Vitalik's new article: It's time for the entire Ethereum ecosystem to "align"
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Vitalik's new article: It's time for the entire Ethereum ecosystem to "align"
Currently, Ethereum's main challenge is ensuring all projects work together to build a single Ethereum ecosystem, rather than 138 incompatible territories.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Vitalik Buterin
Translation: Scof, ChainCatcher
In the Ethereum ecosystem, alignment is one of the most important governance challenges—or more precisely, integrating decentralization with cooperation. The strength of this ecosystem lies in its wide range of individuals and organizations—client teams, researchers, Layer 2 teams, application developers, local community groups—all working toward their own visions of what Ethereum could become. The main challenge is ensuring that all these efforts collectively build one cohesive Ethereum ecosystem, rather than 138 incompatible fiefdoms.
To address this challenge, many in the Ethereum ecosystem have proposed the concept of "Ethereum alignment." This might include value alignment (e.g., open source, minimizing centralization, supporting public goods), technical alignment (e.g., adhering to ecosystem-wide standards), and economic alignment (e.g., using ETH as a token where possible). However, historically this concept has been poorly defined, creating risks of social-layer capture: if alignment means having the right friends, then the idea of "alignment" fails.
To solve this, I believe we should make the concept of alignment clearer by breaking it down into specific attributes that can be measured through concrete metrics. Everyone’s list will differ, and metrics will inevitably evolve over time. Nevertheless, I think we already have some solid starting points.
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Open Source – This is valuable for two reasons: (i) code can be audited for security, and more importantly, (ii) it reduces the risk of proprietary lock-in and allows permissionless improvements by third parties. Not every part of every application needs to be fully open source, but core infrastructure components relied upon by the ecosystem absolutely should be. The gold standard here is the FSF Free Software Definition and the OSI Open Source Definition.
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Open Standards – Strive for interoperability with the Ethereum ecosystem and build on open standards, whether existing (e.g., ERC-20, ERC-1271...) or under development (e.g., account abstraction, cross-L2 transfers, L1/L2 light client proofs, upcoming address format standards). If you want to introduce a new feature that current standards don't support well, collaborate with others to write a new ERC. Applications and wallets could be rated based on how many ERCs they support.
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Decentralization and Security – Avoid trust assumptions, minimize censorship vulnerabilities, and reduce reliance on centralized infrastructure. Natural metrics include: (i) The walkaway test: If your team and servers disappeared tomorrow, would your application still be usable? And (ii) The insider attack test: If your team itself tried to attack the system, how much damage could they cause? A notable formalization of this is the L2beat Rollup Stages framework.
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Positive-Sumness:
- Toward Ethereum: A project's success should benefit the broader Ethereum community—including ETH holders and users—even those outside the project’s immediate ecosystem. Concrete examples include using ETH as the native token (thus contributing to its network effects), contributing to open-source technologies, and committing to donate a portion of tokens or revenue to public goods within the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Toward the Wider World: Ethereum aims to make the world freer and more open, enabling new forms of ownership and collaboration, and positively contributing to humanity’s major challenges. Does your project do this? Examples include applications that deliver sustainable value to broader audiences (e.g., financial inclusion), donating a share to public goods beyond Ethereum, and building technologies with utility beyond crypto (e.g., funding mechanisms, general computer security) that are actually used in those contexts.
Map of Ethereum nodes, source: ethernodes.org
Clearly, the above criteria won’t apply uniformly to every project. Metrics will vary significantly depending on the type of project—Layer 2s, wallets, decentralized social media apps, etc. Priorities may also shift over time: two years ago, it was acceptable for rollups to use “training wheels” due to being in an early stage; today, we need to reach at least Stage One as quickly as possible. Currently, the clearest positive-sum metric is a commitment to donate a portion of tokens, which an increasing number of projects are adopting. In the future, we can also develop clearer metrics for other aspects of positive-sumness.
My ideal goal is to see more entities like L2beat emerge, tracking how well various projects meet the above standards—and others proposed by the community. Projects shouldn’t compete to make the right friends, but rather to align as strongly as possible according to clear and understandable criteria. The Ethereum Foundation should maintain some distance here: we fund L2beat, but we shouldn’t *be* L2beat. Creating the next L2beat should itself be a permissionless process.
This would also provide a clearer path for the Ethereum Foundation and other organizations (and individuals) who wish to support and engage with the ecosystem while maintaining neutrality—helping them decide which projects to support and use. Each organization and individual can use their own judgment to determine which standards matter most to them, and partly base their choices on how well projects align with those standards. This makes it easier for the Ethereum Foundation—and everyone else—to become part of the incentive structure encouraging greater alignment.
Meritocracy can only be achieved once “merit” is clearly defined; otherwise, you end up with a (possibly exclusive and zero-sum) social game. The best response to concerns about “who watches the watchers” is not to place all hopes on ensuring every influential person is an angel, but instead to rely on proven techniques like decentralization. Dashboard organizations like L2beat, block explorers, and other ecosystem monitors are excellent examples of this principle already at work in today’s Ethereum ecosystem. If we can do more to clarify the different dimensions of alignment—without concentrating authority in any single “watcher”—we can make the concept more effective, fair, and inclusive, just as the Ethereum ecosystem strives to be.
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