A comprehensive review of the projects and tracks that Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin often "likes"

Author: Terry, Plain Language Blockchain

As one of the fastest-changing fields of influence, for ordinary retail investors deep in the Web3 world, whether they can pay attention to the product promotion tweets of various Alpha bloggers and KOLs in a timely manner has almost become a necessary skill for tracking the code of wealth.

So who is the most influential "product promotion" king in the current crypto world?

Although the following KOL product promotion effect chart may not be rigorous, it is accurate to put Vitalik Buterin in a unique position - as the absolute decision-maker of the pan-Ethereum ecosystem, although Vitalik rarely "promotes" directly, every "open card" and "secret milk" words and deeds will have a great driving effect on the market.

The recent surge in ENS due to Vitalik's call is a typical example. Therefore, this article aims to review the development and current status of projects/technical directions that Vitalik has "promoted" in history, and try to summarize the reasons behind them and how they have influenced and shaped the Ethereum we see today.

01 Open "preference" for ENS

It is no exaggeration to say that Vitalik "preferences" ENS.

He once publicly stated in an interview: "The Ethereum domain name service ENS is the most successful non-financial Ethereum application to date."

As we all know, the full name of ENS launched in 2017 is Ethereum Name Service is a distributed domain name service based on Ethereum. Through a unique bidding mechanism, any user can register one (or more) Ethereum domain names ending with ".eth" for their Ethereum addresses through a bidding process.

In short, ENS can map a person's long and difficult-to-remember "Ethereum address starting with 0x" to a custom short address, such as satoshi.eth, vitalik.eth, etc.. In this way, in a wallet that supports ENS, users no longer have to copy and paste long addresses, and can directly use ENS domain names to bind various cryptocurrency addresses and receive cryptocurrency payments.

Vitalik's Twitter account nickname has always been "vitalik.eth", which is equivalent to a long-term free advertisement for ENS, and also indirectly shows his support for ENS.

Since the first half of this year, Vitalik has directly participated in the promotion of ENS on several occasions, which has had a strong and visible impact on the price trend of ENS in the secondary market:

First, on January 3, Vitalik forwarded ENS's layer2 data parsing solution and posted that "all L2s should run on the CCIP parser so that we can register, update and read ENS subdomains directly on L2. ENS is very important and it needs to be affordable." Subsequently, ENS rose by more than 30% in 5 minutes, breaking through 12 USDT.

And on May 21, Vitalik and ENS once again staged a rather dramatic "support" drama - the reason was that Vitalik, in his discussion with others about the sorter & intention, gave an example of his views on cross-L2 standards/infrastructure, in which he emphasized the three points of "key changes in token transfer, ENS, and smart contract wallets (individuals and organizations)":

We need an open decentralized protocol for quickly transferring assets from one L2 to another L2 and integrating it into the default sending page of the wallet. Token transfer, ENS, and key changes in smart contract wallets are all easy to implement on L1, but difficult on L2. Light clients, basic reliability, and proof systems are also more secure/decentralized on L1, but far from enough on L2.

In general, since January 3, ENS has risen from $8 to a maximum of $30, an increase of nearly 300%.

02 What else did Vitalik "promote"?

In addition to ENS, Vitalik has also "promoted" a long list of projects/technical directions in history.

• Plasma

The first is naturally Plasma, which was once Vitalik's most respected Ethereum expansion solution. Now few people mention it, and even most new users have never heard of it.

In August 2017, Vitalik and Joseph Poon jointly released the original idea of ​​Plasma - an off-chain expansion plan, which essentially separated data and calculations (except deposits, withdrawals and Merkle roots) from the Ethereum main chain and put them off-chain for execution.At the same time, some key operating status data is regularly stored on the main chain to ensure the ultimate security with the help of the Ethereum main chain.

However, since Plasma cannot solve the problem of data retention and is not conducive to migrating contract status to L1, it was eventually replaced by a new Ethereum expansion route represented by Rollup.Now, the numerous Rollups have almost become the only mainstream option for Ethereum expansion.

However, it is worth noting that since Rollup is extremely dependent on the data availability on the main chain, and Plasma completely bypasses the data availability issue and greatly reduces transaction fees, the popularity has begun to recover again. At the end of last year, Vitalik Buterin published articles such as "Exit games for EVM validiums: the return of Plasma", viewing Plasma as a way to improve chain scalability using validity proofs such as zkSync and StarkNet.

This also makes everyone begin to re-examine Plasma's ability to minimize data availability limitations. It is expected that Plasma may play an important role in improving the performance of the Ethereum network in the future.

• RAI

In the field of stablecoins, Vitalik has published a special article to explain his views on the design of stablecoins, and believes that they can basically be divided into three different categories: centralized stablecoins, stablecoins backed by real-world assets governed by DAOs, and stablecoins backed by cryptocurrencies with minimal governance.

The first two are represented by USDT/USDC and DAI, respectively, while for the third category, he specifically introduced the model of RAI in detail, believing that RAI avoids all connections with non-cryptocurrency financial systems, making it more difficult to attack.

After that, Vitalik also expressed his belief in the rise of RAI when participating in public events that he believed that the rise of RAI could solve the problem of Lido dominating the LSD ecosystem, and believed that "RAI's radical governance may not need to go all the way. If the RAI community adopts more active governance to support staking ETH and intends to only accept non-dominant forms of staking ETH, that would be enough."

As of the time of posting, on-chain data shows that the total supply of RAI is only 1.65 million, and its share in stablecoins is almost negligible.

• SIWE, POAP, SBT

How do you prove who you are in the Web3 world?

Vitalik once wrote that ENS and other tools are helpful in building an ecosystem around identity because "blockchains are valuable for identity applications because they are independent of institutions." In addition to ENS, SIWE, POAP, and SBT are also regarded by Vitalik as key components for building an on-chain identity system:

The Sign In With Ethereum (SIWE) standard allows Web3 users to log in to (traditional) websites based on on-chain accounts;

POAP is used to issue tokens that represent proof;

Especially through the article "Decentralized Society: Finding the Soul of Web3", Vitalik made the soul-bound token SBT gradually enter the field of vision of more people, and gradually become the actual carrier of Web3 digital identity - SBT can further prove the results while also deducing on-chain traces and recording the participation process, and at the same time has permanent and non-transferable token attributes, which lays the foundation for building a one-to-one complete Web3 identity system.

From this perspective, the core of Soul Binding Token SBT is actually to build a native Web3 identity system from scratch for each Web3 user in the Web3 world, so that based on this identity system, Web3 can be more widely expanded to diversified new application scenarios in addition to applications such as DeFi and NFT.

However, as the Web3 social trend subsides, SBT is currently only a representative credential of decentralized identity and has not yet ushered in large-scale on-chain adoption.

• DVT

On December 28, 2023, Vitalik published an article discussing how to handle the huge number of signature loads in the Ethereum network without sacrificing decentralization.The corresponding solution is to use DVT (distributed validator technology) to build a decentralized staking pool.

Because DVT allows multiple nodes to act as an Ethereum PoS validator, it can significantly improve security and decentralization. In November 2023, Lido actually began trialing the DVT solution to implement the so-called distributed validator network - powered by Obol Network and SSV Network.

• Loopring/Taiko

As one of the early representative projects of the Rollup solution, Vitalik has publicly praised Loopring's solution many times, such as recognizing the Loopring protocol in discussions related to transaction performance, saying that combined with sharding, the horizontal expansion solution divides the Ethereum network into thousands of "islands", and the network's transaction performance can theoretically reach 160,000 transactions per second.

Taiko, which has a close relationship with Loopring and has just been launched on the mainnet, was also recognized by Vitalik not long ago. On May 25, Vitalik Buterin promoted the first block on the Taiko mainnet as a block proposer, and wrote in the block:

"I’m excited to see that Taiko is launching as a based rollup. Ethereum benefits from L2s taking a plurality of different approaches, and I appreciate them being among the first to go in this direction."

• Farcaster

In September 2023, Vitalik's X account was hacked and released a phishing link for free ConsenSys's Proto Danksharding commemorative NFT, causing users to lose more than $690,000.

Vitalik then stated on the decentralized social media Farcaster that his Twitter account had indeed been hijacked by a SIM card, possibly because his mobile phone number was exposed when he registered for Twitter Blue. He also said that he had uninstalled Twitter and joined Farcaster, which can control account recovery through the Ethereum address.

As of the time of posting, Vitalik has indeed made Farcaster his main social media platform - he has posted more than 10 posts on Farcaster in the past week, but none on X, and the latest one is a reply to an old post on June 11.

03 The secret battle for Ethereum's "orthodoxy" behind the promotion of goods

Back to the core issue, as a super public figure whose words and deeds have a significant influence on the pan-Ethereum ecosystem and even the entire Web3 world, what kind of considerations are behind Vitalik's public "promotion of goods"?

The reason is simple. It is largely for the purpose of maintaining the "orthodoxy" of Ethereum, or ensuring that the development of Ethereum does not derail or stall, and is committed to drawing up an ideal future - the blueprint of Ethereum's further decentralization and the realization of Mass Adoption.

Just from the ENS, Plasma, and Taiko mentioned above, we can clearly see a main line for maintaining the orthodoxy of Ethereum DA:

First, behind the ENS L2 data parsing solution that Vitaik actively called for, it just required that the ENS service extended to each L2 network must adopt the orthodox Ethereum DA, that is, the DA must be placed on the Ethereum mainnet, thereby excluding L2s that choose third-party DA platforms such as Celestia.

Because ENS is a key component in the construction of the Ethereum identity system, when the pan-Ethereum ecosystem realizes the influx of Mass Adoption traffic in the future, it is a non-financial application and infrastructure that L2s cannot ignore.

The standard of "If L2 wants to deploy ENS, it must put DA on the Ethereum mainnet" has been established in advance, which further increases the opportunity cost of L2 choosing a third-party DA, and it has to carefully consider whose comprehensive cost is higher.

Plasma's intention is undoubtedly more obvious - in the context of the DA war, it completely avoids the data availability problem, which can greatly reduce transaction fees (extension reading "Who is moving Ethereum's "cheese"? The opportunities behind this main narrative in 2024"), especially the combination of Plasma and ZK zero-knowledge proof, which just proves the validity of Plasma blocks on the main chain and reduces dependence on the exit mechanism.

Finally, as the first landing project of Based Rollup, Taiko’s core highlight is to achieve Rollup expansion through L1 sorting—the sorting power (and derived sorting, MEV and other income) are all entrusted to L1, that is, all sorting and security are provided by Ethereum L1, which further enhances the economic attractiveness and competitiveness of the Ethereum mainnet.

Behind all public actions, there are legitimate or illegitimate (private or public) interest associations, and Ethereum and Vitalik are no exception. As early as the third-party DA debate launched by Celestia began to emerge, it can be seen that Vitalik is very experienced in struggle.

There is an interesting analogy in the article "On the Impact of Vitalik and Various Roadmaps on Ethereum Governance Process", that is, Vitalik actually plays a substantial "CTO" role in the Ethereum ecosystem to control the giant ship of Ethereum from deviating from the track:

He is responsible for guiding the development process of Ethereum to be consistent with the planning direction of each "roadmap", and even has the final say on whether the development direction is in line with the vision of Ethereum (regardless of whether he is willing to be so "dictatorial").

From this perspective, no matter how people usually make fun of the difference between Vitalik and Satoshi Nakamoto as the first two cryptocurrency/ecological founders, at least Vitalik is a very qualified project founder - he strives to maintain the orthodoxy of Ethereum, and always firmly controls the giant ship of Ethereum to move in the direction that he (and some key figures) thinks is appropriate, and does not derail or lose speed in the competition of public chains.

04 Summary

Vitalik is a human being, not a god. As long as we look at it from this perspective, we can clearly see the answers behind all the problems.

For ordinary users like us, we only need to remember that Vitalik's various studies on Ethereum often contain the possibility of leading new hot spots, and we can keenly smell the main battlefield of future capital struggles that may be hidden in it.