Opinion: Where is the Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum Ecosystem Going?

Editor's Note: This article comes fromEthereum enthusiasts (ID: Ethfans)Ethereum enthusiasts (ID: Ethfans)

, Author: Alex Van, translation & proofreading: Min Min & A Jian, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

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-Amsterdam office, Zug cantonal headquarters and Berlin office where most of the early team worked-

Although the high degree of centralization of the Ethereum Foundation in the early years may have played a vital role in the development of Ethereum, it also attracted a lot of criticism for the so-called decentralized Ethereum.

At Devcon4, Aya Miyaguchi, the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, gave a wonderful speech, and it can be seen that her management style is deeply influenced by Zen.

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-Aya at Devcon4-

Aya believes that simplifying complexity can create more value. The Ethereum Foundation should take a small and beautiful development route, decentralize the power in hand, reduce the control of resources, and fund different teams.

In the Ethereum ecosystem, there will no longer be a so-called "official" internal team and external contributors. The Foundation will provide funding for all internal and external teams without discrimination. Internal teams also need to compete fairly with external teams to obtain resource.

If someone had asked me a few years ago how the Foundation should grow and manage its resources, I would have said the same thing as Aya. I knew it had to be this way because it was actually asked. Before Aya became executive director, we had several conversations, sometimes in formal settings and sometimes privately in the hallway, about what kind of foundation met everyone's expectations, and usually came to the conclusion that every Every team wants to have more autonomy over their budgets, to be able to experiment more, without having to ask permission for every hiring or scheduling of meetings. This has now been achieved.

Of course, there are two sides to everything: more autonomy means more risk. If the limited resources are to be allocated to more teams, it will also bring more intense competition.

In fact, this has the potential to be positive as well, but it won't be easy for the team. Based on my experience of leading the Mist team for many years, the Mist browser we developed aims to aggregate various Ethereum technologies to create the vision of Web 3.0. However, only a handful of die-hard Ethereum fans use the browser, failing to attract any mainstream audience. (Although it depends on your definition of "mainstream", at least no team has really achieved this yet) - Also, we have a lot of serious security problems.

Our team realized that although the biggest security risk lies in the browser components, using only one application to connect and manage various Ethereum components can still create great value. This application is now known as Grid. At the same time, I started thinking about our real barriers to mainstream user acquisition and started a project called universal logins. Then I realized that if I quit, the Grid team would have more budget to do better things, so I quit.

That's how it is. I no longer eat into the budget of any team within the Ethereum Foundation. No one asked me to do it, I just told the finance department about it (also said on twitter).

In fact, Aya's first challenge was figuring out who actually worked for the foundation: Some people who were on active labor contracts went to join a Github project, disappeared for months, and then suddenly disappeared. It is not uncommon to withdraw from the project and send a 3-month labor invoice, or sometimes no invoice at all. I've experienced something similar myself, where a team member who neither formally resigned nor was fired, simply disappeared without replying to messages or sending invoices. That's one of the strange downsides of remote work. In this regard, the new funding model works better. It doesn't matter how many people are actually involved in each project: money goes in, code goes out. If the results are not good, just don't give the money.

In short: the foundation is transforming into a grantmaking organization. My old project was terminated, and I didn't want to jeopardize the chances of getting funding for a new project by eating up my budget. In this way, I can also spare more time to solve what I think is the biggest problem in this ecology: user guidance.

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Why Ethereum’s User Onboarding Is So Bad

A year ago, Metamask was pretty much the only desktop application. Although there are a dozen or so mobile apps, their users are repeating a routine: for each new app, you create a new private key, back up the seed phrase, and transfer ETH to the app. And so on and on.

The onboarding process is often lengthy and complicated—if you want to get ETH, you need to apply for a credit card or sign up for an exchange account, and it usually takes days to get approved—and every time you install a new application, you need to apply for a credit card or sign up for an exchange account. Go through the same process again! The process is much faster if you already have ETH (or even BTC), though you still have to think about things like private keys and backups.

In the year since I gave a presentation on meta-transactions at the Toronto conference, everything has changed dramatically and more wallets have taken up the challenge seriously. Even if some wallets still create a private key for each user, they will not show the user the interface for backing up the private key until the user has some experience in using it and has some valuable assets.

However, we still face a major problem: each application will repeat the same boot process. If you try a new app, you usually have to start all over again. For users already onboarded to Ethereum, we need to allow them to try out new applications without having to transfer money or share private keys.