"No Chinese": Arrogance and Prejudice at Montenegro's EDCON
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"No Chinese": Arrogance and Prejudice at Montenegro's EDCON
The Ethereum community needs to take more proactive actions to understand, pay attention to, and support projects and entrepreneurs who have a keen sense for application-layer development, regardless of where they come from.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthors: Charlie Chen, Lyv, Aki Network Research; Nova community from The Whale also contributed
From May 19 to May 23, 2023, a five-day Ethereum developer community conference concluded in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. Spanning from the Super Demo Preliminaries on the 19th to the Super Demo Finals on the 23rd, the event featured 48 demo presentations and 53 topic-sharing sessions. Meanwhile, outside the main venue, numerous DAOs and investors organized various technical talks and social gatherings.
Amid this high-intensity, densely packed exchange, we sensed an indescribable tension quietly building among participants. Attendees from different backgrounds gradually discovered significant ideological conflicts and divergences—particularly evident between Chinese-speaking practitioners and their Western counterparts. To some extent, this underlying tension or anxiety is closely tied to the conference’s content, organizational format, participant composition, and cultural contexts. Aki Network Research and our collaborators aim to unpack the origins of these attitudes of arrogance and bias.
Everyone Was Talking About Zuzalu
The core participants at this conference primarily included Vitalik Buterin and his close associates, the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum community members, developers from Zuzalu, and various digital nomads. They gathered at Zuzalu—an experimental pop-up city initiated by Vitalik and friends—located at the Sea Forest resort in Montenegro.
Zuzalu aims to foster co-creation and collective decision-making to address the future direction and challenges of the Web3 industry over the next decade. To support this vision, Vitalik personally funded $2 million to sponsor qualified organizations, projects, or developers to join Zuzalu, providing them with accommodations and essential logistical support. This diverse group emphasized not only foundational technologies but also key infrastructure areas such as account abstraction and user privacy—ensuring readiness for massive traffic and transaction volumes in the future while paving the way for standardized entry points.
Although Zuzalu, styled like a 1970s hippie social experiment, attracted considerable attention within the developer community, it also drew criticism regarding its centralized organization, nepotistic selection process, and perceived celebration of Silicon Valley elitism.
The Disconnected Chinese-Speaking Participants
Another prominent group consisted of Asian attendees actively seeking greater influence and value in global markets. These participants—especially representatives from Chinese projects—demonstrated strong insights into user growth and product experience, offering rich possibilities and imaginative narratives for blockchain applications.
However, due to differences between their innovative approaches and the mainstream ethos of the Ethereum community, they generally felt their perspectives were neither fully understood nor adequately recognized during the conference. This sentiment may have manifested as deep frustration and dissatisfaction, adding an intangible strain to the overall atmosphere.
"Big Fan" but "No Chinese"
This latent conflict did not ease with continued dialogue and instead reached a climax through an incident both accidental and inevitable. One anonymous attendee recounted being rejected when requesting a photo with Vitalik: “no Chinese, thank you, but sorry.” The interviewee added: “I told him I was a big fan wanting just a quick picture. My T-shirt was covered in project stickers—many Chinese-language projects previously approached Vitalik for photos to gain visibility and endorsement, so I understand his stance.”
This incident sparked controversy within Chinese-speaking communities, and the emotional residue has not dissipated even after the conference ended. On the contrary, it seems to have left a deeper impression, suggesting that while the event may be over, the real challenges are only beginning. It's clear that going forward, we won't just face surface-level issues—but rather invisible pressures, competition, and underlying tensions in the global market dynamics.
Conflict can be seen as a sharp clash between two distinct ideologies. Whether labeled as arrogance, centralization, short-termism, or frustration, these represent superficial collisions. Assessing, categorizing, and labeling these views is relatively straightforward. But truly understanding the roots of these dynamics and probing the deeper causes behind these surface phenomena is a complex and difficult task.
Therefore, the authors seek to interpret and make sense of this process. While our perspectives may be limited and potentially one-sided, we welcome all criticism, corrections, and feedback to help us achieve a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding.
Excessive Focus on ZK Infrastructure Projects
Ethereum’s development path continues to tackle fundamental challenges such as scalability, account abstraction, and user privacy.
These are critical issues concerning the stability of Ethereum’s foundational infrastructure and user experience. While long-term investments lay the groundwork for the next wave of innovation and prepare for broader adoption, they may fail to generate compelling new narratives in the short term. Ethereum’s prioritization appears increasingly driven by technological feasibility rather than existing user bases or application ecosystem potential—particularly evident in the heavy focus on zero-knowledge (zk) infrastructure.
Nonetheless, despite extensive work on底层 technology and infrastructure, there remains significant room for improvement in user experience and application-layer design. Entrepreneurs from Europe and the Middle East tend to overly emphasize infrastructure and B2B services, overlooking promising projects capable of driving new industry narratives. The Ethereum community should pay closer attention to and support initiatives focused on user experience and product design to better meet current and future user needs.
We believe that Web3, though full of potential, has moved beyond the stage where user growth can be assumed to happen organically. This point is likely obvious to Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs familiar with the brutal competition of the mobile internet era, but may take longer for Western founders to accept. New Web3 users require broader application scenarios to effectively utilize improved infrastructure—that is first-principles thinking.
Beware of New Centralization: Will the Dragon-Slayer Become the Dragon?
Venture capital in the West is increasingly pouring funds into foundational infrastructure projects, causing valuations to soar. However, many of these projects lack strong differentiation and rely heavily on anticipated airdrops to attract and retain users—a trend contributing to anxiety and tension during bear markets.
Treating new infrastructure projects as tools to lock liquidity might reflect path dependency—or perhaps simply necessity. In blockchain ecosystems, liquidity is paramount, and new infrastructure naturally attracts large inflows. Yet this strategy carries risks.
Firstly, it could stifle innovation. If liquidity concentrates in a few infrastructure projects, other innovative ventures may struggle to access sufficient capital. Additionally, this concentration may reduce competition and diversity across the ecosystem.
Secondly, locking liquidity can destabilize markets. Should major infrastructure projects encounter issues, widespread liquidity crises could ripple through the entire system.
Thus, while using infrastructure to absorb liquidity may yield short-term benefits, long-term health demands more sustainable approaches—such as encouraging competition and innovation, and establishing robust risk management frameworks.
Ethereum’s Layered, Infrastructure-First Approach
Key topics related to Ethereum’s own development at this EDCON—including rollup scaling, zkEVM roadmap, account abstraction, and user privacy—are familiar ground for most developers.
Still, it’s important to recognize that Ethereum has consistently advanced its core infrastructure in a deliberate, step-by-step manner—and so far, delivery has been solid: transitioning to PoS consensus years ago, establishing rollups as the primary scaling solution in recent years, and now pushing forward account abstraction and on-chain privacy since last year’s Bogotá summit.
These technical advancements have shaped the roles of various ecosystem participants: PoS transition affected miners, scaling solutions target developers, while today’s AA and privacy features directly serve end-users.
It would be inaccurate to say Ethereum neglects application-layer progress. On the contrary, it is methodically laying the foundation for the next paradigm-breaking project. In this process, centralized entities like the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik’s inner circle inevitably prioritize certain directions based on strategic considerations.
As Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated in his keynote, the three major technical challenges facing Ethereum are scalability, privacy, and user security. He noted: “Over the past decade, Ethereum focused on smart contract security. Over the next decade, we will shift focus to account security.”
Based on the session categories listed on Edcon.io’s official agenda, we can clearly see Ethereum’s current priorities. Logically, now is the time to aggressively advance account abstraction and user privacy—first ensuring the base layer can handle massive scale before refining user interfaces and setting unified standards.
Western Community’s Concerns About Ponzi Culture
On another front, overseas developer communities at this EDCON expressed heightened concern and vigilance toward Ponzi-like behaviors. In Asia-Pacific startup circles, FOMO and ponzi mechanics may—at least in early growth stages—reflect strong market execution capabilities. Outside this region, however, many observers only witness the price decline phase of such projects, overlooking the positive momentum generated during their initial rise from zero to prominence.
Certainly, the industry needs stronger consensus and community mechanisms to hold projects accountable, urging self-regulation and discipline. Investors must also improve their ability to distinguish trustworthy projects from risky ones.
Yet this is no easy task. The anonymity and cross-border nature of blockchain and crypto make regulation and tracking harder for project teams. We must confront this reality and take feasible measures to minimize such risks. As infrastructure matures and larger user flows emerge, the following countermeasures are expected to gradually improve:
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Enhance Industry Self-Regulation: Key players in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space should collectively build and maintain self-governance mechanisms—for example, establishing ethical guidelines, clarifying norms, publicly exposing rule-breakers on-chain, and incentivizing compliance.
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Improve Investor Education and Public Awareness: Educating the public and investors is crucial—helping them recognize red flags of scams like Ponzi schemes and enhancing vigilance against seemingly too-good-to-be-true investment opportunities.
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Strengthen Technical Oversight Tools: Leverage blockchain transparency by developing better analytical and monitoring tools to detect and prevent fraudulent activities.
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Reinforce Legal and Regulatory Frameworks: Despite the borderless nature of crypto, stronger laws can still deter and combat fraud. Governments should enhance legal oversight and cooperate internationally to fight cross-border scams.
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Promote Transparency and Accountability: Encourage projects to openly disclose operational details, team information, and financial status, while holding them responsible for their actions and impacts on investors and the community.
East Meets West: Toward More Effective Dialogue and Mutual Learning
Indeed, the Ethereum Foundation exhibited certain self-centered tendencies during the event, appearing less attuned to application-layer innovation.
As a result, Chinese and Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs may have felt their contributions and viewpoints were insufficiently acknowledged or understood. This highlights the need for the Ethereum community to embrace more inclusive attitudes, listen to diverse voices, and deepen support for user-centric applications to strengthen overall ecosystem health and vitality.
This issue also reminds us that the Ethereum community must take proactive steps to understand, engage with, and support entrepreneurs who possess sharp instincts for application-layer development—regardless of geography.
While Chinese projects often excel in user growth and product experience, their core narratives tend to lack strong philosophical grounding. Founders frequently imagine needs that exceed real-world use cases, reflecting a need for stronger international product positioning.
Thus, while this clash and tension may appear confrontational, it can also be viewed as a valuable opportunity for learning and growth. It provides a platform for exchanging different mindsets, cultures, and values—enabling all parties to re-examine their assumptions and broaden their perspectives.
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