Making Ethereum alignment legible

2024 Sep 28 See all posts


Making Ethereum alignment legible

One of the most important social challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem is balancing - or, more accurately, integrating, decentralization and cooperation. The ecosystem's strength is that there is a wide array of people and organizations - client teams, researchers, layer 2 teams, application developers, local community groups - all building toward their own visions of what Ethereum can be. The primary challenge is making sure that all these projects are, collectively, building something that feels like one Ethereum ecosystem, and not 138 incompatible fiefdoms.

To solve this challenge, many people throughout the Ethereum ecosystem have brought up the concept of "Ethereum alignment". This can include values alignment (eg. be open source, minimize centralization, support public goods), technological alignment (eg. work with ecosystem-wide standards), and economic alignment (eg. use ETH as a token where possible). However, the concept has historically been poorly defined, and this creates risk of social layer capture: if alignment means having the right friends, then "alignment" as a concept has failed.

To solve this, I would argue that the concept of alignment should be made more legible, decomposed into specific properties, which can be represented by specific metrics. Each person's list will be different, and metrics will inevitably change over time. However, I think we already have some solid starting points.




Ethereum node map, source ethernodes.org


Obviously, not all of the above is applicable to each project. The metrics that make sense for L2s, wallets, decentralized social media applications, etc, are all going to look very different. Different metrics may also change in priority: two years ago, rollups having "training wheels" was more okay because it was "early days"; today, we need to move to at least stage 1 ASAP.

My ideal goal here is that we see more entities like L2beat emerging to track how well individual projects are meeting the above criteria, and other criteria that the community comes up with. Instead of competing to have the right friends, projects would compete to be as aligned as possible according to clearly understandable criteria. The Ethereum Foundation should remain one-step-removed from most of this: we fund L2beat, but we should not be L2beat. Making the next L2beat is itself a permissionless process.

This would also give the EF, and other organizations (and individuals) interested in supporting and engaging with the ecosystem while keeping their neutrality, a clearer route to determine which projects to support and use. Each organization and individual can make their own judgement about which criteria they care about the most, and choose projects in part based on which ones best fit those criteria. This makes it easier for both the EF and everyone else to become part of the incentive for projects to be more aligned.

You can only be a meritocracy if merit is defined; otherwise, you have a (likely exclusive and negative-sum) social game. Concerns about "who watches the watchers" are best addressed not by betting everything on an attempt to make sure everyone in positions of influence is an angel, but through time-worn techniques like separation of powers. "Dashboard organizations" like L2beat, block explorers, and other ecosystem monitors are an excellent example of such a principle working in the Ethereum ecosystem today. If we do more to make different aspects of alignment legible, while not centralizing in one single "watcher", we can make the concept much more effective, and fair and inclusive in the way that the Ethereum ecosystem strives to be.