the Ethereum ecosystem have proposed the concept of "Ethereum consistency". This might include values ​​alignment (e.g., open source, minimal centralization, support for public goods), technology alignment (e.g., working with ecosystem-wide standards), and economic alignment (e.g., using ETH where possible as tokens).

However, the concept has historically been poorly defined, which creates the risk of being controlled at the social level: if consistency means having the right friends, then "consistency" as a concept fails.

To solve this problem, I think we should make the concept of consistency clearer and break it down into specific attributes that can be expressed through specific metrics.

Everyone’s list will be different, and metrics will inevitably change over time. However, I think we have some solid starting points.

• Open Source: This is valuable for two reasons:
  (i) The code can be inspected for security and more importantly (ii) the risk of proprietary lock-in is reduced and allows third parties to make improvements without permission. Not every part of every application needs to be fully open source, but the core infrastructure components that the ecosystem relies on absolutely should be. The gold standards here are the FSF Free Software Definition and the OSI Open Source Definition.

• Open Standards: Work towards interoperability with the Ethereum ecosystem and build on open standards, whether already existing (e.g. ERC-20, ERC-1271...) or under development (e.g. Account abstraction, cross-L2 transfers, L1 and L2 light client attestation, upcoming address format standards). If you want to introduce a new feature that's not well served by the existing standard, work 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: Avoid points of trust, minimize censorship vulnerabilities, and minimize reliance on centralized infrastructure. The natural metrics are (i) The walkaway test: if your team and servers disappeared tomorrow, would your application still be usable, and (ii) The internal attack test: how much would be broken if your team itself tried to attack the system , how much damage can you cause? An important formalization is the L2beat aggregation stage.

• Positive sum: 1) Ethereum-oriented - 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 (thus contributing to its network effect), contributions to open source technology, and committing to donating a percentage of tokens or revenue to public goods of the Ethereum ecosystem. 2) Facing the wider world - Ethereum aims to make the world a freer and more open place, enable new forms of ownership and cooperation, and make positive contributions to the major challenges facing humanity. Did your project do it? Examples include applications that bring sustainable value to a wider audience (e.g., financial inclusion), donating a percentage to public goods beyond Ethereum, and building technology with utility beyond cryptocurrencies (e.g., financing mechanisms , general computer security), these techniques are actually used in these environments.

Ethereum node map ethernodes.org

Obviously, the above criteria will not apply to every project.

For layer 2 networks (L2s), wallets, decentralized social media applications, etc., the applicable metrics will be very different. Different metrics may also change in priority: two years ago, it was acceptable for Rollup to use "training wheels" because it was still in the "early stages"; today, we need to reach at least stage one as quickly as possible.

Today, the most obvious positive-sum indicator is a pledge to donate a certain percentage of tokens, and more and more projects are doing this; in the future, we may also find indicators that make other aspects of positive-sumness clear.

My ideal goal would be to see more entities like L2beat emerge to track how well individual projects are doing in meeting the above criteria, as well as those proposed by other communities.

Projects shouldn’t be competing to make the right friends, but they should be competing to be as consistent as possible based on clear and understandable criteria.

The Ethereum Foundation should keep its distance here: we fund L2beat, but we shouldn’t be L2beat.

Creating the next L2beat is itself a permissionless process.

This will also provide a clearer path for the Ethereum Foundation and other organizations (and individuals) who want to support and participate in the ecosystem while remaining neutral to decide which projects to support and use.

Each organization and individual can use their own judgment to determine which criteria they are most concerned about and select projects based in part on which projects best meet those criteria.

This makes it easier for the Ethereum Foundation and everyone else to be part of the incentives for projects to be more aligned.

Meritocracy can only be achieved if "merit" is clearly defined; otherwise, you have a (possibly exclusive and zero-sum) social game.

The best solution to the worry about "who watches the watchdogs" is not to pin all hopes on attempts to ensure that all influential people are angels, but through tried and tested techniques like decentralization.

“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 could do more to make the different aspects of consistency clearer while not focusing on a single "oversight", we could make the concept more effective, as well as fair and inclusive, much like the Ethereum ecosystem as pursued.

This article is reproduced in cooperation with: Shenchao

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