What is Vitalik's 'Exit Scam'? How to assess the decentralization and security of a project.

“Walk Away Test” is a relatively new thinking tool used to assess the level of project and network centralization, and can be a key test for evaluating Decentralization projects, and can also be improved and upgraded into a risk rating tool. (Background: CZ, Vitalik Buterin advocate together! Biological meme coins surge k times, hot money flows into the DeSci Decentralization scientific track) Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once explained this thinking suggestion in a blog article titled Making Ethereum alignment legible: When it comes to issues of Decentralization and security, it is important to minimize reliance on centralized infrastructure and reduce audit vulnerabilities. For this, the methods of assessment we can use include: “Walk Away Test” and “Internal Attack Test”. Among them, the “Internal Attack Test” refers to autonomously launching an attack on the system to observe the potential harm it can cause, in order to discover vulnerabilities; while the “Walk Away Test” is a relatively new thinking tool used to assess the level of project and network centralization, and can be a key test for evaluating Decentralization projects, and can also be improved and upgraded into a risk rating tool. Making Ethereum alignment legible, the original article can be found at: What is the “Walk Away Test”? If your team and servers disappear tomorrow, can your application still function? This is the core test idea of the “Walk Away Test” - it is a thinking tool that can be used to evaluate whether Web3 projects, platforms, or protocols have true independent operational capabilities and sustainable development value. The “Walk Away Test” is closely related to the technical philosophy of Block chain Decentralization and Autonomy, and the directions of thinking that can be derived from this test include: Project development: If the development team dissolves, can the project still operate independently? Is there an active community that can take over the project after the team leaves? Is the project’s code Open Source and able to attract developers to continue improving it? Is there Decentralization verification Nodes to protect the network, or enough community support to maintain development? Economic model: Does the project have a sustainable economic model? Does the project have practical application scenarios for sustainability? Does the appreciation of assets in the project rely substantially on speculation or centralized control? Community governance: Do all parties involved in the project have a fair way to participate in decision-making? Can the project start a decision-making mechanism and solve problems without a clearly defined core manager? Does the project need to rely on a few core members for governance, or does it have a more widely distributed community governance foundation? Why is the “Walk Away Test” important? If a project relies too much on the founding team or certain key personnel to operate; if a network must rely on a fixed server to process data, then it is essentially centralized, and the long-term survival, value, and even the ability to resist audits and risks of the project or network may be questioned. The importance of the “Walk Away Test” lies in the fact that through this thinking tool, the actual reliance of the project or network on centralized infrastructure can be explored, allowing the project or network to effectively improve, relying on the firm technical and philosophical concept of “Decentralization”. In 2017, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in an early blog article discussing the concept of Decentralization: “Decentralization” is one of the most common terms in the field of encryption economics and is often directly used as a basis for measuring whether a network is a Block chain network. However, the actual meaning of this term often leads to much confusion and perplexity. Vitalik Buterin points out: When people discuss a Decentralization issue, they are actually discussing three independent aspects: Is it structurally centralized or Decentralization? For example, how many computers make up this system? How many computers can this system tolerate crashing at any given time and still continue to operate? Is it politically centralized or Decentralization? For example, how many individuals and organizations can ultimately control the computers that make up this system? Is it logically centralized or Decentralization? For example, is the system’s interface and database structure a single entity? Or is it a non-structured group? If the system’s users and providers were divided into two separate units, could they still operate as completely independent entities? And what is the role and significance of emphasizing “Decentralization”, Vitalik Buterin also provided a clear explanation in a blog post in 2018: Fault tolerance: Decentralization systems have a lower probability of accidental failure because they rely on many independent components, and theoretically, the probability of simultaneous failure of independent components is relatively low. Resistance to attacks: Decentralization systems make it more costly to attack and manipulate, as they lack sensitive central points. The cost and difficulty of attacking a system with a clear central point are significantly lower than for a Decentralization system. Preventing collusion: If participants in the Decentralization system want to sacrifice the interests of other participants and conspire for their own gain, they will pay a higher price than participants in a centralized system. Key testing for evaluating Decentralization projects If we look at it from the logic of the “Walk Away Test”, Bitcoin can be considered to have passed this test: the public does not know where Satoshi Nakamoto is, but Bitcoin can continue to develop relying on a Decentralization network and global developers. In the case of Ethereum, founder Vitalik Buterin mentioned in a forum in 2022: Almost all Rollups are not mature, and most of them use the so-called Training Wheels as auxiliary measures to ensure operation. However, Training Wheels as auxiliary measures also reflect the reliance of Rollup projects on “human intervention”. The lower the reliance on Training Wheels in Layer2 networks, the lower the risk; the higher the reliance on Training Wheels, the higher the risk. For this reason, Vitalik Buterin and others graded the reliance of Rollup projects on Training Wheels: Stage 0 (full reliance), Stage 1 (partial reliance), Stage 2 (complete abandonment). Subsequently, the L2beat website revised this trap classification scheme through community feedback, and in June 2024, it was upgraded to a “Layer2 Risk Rating Indicator” to assess the risk of different Layer2 projects. Training Wheels (commonly translated as auxiliary wheels) are certain restrictive mechanisms or measures added in the early implementation of Rollup technology to ensure security and stability. Rollup protocols that require the implementation of Training Wheels usually have not yet…