By Charlie Chen, Lyv @Aki Network Research, whaling community Nova also contributed
2023.5.19-5.23, the 5-day Ethereum 2023 developer community meeting came to an end in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. From the Super Demo Preliminaries on the first day on the 19th to the end of the Super Demo Finals on the 23rd, the meeting held 48 roadshows and shared 53 topics. At the same time, outside the main venue, many DAO and investors also organized various technology sharing and social activities.
In this high-intensity and high-density communication and interaction, we felt a kind of tension that is difficult to express quietly accumulated among the participants. Participants from different backgrounds seem to have gradually discovered many conflicts of views and differences in ideology, especially the tension between practitioners in the Chinese world and their European and American counterparts. To some extent, the generation of this tension or anxiety is closely related to the content, organization, composition and background of the meeting. Aki Network Research and partners will dissect the ins and outs of these pride and prejudice for readers.
Everyone's Talking About Zuzalu
The core participants of this conference mainly include Vitalik Buterin and his close team, the Ethereum Foundation, the Ethereum community, the developers of Zuzalu and various digital nomads. They gathered at Zuzalu, initiated by Vitalik and friends, a first-of-its-kind social experiment in the form of a pop-up urban community, located in the Sea Forest resort in Montenegro.
The purpose of Zuzalu is to communicate and make decisions in a co-creative and symbiotic manner to solve the development direction and problems of the Web3 industry in the next ten years. To this end, Vitalik personally invested 2 million US dollars to sponsor qualified organizations, projects or developers to enter Zuzalu, and provided them with necessary support such as hotel accommodation. This diverse combination of participants not only emphasizes the importance of the underlying technology, but also highlights the importance of infrastructure such as account abstraction and user privacy, so as to ensure that it can cope with large-scale traffic and transaction needs in the future, and also provides a standardized entrance. paved the way.
Although Zuzalu, as a social experiment in the style of hippies in the 1970s, has gained a lot of attention in the developer community, it has also attracted a lot of attention to its centralized form, nepotism in the selection model, and the elitist lifestyle of Silicon Valley. criticism.
Unaccustomed Chinese-speaking players
Another notable group of attendees were attendees from Asia, actively seeking greater influence and value in the global marketplace. This part of the participants, especially the representatives of the Chinese project, has a strong focus and insight on user growth and product experience. Their thinking and efforts provide rich possibilities and imaginations for the development narrative of the blockchain on the application side space.
However, perhaps due to some differences between their innovation and practice direction and the mainstream ideas of the Ethereum community, they generally felt that their views and voices were not fully understood and valued during the meeting. This emotion and feeling may manifest as a deep-seated dissatisfaction and frustration, adding an indefinable tension to the atmosphere of the meeting.
“Big Fan“ but”No Chinese“
This hidden contradiction and conflict was not alleviated by the extension and communication of the meeting, and was pushed to a climax in an accidental and inevitable event. The author interviewed an anonymous participant who said that he was rejected in the process of seeking a photo with Vitalik: "no Chinese, thank you, but sorry." The interviewee said: "At that time, I said that I was a Big Fan, I hope to seek photos, and the T-Shirt is full of project labels. Before that, many Chinese projects looked for Vitalik to take photos to endorse the projects, so I understand this attitude.”
The incident caused some controversy in the Chinese community, and the emotions did not seem to dissipate because of the end of the meeting. On the contrary, it seemed to leave a deeper mark on the minds of the participants, as if to tell us that although the meeting was over, the real problems and challenges had just begun. We can clearly feel that in the following global market dynamics, what we need to face will not only be superficial problems, but also this invisible pressure, competition and tension.
Conflict can be understood as a fierce confrontation between two different types of ideas. Whether it is categorized as hubris and centralization, or quick success and frustration, these are superficial collisions. Evaluating, categorizing, and labeling these concepts is relatively straightforward. But it is a complex and difficult task to truly understand the source of these dynamics and explore the deep reasons behind these superficial phenomena.
Therefore, the author tries to understand and interpret this process. Although the views put forward may be limited by personal perspectives and may be one-sided, criticism, correction and feedback from all parties are very welcome to help the author gain a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding.
Too much attention to ZK infrastructure projects
Ethereum's development path has been grappling with some fundamental challenges, including scaling, account abstraction, and user privacy.
These are major issues related to the stability of Ethereum's underlying infrastructure and user experience. While in the long run, this is paving the way for the next phase of innovation, ready for the arrival of a wider range of applications and users, it may be that in the short term, these efforts will not lead to a clear new story. In terms of the attention paid to zk infrastructure projects, Ethereum’s decision-making seems to be more driven by technical possibilities rather than the potential of the existing user base and application ecology.
However, what we cannot ignore is that although Ethereum has done a lot of work on the underlying technology and infrastructure, there is still a lot of room for improvement in building a better user experience and application level. Entrepreneurs in Europe and the Middle East pay too much attention to infrastructure and B-side service construction, and do not see projects that have the potential to promote new narratives in the industry. The Ethereum community needs to pay attention to and support more projects that focus on user experience and product design, so as to better meet the current needs. There are and future user needs.
The author believes that, as an emerging industry, although Web3 has huge potential and room for growth, it has passed the stage where it is easy to think that users will grow naturally and naturally. This argument may be very clear to Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs who have seen the brutal competition in the mobile Internet era, but it may take more time for European and American entrepreneurs to accept it. New Web3 users need a wider range of application scenarios to use better infrastructure. This is the first principle.
Be wary of the new centralization, will the dragon-slaying boy also become a dragon?
European and American venture capital circles have indeed invested more and more in infrastructure projects, which has caused the valuation of related projects to soar. However, many of these projects have not been able to speak to strong differentiation and can only rely on airdrop expectations to attract and retain users. This creates an air of tension and anxiety in a bear market.
Viewing new infrastructure projects as a means of locking in liquidity may be path-dependent thinking, and it can also be said to be a helpless move. In the blockchain ecosystem, liquidity is key, and new infrastructure projects often attract a lot of liquidity. However, this strategy can also cause some problems.
First, it may stifle innovation. If liquidity is mainly concentrated in some infrastructure projects, other innovative projects may lack sufficient liquidity to develop. Additionally, this strategy can also make the ecosystem too centralized, resulting in a lack of competition and diversity.
Second, locking up liquidity may lead to market instability. If a large amount of liquidity is locked in some infrastructure projects, once problems occur in these projects, it may trigger a liquidity crisis and affect the entire market.
Therefore, while locking in liquidity through new infrastructure projects may work in the short term, in the long run we need to find healthier and sustainable ways to manage and increase liquidity, for example by encouraging competition and innovation, And by establishing robust risk management mechanisms.
Great infrastructure, layer-by-layer Ethereum
The key topics related to the development of Ethereum itself in this EDCON, including Roll-up expansion, zkEVM roadmap, account abstraction, user privacy, etc., are commonplace for developers.
But at the same time, we need to be clear that in the process of promoting key infrastructure construction, Ethereum has been progressively scheduled layer by layer, and the delivery status has been good so far: from the layout and transformation of the PoS consensus mechanism a few years ago, to the recent Two years to set the tone of the Roll-up-centered expansion plan, and then last year's Bogota conference began to show its sharpness in account abstraction and so on.
The technological progress of Ethereum has also affected various participants in its ecology. For example, the PoS transformation covers the miner group, and the expansion plan is mainly for developers. The current AA and on-chain privacy are infrastructure constructions that directly serve ordinary users.
It can be said that Ethereum has never ignored the development of the application side. Instead, in its own way, it is paving the way for the next project or paradigm that breaks the old mold. In this process, centralized organizations, such as the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik's small circle, will inevitably have a lot of considerations in terms of prioritization in technological progress and product iteration.
As Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, proposed three major technical challenges facing Ethereum in his keynote speech: scalability, privacy, and user security. He pointed out, "In the past ten years, the main focus of Ethereum has been on the security of smart contracts, and in the next ten years, we will pay more attention to the security of accounts."
According to the theme classification of the Edcon.io official website agenda topics, we can roughly understand the direction and energy allocation that Ethereum is currently most concerned about. Clearly, now is the time for Ethereum to make a big push towards account abstraction and user privacy. This is logical - the industry needs to first ensure that the bottom layer can carry huge traffic and a huge amount of transactions, and then optimize the user interface and formulate a unified standard.
Overseas communities are concerned and alert to Ponzi culture
On the other hand, in this EDCON China Overseas developer community also expressed their vigilance and concerns about the Ponzi culture. Among Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs, fomo and ponzi should at least be an important reflection of market operation capabilities in the early stage of project growth; while outside Asia-Pacific, most people seem to only see the process of a project’s asset price falling from the highest point, and underestimate the first half. Segment positive effects from 0 to 100.
Of course, the entire industry also needs better consensus and community mechanisms to beat project parties and require them to strengthen self-regulation and self-discipline. At the same time, investors also need to improve their identification ability to better judge which projects are authentic and reliable, and which projects may be risky.
However, the process is not easy. Due to the anonymity and cross-border nature of blockchain and cryptocurrency, this makes supervision and tracking more difficult for project parties. We must face this reality and take steps to reduce this risk to the extent possible. It is foreseeable that in the future, with the improvement of infrastructure and the influx of greater traffic, the following coping strategies will be gradually improved.
Improve industry self-regulation capabilities: All major players in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries should work together to build and maintain a self-regulatory mechanism for the industry. For example, establish an industry code of ethics, clarify industry norms, publicly expose behaviors that violate the rules on the chain, and encourage everyone to abide by the regulations.
Improving investor education and public awareness: Educating the public and investors is critical to understand the typical characteristics of fraudulent practices such as CX schemes, raise their awareness of prevention, and be able to identify those that seem too good Investment Opportunities.
Strengthen technical supervision methods: use the transparency of blockchain to develop better analysis tools and supervision technology to help detect and prevent fraud.
Strengthen laws and regulations: Although cryptocurrencies and blockchains have cross-border characteristics, the strengthening of laws and regulations can still prevent and combat fraud to a certain extent. Governments of all countries should strengthen legal supervision of such fraudulent activities and cooperate with other countries to jointly combat transnational fraudulent activities.
Encourage transparency and sense of responsibility: Encourage project parties to openly and transparently display information such as the operation of their projects, team members, and financial conditions. At the same time, project parties are also required to be responsible to investors and the community, and responsible for the consequences of their actions.
East and West: How to have a more effective dialogue and learn from each other's strengths?
During the hosting process, the Ethereum Foundation did show some self-centered attitudes, and their sensitivity to the development of the application side seems to be insufficient.
Therefore, Chinese and Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs may feel that their views and contributions have not been valued and understood enough during this process. These all reflect that the Ethereum community needs to be more inclusive and understand diverse voices, and needs to have a deeper understanding and support for those real user-oriented applications, so as to improve the health and prosperity of the entire ecosystem.
This problem also reminds us that the Ethereum community needs to take more active actions to understand, pay attention to and support those projects and entrepreneurs who have a keen sense of application-side development, no matter where they come from.
Although the Chinese project attaches great importance to user growth and product experience, its core narrative on the abstract level is usually not strong enough, and the needs imagined by the founding team often exceed the thinking based on actual scenarios, which to a certain extent highlights their interest in international The world's product positioning needs to be strengthened.
So this collision and tension, while it may seem conflicting, can also be seen as a valuable learning and growth opportunity. This provides a platform for exchange and understanding between different mindsets, cultures and values, giving all parties an opportunity to re-examine their views and assumptions.
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The content is for reference only, not a solicitation or offer. No investment, tax, or legal advice provided. See Disclaimer for more risks disclosure.
"No Chinese": Pride and Prejudice at EDCON Montenegro
By Charlie Chen, Lyv @Aki Network Research, whaling community Nova also contributed
2023.5.19-5.23, the 5-day Ethereum 2023 developer community meeting came to an end in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. From the Super Demo Preliminaries on the first day on the 19th to the end of the Super Demo Finals on the 23rd, the meeting held 48 roadshows and shared 53 topics. At the same time, outside the main venue, many DAO and investors also organized various technology sharing and social activities.
In this high-intensity and high-density communication and interaction, we felt a kind of tension that is difficult to express quietly accumulated among the participants. Participants from different backgrounds seem to have gradually discovered many conflicts of views and differences in ideology, especially the tension between practitioners in the Chinese world and their European and American counterparts. To some extent, the generation of this tension or anxiety is closely related to the content, organization, composition and background of the meeting. Aki Network Research and partners will dissect the ins and outs of these pride and prejudice for readers.
Everyone's Talking About Zuzalu
The core participants of this conference mainly include Vitalik Buterin and his close team, the Ethereum Foundation, the Ethereum community, the developers of Zuzalu and various digital nomads. They gathered at Zuzalu, initiated by Vitalik and friends, a first-of-its-kind social experiment in the form of a pop-up urban community, located in the Sea Forest resort in Montenegro.
The purpose of Zuzalu is to communicate and make decisions in a co-creative and symbiotic manner to solve the development direction and problems of the Web3 industry in the next ten years. To this end, Vitalik personally invested 2 million US dollars to sponsor qualified organizations, projects or developers to enter Zuzalu, and provided them with necessary support such as hotel accommodation. This diverse combination of participants not only emphasizes the importance of the underlying technology, but also highlights the importance of infrastructure such as account abstraction and user privacy, so as to ensure that it can cope with large-scale traffic and transaction needs in the future, and also provides a standardized entrance. paved the way.
Although Zuzalu, as a social experiment in the style of hippies in the 1970s, has gained a lot of attention in the developer community, it has also attracted a lot of attention to its centralized form, nepotism in the selection model, and the elitist lifestyle of Silicon Valley. criticism.
Unaccustomed Chinese-speaking players
Another notable group of attendees were attendees from Asia, actively seeking greater influence and value in the global marketplace. This part of the participants, especially the representatives of the Chinese project, has a strong focus and insight on user growth and product experience. Their thinking and efforts provide rich possibilities and imaginations for the development narrative of the blockchain on the application side space.
However, perhaps due to some differences between their innovation and practice direction and the mainstream ideas of the Ethereum community, they generally felt that their views and voices were not fully understood and valued during the meeting. This emotion and feeling may manifest as a deep-seated dissatisfaction and frustration, adding an indefinable tension to the atmosphere of the meeting.
“Big Fan“ but”No Chinese“
This hidden contradiction and conflict was not alleviated by the extension and communication of the meeting, and was pushed to a climax in an accidental and inevitable event. The author interviewed an anonymous participant who said that he was rejected in the process of seeking a photo with Vitalik: "no Chinese, thank you, but sorry." The interviewee said: "At that time, I said that I was a Big Fan, I hope to seek photos, and the T-Shirt is full of project labels. Before that, many Chinese projects looked for Vitalik to take photos to endorse the projects, so I understand this attitude.”
The incident caused some controversy in the Chinese community, and the emotions did not seem to dissipate because of the end of the meeting. On the contrary, it seemed to leave a deeper mark on the minds of the participants, as if to tell us that although the meeting was over, the real problems and challenges had just begun. We can clearly feel that in the following global market dynamics, what we need to face will not only be superficial problems, but also this invisible pressure, competition and tension.
Conflict can be understood as a fierce confrontation between two different types of ideas. Whether it is categorized as hubris and centralization, or quick success and frustration, these are superficial collisions. Evaluating, categorizing, and labeling these concepts is relatively straightforward. But it is a complex and difficult task to truly understand the source of these dynamics and explore the deep reasons behind these superficial phenomena.
Therefore, the author tries to understand and interpret this process. Although the views put forward may be limited by personal perspectives and may be one-sided, criticism, correction and feedback from all parties are very welcome to help the author gain a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding.
Too much attention to ZK infrastructure projects
Ethereum's development path has been grappling with some fundamental challenges, including scaling, account abstraction, and user privacy.
These are major issues related to the stability of Ethereum's underlying infrastructure and user experience. While in the long run, this is paving the way for the next phase of innovation, ready for the arrival of a wider range of applications and users, it may be that in the short term, these efforts will not lead to a clear new story. In terms of the attention paid to zk infrastructure projects, Ethereum’s decision-making seems to be more driven by technical possibilities rather than the potential of the existing user base and application ecology.
However, what we cannot ignore is that although Ethereum has done a lot of work on the underlying technology and infrastructure, there is still a lot of room for improvement in building a better user experience and application level. Entrepreneurs in Europe and the Middle East pay too much attention to infrastructure and B-side service construction, and do not see projects that have the potential to promote new narratives in the industry. The Ethereum community needs to pay attention to and support more projects that focus on user experience and product design, so as to better meet the current needs. There are and future user needs.
The author believes that, as an emerging industry, although Web3 has huge potential and room for growth, it has passed the stage where it is easy to think that users will grow naturally and naturally. This argument may be very clear to Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs who have seen the brutal competition in the mobile Internet era, but it may take more time for European and American entrepreneurs to accept it. New Web3 users need a wider range of application scenarios to use better infrastructure. This is the first principle.
Be wary of the new centralization, will the dragon-slaying boy also become a dragon?
European and American venture capital circles have indeed invested more and more in infrastructure projects, which has caused the valuation of related projects to soar. However, many of these projects have not been able to speak to strong differentiation and can only rely on airdrop expectations to attract and retain users. This creates an air of tension and anxiety in a bear market.
Viewing new infrastructure projects as a means of locking in liquidity may be path-dependent thinking, and it can also be said to be a helpless move. In the blockchain ecosystem, liquidity is key, and new infrastructure projects often attract a lot of liquidity. However, this strategy can also cause some problems.
First, it may stifle innovation. If liquidity is mainly concentrated in some infrastructure projects, other innovative projects may lack sufficient liquidity to develop. Additionally, this strategy can also make the ecosystem too centralized, resulting in a lack of competition and diversity.
Second, locking up liquidity may lead to market instability. If a large amount of liquidity is locked in some infrastructure projects, once problems occur in these projects, it may trigger a liquidity crisis and affect the entire market.
Therefore, while locking in liquidity through new infrastructure projects may work in the short term, in the long run we need to find healthier and sustainable ways to manage and increase liquidity, for example by encouraging competition and innovation, And by establishing robust risk management mechanisms.
Great infrastructure, layer-by-layer Ethereum
The key topics related to the development of Ethereum itself in this EDCON, including Roll-up expansion, zkEVM roadmap, account abstraction, user privacy, etc., are commonplace for developers.
But at the same time, we need to be clear that in the process of promoting key infrastructure construction, Ethereum has been progressively scheduled layer by layer, and the delivery status has been good so far: from the layout and transformation of the PoS consensus mechanism a few years ago, to the recent Two years to set the tone of the Roll-up-centered expansion plan, and then last year's Bogota conference began to show its sharpness in account abstraction and so on.
The technological progress of Ethereum has also affected various participants in its ecology. For example, the PoS transformation covers the miner group, and the expansion plan is mainly for developers. The current AA and on-chain privacy are infrastructure constructions that directly serve ordinary users.
It can be said that Ethereum has never ignored the development of the application side. Instead, in its own way, it is paving the way for the next project or paradigm that breaks the old mold. In this process, centralized organizations, such as the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik's small circle, will inevitably have a lot of considerations in terms of prioritization in technological progress and product iteration.
As Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, proposed three major technical challenges facing Ethereum in his keynote speech: scalability, privacy, and user security. He pointed out, "In the past ten years, the main focus of Ethereum has been on the security of smart contracts, and in the next ten years, we will pay more attention to the security of accounts."
According to the theme classification of the Edcon.io official website agenda topics, we can roughly understand the direction and energy allocation that Ethereum is currently most concerned about. Clearly, now is the time for Ethereum to make a big push towards account abstraction and user privacy. This is logical - the industry needs to first ensure that the bottom layer can carry huge traffic and a huge amount of transactions, and then optimize the user interface and formulate a unified standard.
Overseas communities are concerned and alert to Ponzi culture
On the other hand, in this EDCON China Overseas developer community also expressed their vigilance and concerns about the Ponzi culture. Among Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs, fomo and ponzi should at least be an important reflection of market operation capabilities in the early stage of project growth; while outside Asia-Pacific, most people seem to only see the process of a project’s asset price falling from the highest point, and underestimate the first half. Segment positive effects from 0 to 100.
Of course, the entire industry also needs better consensus and community mechanisms to beat project parties and require them to strengthen self-regulation and self-discipline. At the same time, investors also need to improve their identification ability to better judge which projects are authentic and reliable, and which projects may be risky.
However, the process is not easy. Due to the anonymity and cross-border nature of blockchain and cryptocurrency, this makes supervision and tracking more difficult for project parties. We must face this reality and take steps to reduce this risk to the extent possible. It is foreseeable that in the future, with the improvement of infrastructure and the influx of greater traffic, the following coping strategies will be gradually improved.
East and West: How to have a more effective dialogue and learn from each other's strengths?
During the hosting process, the Ethereum Foundation did show some self-centered attitudes, and their sensitivity to the development of the application side seems to be insufficient.
Therefore, Chinese and Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs may feel that their views and contributions have not been valued and understood enough during this process. These all reflect that the Ethereum community needs to be more inclusive and understand diverse voices, and needs to have a deeper understanding and support for those real user-oriented applications, so as to improve the health and prosperity of the entire ecosystem.
This problem also reminds us that the Ethereum community needs to take more active actions to understand, pay attention to and support those projects and entrepreneurs who have a keen sense of application-side development, no matter where they come from.
Although the Chinese project attaches great importance to user growth and product experience, its core narrative on the abstract level is usually not strong enough, and the needs imagined by the founding team often exceed the thinking based on actual scenarios, which to a certain extent highlights their interest in international The world's product positioning needs to be strengthened.
So this collision and tension, while it may seem conflicting, can also be seen as a valuable learning and growth opportunity. This provides a platform for exchange and understanding between different mindsets, cultures and values, giving all parties an opportunity to re-examine their views and assumptions.