Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared thought-provoking suggestions in his blog post Making Ethereum Alignment Legible. He emphasized minimizing reliance on centralized infrastructure and reducing censorship vulnerabilities when addressing issues of decentralization and security. To achieve this, two testing methods are proposed: the “Walk Away Test” and the “Internal Attack Test.” The “Internal Attack Test” involves deliberately attacking the system to observe the potential damage, thereby identifying vulnerabilities. The “Walk Away Test,” on the other hand, is a relatively new conceptual tool used to examine a project’s or network’s dependency on centralization. It serves as a crucial test for evaluating decentralized projects and could be refined into a comprehensive risk assessment tool.

For more details, refer to the original post Making Ethereum Alignment Legible: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/09/28/alignment.html

What is the “Walk Away Test”?

The core idea behind the “Walk Away Test” is this: If your team and servers disappear tomorrow, would your application still function? \
This test serves as a tool to assess whether a Web3 project, platform, or protocol has true operational independence and sustainable development value. \
The “Walk Away Test” is closely related to the technological and philosophical concepts of decentralization and autonomy in blockchain. The areas for reflection that can be derived from this test include:

Project development:

• If the development team disbands, can the project continue to operate independently?
• Is there an active community that can take over the project if the team leaves?
• Is the project’s code open-source and capable of attracting developers to continue improving it?
• Are there decentralized validator nodes protecting the network, or sufficient community support to maintain its development?

Economic model:

• Does the project have a sustainable economic model?
• Does the project have a sustainable application scenario?
• Does the appreciation of assets on the project rely heavily on speculative manipulation or centralized control?

Community governance:

• Do participants in the project have a fair way to participate in decision-making?
• Can the project initiate a decision-making mechanism and solve problems without a clear core manager?
• Does the project rely on a few core members for governance, or is it based on a broader decentralized decision-making structure?

Why is the “Walk Away Test” important?

If a project is overly dependent on its founding team or certain key individuals to operate, or if a network must rely on a fixed server to process data, it is fundamentally still centralized. The long-term survival, value, and even the ability to resist censorship and risks of such a project or network may be questioned.

The importance of the “Walk Away Test” lies in its ability to reveal the actual degree of dependence on centralized infrastructure, allowing a project or network to make effective improvements. Its underlying technological philosophy is firmly rooted in “decentralization.”

In 2017, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin discussed the concept of decentralization in a blog post, stating that:

“Decentralization” is one of the most common terms in cryptoeconomics and is often used as the direct basis for determining whether a network is blockchain-based. However, the actual meaning of this term often causes confusion and misunderstanding.

Vitalik Buterin pointed out that when people discuss decentralization, they are actually referring to three independent aspects:

1. Architecturally, is it centralized or decentralized? For example, how many computers make up the system? How many computers can crash at any given time before the system stops functioning?
2. Politically, is it centralized or decentralized? For example, how many individuals or organizations can ultimately control the computers that make up the system?
3. Logically, is it centralized or decentralized? For example, is the system’s interface and database structure a single, unified entity, or is it a non-structured group? If the system’s users and providers are separated, can they still operate as independent units?

The role and significance of “decentralization” were also clearly explained by Vitalik Buterin in a 2018 blog post:

1. Fault tolerance: Decentralized systems have a lower probability of failure because they rely on many independent components. The chances of all independent components failing simultaneously are theoretically low.
2. Attack resistance: Decentralized systems make it more costly to attack and manipulate because there are no sensitive central points. Attacking a centralized system is significantly easier and cheaper than attacking a decentralized system.
3. Prevention of collusion: In a decentralized system, participants who seek to sacrifice the interests of others and conspire to profit themselves must pay a higher cost than those in a centralized system.

Core Value: Key Test for Evaluating Decentralized Projects

If we apply 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 continues to evolve, relying on a decentralized network and global developers.

In Ethereum, founder Vitalik Buterin mentioned in a 2022 forum post that almost all Rollups are not yet mature, with most using a mechanism called Training Wheels to ensure operations. However, the reliance on Training Wheels reflects the Rollup projects’ dependence on “artificial intervention.” The less a Layer 2 network depends on Training Wheels, the lower its risk; the more it relies on Training Wheels, the higher the risk.

To address this, Vitalik Buterin and others classified Rollup projects based on their dependence on Training Wheels: Stage 0 (fully dependent), Stage 1 (partially dependent), and Stage 2 (completely abandoned). Later, the L2beat website, through community feedback, refined this classification and upgraded it in June 2024 into a “Layer 2 Risk Rating Index,” which evaluates the risk levels of different Layer 2 projects.

Learn more. What are Training Wheels?

Training Wheels (commonly translated as “辅助轮”) are certain restrictive mechanisms or measures added during the early implementation of Rollup technology to ensure security and stability.

Rollup protocols that require Training Wheels typically have not yet achieved trustlessness or minimal trust. This could be due to reasons such as overly complex code, lack of security audits, a large potential attack surface in contracts, or the project being newly launched without established user trust.

In response, Vitalik Buterin pointed out that his ideal goal is to see more entities like L2beat emerge, which can track the real status of projects in meeting established standards or other criteria proposed by the community. Competition between projects will no longer be about “having the right friends,” but about aligning as closely as possible with clear and understandable standards.

On a larger scale, the “Walk Away Test” could be further developed into a risk rating tool to assess the decentralization substance and sustainability of Web3 wallets, as well as decentralized use cases like games and DeFi.

As a common political philosophy theory suggests, to solve the problem of “who supervises whom,” the best solution is power separation, not power concentration. Project “alliances” lead to power concentration, while power separation is achieved through systems and culture—in the blockchain world, these systems and culture represent the “consensus standards.”

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