"No Chinese": Arrogance and Prejudice in Montenegro EDCON

Written by: Charlie Chen, Lyv, Aki Network Research; the whaling community Nova also contributed

From May 19 to May 23, 2023, the five-day Ethereum 2023 Developer Community Conference concluded in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. Starting with the Super Demo Preliminaries on the first day, May 19, and ending with the Super Demo Finals on May 23, the conference featured 48 demo sessions and 53 topic discussions. Meanwhile, outside the main venue, many DAOs and investors organized various technical sharing and social activities.

In this high-intensity and high-density exchange and interaction, we sensed a subtle tension accumulating among the participants that was difficult to articulate. Attendees from different backgrounds seemed to gradually discover many conflicts in viewpoints and ideological differences, particularly the tension between practitioners from the Chinese-speaking world and their counterparts from Europe and America was especially pronounced. To some extent, the emergence of this tension or anxiety is closely related to the content performance, organizational format, and the composition and background of the participants at this conference. Aki Network Research and its partners will analyze the origins of these arrogance and prejudice for the readers.

Everyone is Talking About "Zuzalu"

The core participants of this conference mainly included Vitalik Buterin and his close team, the Ethereum Foundation, the Ethereum community, developers of Zuzalu, and various digital nomads. They gathered at Zuzalu, a pioneering social experiment in the form of a pop-up city community initiated by Vitalik and friends, located at the Sea Forest resort in Montenegro.

The purpose of Zuzalu is to communicate and make decisions in a co-creative and symbiotic manner to address the development direction and issues of the Web3 industry over the next decade. To this end, Vitalik personally funded $2 million to sponsor eligible organizations, projects, or developers to enter Zuzalu and provided them with necessary support such as hotel accommodations. This diverse participant mix not only emphasizes the importance of underlying technology but also highlights the focus on infrastructure aspects such as account abstraction and user privacy, ensuring that it can meet the demands of large-scale traffic and transactions in the future while paving the way for standardized entry points.

Although Zuzalu, as a social experiment with a distinct 1970s hippie style, has garnered significant attention within the developer community, it has also attracted criticism regarding its centralized organization, nepotism in selection, and the elitist lifestyle it showcases.

Out of Place Chinese-speaking Players

Another prominent group of participants came from Asia, actively seeking greater influence and value in the global market. This group, particularly representatives of Chinese projects, has a strong focus and insight into user growth and product experience, providing rich possibilities and imaginative space for the narrative of blockchain development at the application level.

However, possibly due to their innovative and practical directions differing from the mainstream ideas of the Ethereum community, they generally felt that their viewpoints and voices were not adequately understood and valued during the conference. This sentiment may manifest as a deep-seated dissatisfaction and frustration, adding an indescribable tension to the conference atmosphere.

"Big Fan" but "No Chinese"

This latent contradiction and conflict were not alleviated by the extension and exchange of the conference, and were pushed to a climax during an incidental yet inevitable event. The author interviewed an anonymous participant who stated that they were rejected while seeking a photo with Vitalik: "no Chinese, thank you, but sorry." The interviewee expressed, "At that time, I said I was a Big Fan and hoped to take a photo, and my T-Shirt was covered with project tags. Previously, many Chinese projects sought photos with Vitalik for project promotion, so I understand this attitude."

This incident sparked some controversy within the Chinese community, and the emotions involved did not seem to dissipate with the end of the conference. On the contrary, it seems to have left a deeper mark in the hearts of the attendees, as if telling us that although the conference has ended, the real problems and challenges have just begun. We can clearly feel that in the upcoming global market dynamics, we will face not only surface issues but also this invisible pressure, competition, and tension.

Conflict can be understood as a fierce clash between two different ideological concepts. Whether classified as arrogance, centralization, or short-sightedness and frustration, these are merely surface collisions. Evaluating, categorizing, and labeling these concepts is relatively simple. However, truly understanding the sources of these dynamics and exploring the deeper reasons behind these surface phenomena is a complex and challenging task.

Therefore, the author attempts to understand and interpret this process, although the viewpoints presented may be limited by personal perspectives and may be one-sided. Criticism, corrections, and feedback from all parties are very welcome to help the author gain a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding.

Overemphasis on ZK Infrastructure Projects

The development path of Ethereum has been striving to address some fundamental challenges, including scalability, account abstraction, and user privacy.

These are significant issues concerning the stability of Ethereum's underlying infrastructure and user experience. Although in the long term, this lays the groundwork for the next stage of innovation and prepares for a broader application and user influx, in the short term, these efforts may not create a distinct new narrative. In terms of attention to zk infrastructure projects, Ethereum's decisions seem to be driven more by technical possibilities rather than the potential of the existing user base and application ecosystem.

However, we cannot ignore that despite Ethereum's substantial work on underlying technology and infrastructure, there is still significant room for improvement in building better user experiences and application layers. Entrepreneurs in Europe and the Middle East are overly focused on infrastructure and B-end service construction, failing to see that the Ethereum community needs to pay attention to and support more projects that emphasize user experience and product design to better meet the needs of current and future users.

The author believes that Web3, as an emerging industry, although possessing enormous potential and growth space, has already passed the stage where it can be simply assumed that users will naturally grow. This argument may be very clear to entrepreneurs in the Asia-Pacific region who have witnessed the brutal competition of the mobile internet era, while it may take more time for European and American entrepreneurs to accept. New Web3 users need broader application scenarios to make better infrastructure useful; this is a first principle.

Beware of New Centralization: Will the Dragon Slayer Become the Dragon?

The investment in infrastructure projects by the European and American venture capital circles is indeed increasing, leading to soaring valuations of related projects. However, many of these projects have yet to articulate a compelling differentiation and can only rely on airdrop expectations to attract and retain users. This has created a tense and anxious atmosphere in the bear market.

Viewing new infrastructure projects as a means to lock in liquidity may be a path-dependent thought or a reluctant move. In the blockchain ecosystem, liquidity is key, and new infrastructure projects typically attract significant liquidity. However, this strategy may also raise some issues.

First, it may stifle innovation. If liquidity is primarily concentrated in certain infrastructure projects, other innovative projects may lack sufficient liquidity for development. Additionally, this strategy may make the ecosystem overly centralized, leading to a lack of competition and diversity.

Second, locking in liquidity may lead to market instability. If liquidity is heavily locked in certain infrastructure projects, any issues with these projects could trigger a liquidity crisis, affecting the entire market.

Therefore, while locking in liquidity through new infrastructure projects may have short-term effects, in the long term, we need to seek healthier and more sustainable ways to manage and increase liquidity, such as encouraging competition and innovation, and establishing robust risk management mechanisms.

Strong Infrastructure and Layered Development of Ethereum

The key topics related to Ethereum's own development discussed at this EDCON include Roll-up scalability, zkEVM roadmap, account abstraction, user privacy, etc., which are all familiar topics for developers.

But at the same time, we need to clarify that Ethereum has been progressively scheduling the promotion of key infrastructure, and so far, the delivery status has been good: starting from a few years ago with the layout to transition to the PoS consensus mechanism, to the past two years focusing on Roll-up as the core scalability solution, and then to the account abstraction that began to shine at last year's Bogotá conference.

Ethereum's technical progression has also influenced various participants in its ecosystem, such as the PoS transition covering the miner community, scalability solutions primarily targeting developers, while the current AA and on-chain privacy are directly serving ordinary users' infrastructure needs.

It can be said that Ethereum has never neglected the development at the application level. On the contrary, it is paving the way for the next project or paradigm that can break the old model in its own way. In this process, centralized organizations, such as the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik's inner circle, will inevitably have many considerations in prioritizing technological advancements and product iterations.

As Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out in his keynote speech, Ethereum faces three major technical challenges: scalability, privacy, and user security. He noted, "In the past decade, Ethereum's main focus has been on the security of smart contracts, while in the next decade, we will pay more attention to the security of accounts."

Based on the thematic categorization of the agenda on Edcon.io's official website, we can roughly understand the current directions and energy allocation that Ethereum is most focused on. Clearly, for Ethereum, now is the time to vigorously promote account abstraction and user privacy. This is logical— the industry needs to first ensure that the underlying infrastructure can handle massive traffic and transactions before optimizing the user interface and establishing unified standards.

Concerns and Vigilance of Overseas Communities Regarding Ponzi Culture

On the other hand, during this EDCON, the overseas developer community also expressed significant concerns and vigilance regarding Ponzi culture. Among Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs, FOMO and Ponzi should at least represent an important manifestation of market operation capabilities in the early stages of project growth; while outside the Asia-Pacific, most people seem to only see the process of a project's asset price declining from its peak, underestimating the positive impact of the earlier stage from 0 to 100.

Of course, the entire industry also needs better consensus and community mechanisms to urge project parties to strengthen self-regulation and self-discipline. At the same time, investors need to enhance their discernment abilities to better judge which projects are real and reliable and which may pose risks.

However, this process is not easy. The anonymity of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, along with their cross-border characteristics, makes regulation and tracking more difficult for project parties. We must face this reality and take measures to reduce such risks within the possible scope. It is foreseeable that in the future, as infrastructure improves and greater traffic flows in, the following response strategies will be gradually refined.

• Enhance industry self-regulation capabilities: Major participants in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry should work together to build and maintain a self-regulatory mechanism for the industry. For example, establish industry ethical standards, clarify industry norms, publicly expose rule violations on-chain, and encourage compliance.

• Improve investor education and public awareness: Educating the public and investors is crucial, helping them understand the typical characteristics of fraudulent behaviors like CX plans, enhancing their awareness of prevention, and enabling them to discern overly attractive investment opportunities.

• Strengthen technical regulatory measures: Utilize the transparency of blockchain to develop better analytical tools and regulatory technologies to help detect and prevent fraudulent activities.

• Strengthen laws and regulations: Although cryptocurrencies and blockchain have cross-border characteristics, strengthening laws and regulations can still prevent and combat fraudulent activities to some extent. Governments should enhance legal regulation of such fraudulent behaviors and cooperate with other countries to combat cross-border fraud.

• Encourage transparency and accountability: Encourage project parties to transparently display their operational methods, team members, financial situations, etc., while also requiring them to be accountable to investors and the community for the consequences of their actions.

East and West: How to Dialogue More Effectively and Learn from Each Other?

During the event, the Ethereum Foundation indeed revealed some self-centered attitudes, and their sensitivity to the development at the application level seemed insufficient.

Therefore, Chinese and Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs may feel that their viewpoints and contributions have not received enough attention and understanding in this process. These reflect the need for the Ethereum community to be more inclusive and understand diverse voices, requiring a deeper understanding and support for those truly user-oriented applications to enhance the health and prosperity of the entire ecosystem.

This issue also reminds us that the Ethereum community needs to take more proactive actions to understand, pay attention to, and support projects and entrepreneurs that have a keen sense of application development, regardless of where they come from.

While Chinese projects emphasize user growth and product experience, their core narratives at the abstract level often appear insufficiently strong and resolute, and the needs envisioned by founding teams often exceed considerations based on actual scenarios, highlighting the need for strengthening their product positioning in the international world.

Thus, this collision and tension, although seemingly a conflict, can also be viewed as a valuable opportunity for learning and growth. It provides a platform for exchanging and understanding different modes of thinking, cultures, and values, allowing all parties to re-examine their viewpoints and assumptions.