Revisiting the Orthodoxy of Crypto: The Spiritual Divide Between Us and Vitalik.

At the just-concluded Black Mountain EDCON event, the "DeBox incident" was one of the most talked-about topics. Its team members met Vitalik in Zuzalu, Montenegro and took a photo with him, which immediately attracted a lot of attention to DeBox. In the following days, many domestic teams also followed suit with this "photo marketing" approach and pursued Vitalik, causing him to feel annoyed and leading to the later "No Chinese" rumor.

One thought can lead to heaven or hell. The whole thing revolves around Vitalik, but looking at the Chinese cryptocurrency circle, many project parties are seeking Vitalik's approval. There seems to be an unwritten rule that "what Vitalik approves is good, and what he doesn't approve is garbage." So why do domestic projects seek Vitalik's endorsement?

As early as March 2021, Vitalik wrote an article titled "The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy". At various conferences, both project parties and users believed that a project recognized by the Ethereum Foundation or Vitalik could be called a "legitimate project". Therefore, in this environment, Vitalik's concept of legitimacy has become a sacred decree for project parties to pursue legitimacy. So what does the legitimacy of Web 3 actually refer to? And is our understanding of "legitimacy, legality" consistent with Vitalik's "Legitimacy"?

What is the "orthodoxy" we often talk about?

In Vitalik's article, orthodoxy means that the public follows a common set of beliefs and has faith in an existing or upcoming theoretical mechanism. This is the element required for orthodoxy. In Web 3, orthodoxy is interpreted by the community, a cohesive community with a common belief, such as the recent meme coin, which has no use case and a simple concept, relying solely on our desire to play. For the industry, it is some people or technologies that are worth believing in, and with their crypto attributes, they can give a sense of orthodoxy to projects or people who are close to them.

This is also why people seek legitimacy certification from someone/community. So why do Chinese people pay more attention to "legitimacy"?

For most domestic encryption projects, once they have obtained the support and endorsement of Vitalik, a key figure in Ethereum, it indirectly proves the quality and reliability of the project, and can therefore attract a lot of attention and popularity in a short period of time. This can bring a lot of exposure to the project, and if it is a project that has issued coins, it can directly withdraw economic benefits and achieve a significant increase in coin price in the short term.

In the Chinese cryptocurrency industry, making money, especially making quick money, has been proven to be the most solid consensus. Obviously, taking a group photo to gain popularity can satisfy this demand. It doesn't require development or delivery, just a proof of a group photo can attract the attention of many investors. Especially in the bear market when everyone is short of money, as long as the investors are willing to chase the rise, this effortless "expectation management" will continue. In the Chinese cryptocurrency industry where the quality of projects varies, it was once very popular to gain popularity by taking a photo with Vitalik or experiencing the project, and then taking advantage of the situation to make a profit. People were willing to travel long distances for this and enjoyed it very much.

For example, there was once a project called CityDAO that was very popular. It was a project dedicated to owning land through DAO and implementing governance and land purchase through NFT. It attracted the participation of Vitalik, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and others. Even Vitalik personally wrote an article and minted to support the project. The floor price of the project once reached a high point of 3 ETH, and many domestic users also participated in the project because of Vitalik's mint. However, the heat quickly dropped, and the current floor price is 0.029 ETH. This is also a typical example of Chinese people pursuing legitimacy. (BlockBeats note, for more information about CityDAO, please see "Did you know? NFT can already buy land in the United States").

Therefore, we have to admit that the ideology and narrative of the encryption industry are still dominated by the West. Many high-quality project parties have expressed that Chinese project parties have difficulty going global and have symptoms of not adapting to the international market. In this case, many project parties began to take shortcuts to obtain Vitalik's recognition and pursue "orthodoxy" endorsement projects to gain exposure opportunities.

However, in fact, many projects pursue taking photos with Vitalik out of helplessness. Not all domestic projects are crazily pursuing commercial models and abandoning the essence of crypto. China is not lacking in talent, nor are there no good projects. We see many projects with Chinese figures, such as Conflux and Alchemy, which have gained wide recognition in the market as high-quality domestic infrastructure. And scaling projects like Scroll have gained recognition from the Ethereum community, as well as the legitimacy of the project itself and its technology. This naturally leads to the legitimacy of promotion, rather than relying on endorsements from certain big shots and riding on the popularity to gain traffic. This is how first-class domestic crypto projects are created.

Many domestic projects with lofty public awareness are also dedicated to the construction of encryption infrastructure. However, due to the barrier of language and culture, compared with similar products, they still cannot be recognized in the Ethereum mainstream community atmosphere dominated by Western narratives. After all, the voters do not understand Chinese, and the judges with the right to speak are difficult and really have no motivation to spend energy to figure out what your project is doing, so naturally it will fail in the final vote.

It can be said that the language and cultural barriers are currently the biggest obstacles for domestic projects to gain legitimacy. Even Vitalik himself has realized this. In the Optimism Round 1 Retrospective, Vitalik questioned the results of this round of financing for Optimism, believing that the voting results lacked diversity and specifically pointed out that the Chinese Ethereum community, ethereum.cn, should have been elected. However, due to the choices and subconscious biases of the voters, the Chinese community, which has translated a large amount of high-quality technical materials and is committed to popularizing Ethereum technology knowledge in China, did not receive the bonus.

In the article, Vitalik also pointed out the objective reason for this problem, which is that when judging projects that are mainly in non-mainstream languages (such as Chinese), most voters cannot judge the quality of the project due to language differences. In addition, voters need to integrate into the Chinese community and understand the social dynamics of the specific project, as well as fully understand the mentality of technical and non-technical readers to judge the usefulness of the website to them. Among the current predominantly American voters, there are basically zero voters who meet these requirements. Even the two Chinese-speaking voters are Americans and have little to do with the Chinese Ethereum community.

Therefore, it is difficult for our domestic projects to obtain a business model through public awareness. As a result, we have to reverse the order of priorities and first pursue a business model before constructing public awareness. We seek to increase project exposure and popularity by obtaining Vitalik's endorsement through a photo opportunity. There is nothing wrong with this, it is just a promotional tactic.

However, there are often some problems in the process of improving public awareness through the pursuit of business models. Firstly, some projects stagnate after obtaining a business model, which also reflects the degree of fraud of the project. The higher the degree of fraud, the less willing we are to participate, and there is a lack of legitimacy in everyone's understanding. Secondly, our starting point is based on the recognition of a certain person or community, while foreign projects seem to not care about the recognition of a certain person or community. For example, many foreign projects do not care about Vitalik's views, so how do they understand "Legitimacy" in foreign countries?

Vitalik对正统性的理解有什么不同？

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What is Vitalik's understanding of orthodoxy?

After the Black Mountain Conference, Legitimacy in the eyes of foreign projects and users seems to be different from the "orthodoxy" in the existing cognition of domestic projects. Returning to Vitalik's article, Legitimacy he proposed refers to convincing at least some people through certain legitimate reasons. It has social, multi-party recognition, non-authoritative, and even citizen-conscious attributes. This is exactly the opposite of Chinese people taking photos with him as an endorsement of the project by an authoritative figure. From this perspective, proving the legitimacy of the project by taking photos with Vitalik is a misinterpretation of Legitimacy itself. Therefore, instead of translating Legitimacy as orthodoxy, legitimacy may be more in line with its original meaning in the Chinese context.

In addition, in this article, Vitalik emphasized the importance of public goods in the cryptocurrency industry. He stated that although the industry has no shortage of money (there are billions of dollars in circulation), products with legitimacy lack funding and can only receive tens of millions of dollars annually. These products are crucial for the industry's continued survival.

This seems to point out a contradiction. Although public goods are sustainable, have long-term value, and are crucial to everyone, it is difficult to make money or raise funds in the short term because they lack commercial value. Therefore, they need additional support. Perhaps this is the real purpose of Vitalik's article, to provide guidance for products with public awareness. If a project has no budget or business model in the short term, Legitimacy can be used as a method to maximize its impact on the community and obtain more funds to support the long-term development of the ecosystem.

To be specific, Vitalik initially proposed the concept of Legitimacy based on Bitcoin and Ethereum, both of which have the ability to mobilize large amounts of capital but are limited in how to use it. So the question is, behind these large amounts of available capital, there is a profound and powerful social force that is widely and universally accepted in a coordinated system. If it is not given moral value, Legitimacy can be seen as a social status quo.

Legitimacy includes de facto norms and collective consensus of the group. According to Vitalik's perspective, there are multiple ways to achieve the formation of Legitimacy, including violence, continuity (inertia), fairness, process, performance, and participation, which are not mutually exclusive. The cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem "wins" Legitimacy through community acceptance and adoption, but the sustainability of Legitimacy depends on maintaining the factors that initially made it Legitimate: decentralization and proof of security.

Finally, Vitalik also mentioned that Legitimacy determines the best practices for our interaction with the crypto world - understanding and utilizing the power of this concept is a necessary condition for bringing the greatest benefits to the crypto world.

In other words, the concept of Legitimacy in foreign countries is opposite to ours. For example, the foreign project XXX can achieve good development and business models without relying on Vitalik's endorsement. They obtain their business models by pursuing public awareness, which also confirms Vitalik's concept of Legitimacy and aligns with the true intention of the article.

Conclusion: Can domestic projects break free from the shadow of orthodoxy?

For us Chinese, we will eventually have good domestic projects, provided that we have the strength to forge ahead. Blindly pursuing so-called orthodoxy and relying on it for promotion rather than cultivating projects and building better and more diverse projects that can influence or even lead the cryptocurrency industry is the way forward. Pursuing orthodoxy in domestic projects is not a problem.

Vitalik has said that there are many ways to form legitimacy, but for us, the classification of legitimacy should also be diverse. For current domestic projects, they can be classified into the legitimacy of the project itself, the legitimacy of the technology, and the legitimacy of promotion (which is the most commonly used way for domestic projects). Pursuing the legitimacy of the project itself and its technology, rather than relying on a period of time to promote legitimacy, is more beneficial for us. The short-term legitimacy ultimately does not belong to oneself.

Our projects in the Web 3 field that we can build ourselves may not necessarily be worse than those built abroad. In fact, many Web 3 projects have Chinese people involved, and even project leaders come from or have a background in China. However, the regulatory environment and policies in China are not friendly to Web 3, and many people have gone abroad to develop their projects.

In a sense, this is very similar to the development history of our country. Many years ago, we supported Chinese students to go abroad to learn foreign knowledge and technology, but in the end, they returned to their homeland. "Some people rushed to various parts of the world with various ideas, and there will be many people rushing back from all over the world in the future." With the official implementation of HK encryption policy, under the premise of "having our own policy", learning to use the power of legitimacy has enhanced public awareness, deconstructed Western authority (individuals, organizations, or countries), and domestic projects will not stay in the shadow of orthodoxy for too long.

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