(Or any multi-component ecosystem culture…)
…this layer-2 centric approach to culture is that it tries to balance the benefits of pluralism and cooperation, by creating a diverse set of different subcultures that still share some common values and work together on key common infrastructure to achieve those values.
Vitalik wrote an expanding piece on L2s as cultural extensions of Ethereum, with themes elaborated from How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding?
In it, he describes the architecture of the Ethereum ecosystem surrounded by a constellation of chains, and how these layer 2’s can create their own culture through their scaling solutions. These subcultures maintain alignment and ethos of Eth while developing their own beliefs and call to action for users.
I believe in understanding the architecture of communities, building supportive culture, and establishing legitimacy through execution (in product & otherwise). With care & intention, a culture can be born from the ground up with a guiding plan, allowing for priorities to fluctuate as tech evolves. I’ll be expanding my musings here.
Components of Culture
tldr: your culture is everything.
No, really, everything. Why you exist, how you scale ethereum, what the founders say on twitter, how your community moderators handle your queries, which hackathons you show up to, how active your governance is, geographic concentrations of activity --- everything.
How then could an L2 shape the culture thoughtfully, if it’s literally everything? I think of the framework as simple variations of these core components:
Values - This dictates who’s in or out. A bonding agent that lasts after hype. What does an ideal user on your protocol care about? What kind of builders are you attracting? What makes you attractive to investors?
Rituals - This is what you do together as a group. Very often a group talk, town hall, X Space, core call, etc. Rituals help us remember how we are all contributing towards a similar goal, and the togetherness of a group is powerful, IRL or URL.
Recognition - This is what you give back to members. Your rewards, your rules. Recognition is needed so members feel their building efforts are worthwhile or seen.
Belonging - The feeling among participating members. Aligned values = sense of belonging dictated through being a part of something larger than one’s self. This is the stickiest component of all.
This structure can be modified as needed, but it is inherently a multi-component, complex system.
Building culture requires a concentrated epicenter where it’s rooted from. It’s a bat signal, a magnet, and a filter. Each community will have a different way to execute these basic components.
Other Culture Builders
This is the “everything” part. Let’s talk about the other pieces of the culture that inform people about who you are, & what your vibe is about. These components fall in and out of the above mentioned verticals.
Aesthetic - Are you a boring af website? Ugh. Please balance information and fun here. Ethereum Foundation is a delightful example. This comes down to the colors & fonts you use, so hire a good designer as soon as you can. Computers are visual machines and should be respected as such.
Communication - How you communicate is just as important as what you communicate. Do not sling mud at others (unless you wanna attract that?), be as transparent as possible, and omg plz plz plz know your audience. Nothing is worse than the best of intentions with the worst delivery. If your community can twist it, somehow, someone will. Be crystal clear.
Participation - How can culture help you attract participation? Are you thinking about participation from end users, scaling through business development & startup support, or are you focused on tech stack for now? Contributing to broader projects (such as recovering hacked funds or contributing to public goods) can also inform people about what you value.
Collaborations - Are you working with others? What’s their reputation like? How are they beneficial to the community who is aligned with your values? Are you aligned with interoperability in some way? Vitalik warned about the pitfalls of echo chambers, so it’s important to work nicely with others.
Language, symbols, support systems, your community moderators, the way you layout your repos, the users you attract, the memes you post…again, literally everything & anything can add or subtract from the culture building process.
This is an invitation to be thoughtful, detailed, and envision beyond a few milestones.
Layer 2’s are a Playing Field for Action
Ethereum is a developer-friendly blockchain, and thus it becomes a ripe playing field for action, even beyond finance.
This is an opportunity to show, not tell your audience about the ways you are aligned with Eth. Through building your solution, you can foster your own subculture that shares Eth core principles, rallying the community to collaborate on crucial infrastructure to achieve the bigger vision.
Vitalik does a great job of highlighting some of the ways culture influences a blockchain’s development and ecosystem.
A few particularly important areas that a blockchain's culture has a great impact on include:
The type of changes that get made to the protocol - including quantity, quality and direction
The protocol's ability to remain open, censorship-resistant and decentralized
The ecosystem's ability to attract high-quality protocol developers and researchers
The ecosystem's ability to attract high-quality application developers
The ecosystem's ability to attract users - both quantity of users, and the right kinds of users
The ecosystem's public legitimacy in the eyes of outside communities and actors
It’s important to understand how your ecosystem is being perceived as well as how to speak to your ideal users in a way that resonates with them.
If there were an L2 that had made huge strides in technological advancements and opened source code in the cutting-edge ZK field, yet the most prominent news pieces around the project dealt with consumer NFTs, games, and loyalty programs, the perception would be these verticals are the main area of focus. Thus the researchers and protocol developers in the community needed to build the infra alongside the core dev team might will be harder to attract.
For fun, let’s say I start a new zk L2
By choosing to be a zk rollup, alignment to Eth starts to shape up:
-
zk means building for the longterm, some even say an endgame
-
zk allows for transaction privacy & pseudonymous interactions
-
zk scales fast, secure, & cheap, thus more accessible to real users
-
zk means Eth is the settlement layer
*By building on zk, I hope the interoperability possibilities start to reveal themselves as it continues to evolve.
I’m a dancer so…let’s play & say this new zk L2 dedicated to dancers, so think clients that deal with motion capture, AR, video, and other potentially large file sizes.
All the developers and contributors I hope to attract could be interested in dance or the problem that large files present to this infrastructure, the application layer & client builds should focus on developer experience, education, video optimization, motion capture data optimization, etc to help with dance & motion-based applications.
Anticipating the need for a large amount of data, this potentially triggers a collaboration, the ultimate community hack - with something like a data availability provider.
The dance-centric L2 ecosystem rewards contributions to the infrastructure, governance, and optimizations for functions, also offering rewards to adopted or helpful applications.
Apps themselves seek contributions in other forms like dance content, feedback, or daily activity.
Let’s say a former pro dancer is a social app founder who prioritizes fast transactions and data availability due to the large file sizes dancers work with, and values affordability and accessibility for global participation. Privacy is also an important function and they plan to take advantage of identity solutions using zk, and it also appeals to tech archivists by ensuring it’s built for longevity.
Looking forward to getting to a place where hyper-niche rollups spring up like this….
Culture is Part of the Incentive
If a blockchain's culture does not value curiosity and openness to new technology, then it may well fail…
I stress the importance of building intentionally because a misaligned culture can affect the long-term outcome of projects. Marketing 101 guides us to think about our target audience. What matters to them most?
Your product appeals to people who care about _______ .
Again, once perceptions of your ideal public users are made, it becomes hard to fully alter, but not to hard to guide the perception from a root. If you have the opportunity to front-run perceptions, let it be influenced by the most prominent feature you want your people to care about. Think strategically as you ponder about the evolution of this user base beyond the first few milestones.
Some specific ways in which layer 2s can, and do, end up culturally specializing include:
More willingness to do user outreach* or "business development": intentionally making efforts to attract specific outside actors, including individuals, businesses and communities, to participate in the ecosystem.*
Diversity of values that are emphasized*. Is your community more about "public goods", "good tech", "Ethereum neutrality", "financial inclusion", "diversity", "scaling", or something else? Different L2s give different answers.*
Diversity of participants*: what kinds of people does the community attract? Does it particularly emphasize certain demographic groups? Personality types? Languages? Continents?*
The totality of these wildly different movable parts delights me. Ecosystems are a petri dish of pieces working towards aligned goals, together or apart. It might be why I am wildly intrigued in its growth.
Yes, you will need those core devs to be there early, and you should prioritize this. Go to university campuses & build those relationships. Get in front of academics, researchers, cryptographers, protocol zaddies, and all the big brains. Support virtual meetings, go to conferences, get folks involved in the governance process. Keep the cutting-edge alive. I also think it’s incredibly important to invite the security community in with other technical folks early, depending on the nature of the L2.
It’s equally smart to think of ecosystem building beyond the core to app developers (and those verticals [beginner/hacker/startup]), education, hackathons, and start up support offered in the network in order to boost protocol adoption. Which principles resonate with builders on the app level? Which protocol limitations are app builders aligned to solve for mass adopted, end user blockchain experiences? I think this is a very important layer of education for Ethereum overall, and thoughtful plans can build your support network.
Then we get to non-technical founders, traders, investors, institutions & enterprises, + many more here. This layer can care about aspects like business longevity & legitimacy, financialization, tech optimization, and new consumer experiences. It can be built with start up support (technical, network, & financial), case studies, marketing & storytelling, capturing & measuring value (monetary or other KPIs) + data visualization, deal flow, and early user adoption.
Lest we forget all those early adopters, tech enthusiasts, maybe even a degen or two. I think the technicals get upset that it’s totally possible to enjoy the benefits of their grueling work without understanding much of it. I understand why this layer gets minimized by them, but it’s oddly what makes this tech actually exciting to me. These L2 TPS boasts will be more impressive thru having its limitations actually tested, not theorized to work in practice.
Sure, the mass normies don’t care about decentralization, but they do care if their content goes dark (RIP Myspace). Ask any artist who has made money in their trad sector (or even heard bad deal horror stories) and how that experience directly informs us how & where to put our work.
Censorship resistance, for example, can be the main function of the protocol, which gets translated through the app, which then gets delivered as an easy-to-digest feature in a smooth app UX. The principles or technicalities of the blockchain are okay to abstract through clients built on the protocol, but their principally-driven functions (aka that censorship resistance) should still remain in tact in the product inherent as a function of the chain.
Legitimacy by Performance
Legitimacy is a pattern of higher-order acceptance, in the case of legitimacy by performance, it can be decided through the surrounding contextual social norms.
In crypto, products won’t see traction if the tech doesn’t work, the community is disconnected, product messaging is getting lost, or the founders are scoundrels. There are many markers of legitimacy among users, including collaboration, advocacy, and adoption; and quantitative & qualitative performance indicators can range by vertical. In his writing, Vitalik describes EOS’s thriving global community and how those regional chapters added to the strength of the overall community and power of their messaging. One of the best metrics of legitimacy is genuine advocacy and organizing around that action.
Localization is one of my most vocal strategies in crypto, as it helps us slowly close the gap in knowledge through local context and tangible familiarity to frame this new technology. Public legitimacy can be swayed by the performance of the crypto education they were exposed to. Given this reality, seems like a no-brainer to get the message delivered with local, familiar context.
Overall the more the community grows in fractal patterns & creates autonomous sub-sub-cultures, the more apparent it is how robust the community foundation is. This can happen in any vertical. To quantify success here, look to the subcommunities and their activities - are they organizing themselves? Do they have unique identities? Are they supporting the broader mission? How are they receiving the messaging? How are newcomers welcomed?
Every detail can matter in the early days. Practice this thoughtfulness as you build.
Pluralists riding off together in the sunset…
Maybe being fairly loyal to the Eth ecosystem is the closest I’ll ever get to joining a cult, and that’s okay with me.
For the people who are building in the ecosystem today, how you build is as important as what you build. Today’s end users are early adopters and should be valued as such. These are the folks carving out your product market fit & leaning into your differentiators. They are helping you iron out your prod before it goes to the wider market.
Carving out your own slice of culture & allowing it to be a unique patch in the Ethereum quilt is essential to building your early base. In truth, the possibilities for this technology are barely explored, and I remain hopeful for aligning infrastructure ethos to trickle down to consumer experiences.
