As the industry has gone mainstream with endorsements from major corporations and political figures, builders need to return to the ecosystem’s key ideals surrounding decentralization and building for users' needs, Buterin said.
In his typical jeans and relaxed dark T-shirt uniform, Buterin laid out practical “tests” that he said every crypto project should pass. These include 1) the walk-away test. If the company behind an application disappears, do users keep their assets? And 2) the insider attack test: How much damage can rogue insiders or compromised front-ends cause? And 3) whether it has a trusted computing base: How many lines of code must be trusted to protect users’ funds or data?