Rethinking Crypto Legitimacy: The Spiritual Gap Between Us and Vitalik

Author: LeftOfCenter, Leo, BlockBeats

In the just-concluded Montenegro EDCON event, the "DeBox incident" was one of the most popular topics. Its team members met Vitalik in Zuzalu, Montenegro, and took a photo with him, which attracted a lot of attention to DeBox. In the following days, many domestic teams also followed this "photo marketing" method and "surrounded and intercepted" Vitalik, which made him feel a lot of boredom, and then there were the "No Chinese" rumors.

One thought of heaven and one thought of hell, the whole thing revolved around Vitalik, but looking back at the Chinese currency circle, many project parties are seeking Vitalik's approval. There seems to be an unspoken rule that "what V God is optimistic about is good, and what V God is not optimistic about is garbage." So why do domestic projects seek Vitalik's endorsement?

As early as March 2021, Vitalik wrote a blog post titled "Legitimacy is the most scarce resource in the crypto ecosystem". Later, at various conferences, project owners and users also believed that if a project was recognized by the Ethereum Foundation or Vitalik, it could be called a "legitimacy project". Therefore, in this environment, the concept of legitimacy proposed by Vitalik has also become a sacred edict for project owners to pursue legitimacy. So what does the legitimacy of Web 3 mean? And is there a big difference between our understanding of "legitimacy, legitimacy, and legality" and Vitalik's "Legitimacy"?

What is the "legitimacy" we often talk about?

In Vitalik's article, legitimacy means that the public follows a common and consistent concept and believes in a set of existing or upcoming theoretical mechanisms. We constitute the elements required for legitimacy. In Web 3, the explanation of legitimacy for a project lies in the community, a community with strong cohesion and common beliefs, such as the meme coin that was popular some time ago, which had no use cases and simple concepts, and all relied on our desire to play; for the industry, it is probably some people or technologies in the industry that are worthy of others' trust. With their legitimate crypto attributes, they can make a type of project or person close to them gain legitimacy.

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

For most domestic crypto projects, once they have obtained the support and endorsement of Vitalik, the core figure of Ethereum, it proves the quality and reliability of the project from the side, and then they can get a lot of attention and popularity in a short period of time, which can bring a lot of exposure to the project. If it is a project that has issued coins, it can be directly withdrawn in economic benefits and obtain a short-term substantial increase in the coin price.

In the Chinese currency circle, making money, especially making quick money, has been proven to be the most solid consensus. Obviously, this kind of photo-taking can meet this demand. It does not need to be developed or delivered, and only needs a photo proof to attract the attention of investors. Especially in the bear market, when everyone has no money, as long as the majority of leeks are willing to chase the rise, this effortless "expectation management" will continue. In the Chinese currency circle where projects are of varying quality, taking photos with Vitalik/experiencing the project, gaining popularity and then cutting a wave of leeks by the way, this method was once very popular, so much so that everyone traveled thousands of miles and never tired of it.

For example, CityDAO, a popular project dedicated to owning land in the form of DAO and implementing governance and purchasing land in the form of NFT, attracted Vitalik, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and others to join. Vitalik even personally posted and minted to support the project. The floor price of the project once reached a high of 3 ETH. Many domestic users also rushed to the project because of Vitalik's mint, but then the popularity plummeted. The current floor price is 0.029ETH, which is also a typical example of the Chinese people's pursuit of orthodoxy. (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 crypto industry are still dominated by the West. Many high-quality project owners have said that it is difficult for Chinese project owners to go overseas and that they are not able to adapt to the local environment in order to win the international market. In this situation, many project owners have begun to take shortcuts to obtain Vitalk's recognition and pursue "legitimacy" endorsement projects to gain exposure opportunities.

But in fact, many projects are forced to pursue Vitalik's photo. Not all domestic projects are crazy about pursuing business models and abandoning the essence of crypto. China does not lack talents, nor does it lack good projects. We see Chinese people in many projects. For example, high-quality domestic infrastructure such as Conflux and Alchemy has been widely recognized by the market, and expansion projects such as Scroll have been recognized by the Ethereum community, and have won the legitimacy of the project itself and the technical level. Naturally, they will also gain the legitimacy of publicity, rather than relying on the endorsement of some big guys and the traffic obtained by riding on the popularity. Only in this way can first-class domestic encrypted projects be created.

There are also many domestic projects with great public awareness that want to devote themselves to the construction of crypto infrastructure. However, due to language and cultural barriers, they still cannot gain recognition in the mainstream Ethereum community atmosphere dominated by Western narratives compared to similar products. After all, voters do not understand Chinese, and it is difficult and unmotivated for the judges with a say to spend energy to figure out what your project is about, so they will naturally lose in the final vote.

It can be said that the language and cultural barriers are the biggest obstacles to the legitimacy of domestic projects at present. Even Vitalik himself is aware of this. In the article Optimism First Round Retrospective Financing Review, Vitalik questioned the results of Optimism's round of financing, believing that its voting results lacked diversity, and pointed out by name that the Chinese Ethereum community ethereum.cn should definitely be elected. However, due to the voters' choices and subconscious bias, this Chinese community that translated a large amount of high-quality technical materials and is committed to popularizing Ethereum technical knowledge in China did not receive the bonus.

In the article, Vitalik also pointed out the objective reasons for this problem, that is: when judging projects that are mainly in non-mainstream languages (English), most voters have no way to judge the quality of the project due to language differences. In addition, voters also 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 voting holders who are mainly in the United States, the number of voters who meet these requirements is basically zero. 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, and we have to put the cart before the horse and pursue a business model first and then build public awareness. Get Vitalik's photo endorsement first to increase project exposure and popularity. There is nothing wrong with this, it's just a means of publicity.

However, there are often some problems in the process of pursuing a business model and then improving public awareness. First, some projects stagnate after obtaining a business model, which also reflects the degree of fraud in the project. The higher the degree of fraud in the project, the less willing we are to participate, and it lacks legitimacy in everyone's understanding. Second, our starting point is to rely on the recognition of a certain person or a certain community; while foreign projects do not seem to care about the recognition of a certain person or a certain community. For example, many foreign projects do not care about Vitalik's views. So how do foreign countries understand "Legitimacy"?

What is the difference in Vitalik's understanding of legitimacy?

After the Montenegro Conference, Legitimacy in the eyes of foreign projects and users seems to be different from the "legitimacy" in the existing cognition of domestic projects. Back to Vitalik's article, Legitimacy proposed by Vitalik refers to persuading at least some people to recognize it through some legitimate reasons. It has social, multi-recognized, non-authoritative, and even civic-minded attributes. This is exactly the opposite of the Chinese people taking photos with him to endorse the project with an authoritative person. From this perspective, taking photos with Vitalik to prove the legitimacy of the project is a misunderstanding of Legitimacy itself. Therefore, instead of translating Legitimacy into orthodoxy, in the Chinese context, legitimacy may be more in line with its original meaning.

In addition, in this article, Vitalik also emphasized public products, saying that although the crypto industry is not short of money (hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing in the crypto industry), this type of Legitimacy product lacks funds and can only obtain tens of millions of dollars in funds each year, which is essential for the continued survival of capital.

This seems to point out a contradiction. Although public products are sustainable, have long-term value, and are vital to everyone, they are difficult to make money or raise funds in the short term because they have no commercial value, so they need additional support. Perhaps this is the real purpose of Vitalik writing this article, to provide guidance for those public-minded products, that is, if a project has no budget and no business model in the short term, Legitimacy can be used as a method to maximize its influence on the community and obtain more funds to support the long-term development of the ecosystem.

In detail, Vitalik initially proposed the concept of Legitimacy from Bitcoin and Ethereum, both of which have the ability to mobilize large amounts of capital, but are restricted in how to use these capitals. So the problem is the profound and powerful social forces behind these large amounts of mobilized capital. If something that is widely and generally accepted in a coordination system is not given moral value, Legitimacy can be regarded as the social status quo.

Legitimacy includes de facto norms and collective consensus of the group, and according to Vitalik, there are many ways to achieve the formation of Legitimacy: violence, continuity (inertia), fairness, process, performance and participation, which are not mutually exclusive. Cryptocurrency and blockchain ecology "earn" Legitimacy through community acceptance and adoption, but the continued legitimacy of these things depends on maintaining the factors that originally made it Legitimacy: proof of decentralization and security.

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

To put it another way, foreign Legitimacy is the opposite of us. For example, foreign project XXX can also achieve good development and business model without relying on Vitalik's recognition. They obtain business model by pursuing public awareness, which just verifies what Vitalik said about Legitimacy and is in line with the real intention of the article.

Conclusion: Can domestic projects still get out of the shadow of orthodoxy?

For us Chinese, we will eventually have good domestic projects, provided that the iron needs to be hard. We should blindly pursue the so-called orthodoxy and rely on the so-called orthodoxy for publicity, instead of deepening the project and building better and more diverse projects. The encryption industry that Chinese people can influence or even dominate is the kingly way. There is no problem for domestic projects to pursue orthodoxy.

Vitalik said that there are many ways to form Legitimacy, but from the current situation, the classification of orthodoxy should also be diverse for us. For domestic projects at this stage, it can be divided into the orthodoxy of the project itself, the orthodoxy of technology, and the orthodoxy of publicity (that is, the most commonly used method for domestic projects). It is more beneficial for us to pursue the orthodoxy of the project itself and the project technology, rather than relying on a period of publicity and orthodoxy to make a fuss. After all, the short-term grant does not belong to us.

The projects we can build in the Web 3 field are not necessarily worse than those built abroad. In fact, most Web 3 projects have Chinese people, and even the project leaders are from China. It is true that the domestic regulatory environment and policies are not friendly to Web 3, and many people have gone abroad to show their talents.

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 they still had to return to the motherland in the end. "Some people rushed to all parts of the world with various ideas, and in the future, many people will rush back from all over the world." With the official implementation of the HK encryption policy, under the premise of "having our own policies", we have learned to use the power of Legitimacy, enhance public awareness, and deconstruct Western authority (people, organizations or countries). It will not take long for domestic projects to get out of the shadow of orthodoxy.

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