Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has shown his support for X engineer Haofei’s announcement on the decentralized social media platform, Farcaster. Haofei revealed that the platform will be making “Likes” private.
On May 20, Buterin expanded on the idea and proposed that Farcaster should implement zero-knowledge (ZK) likes to address preference falsification, which occurs when individuals misrepresent their true preferences due to social pressure or fear.
ZK technology is a privacy-preserving cryptography technique that enables one party to prove the truth of a statement to another party without revealing any confidential information. In the context of likes, it would allow someone to prove that they have liked a post without disclosing their identity.
Buterin suggested adopting ZK technology from Zupoll, a tool used in the Zuzalu concept, a pop-up city concept that he initiated. Zupoll is designed for decentralized and cryptographic purposes, specifically anonymous voting and poll decision-making.
Buterin’s proposal to use ZK technology aligns with the core principles of the Farcaster platform, which include user privacy, resistance to censorship, autonomy, and differentiation from centralized social media platforms.
In response to rumors that X might hide users’ likes by default, Haofei confirmed that the platform would indeed make likes private. He explained that users would soon have the ability to like posts “without worrying about who might see it.” He also emphasized that the more posts users like, the better the algorithm will become for them.
The community had mixed reactions to this news. Some users suggested expanding the idea beyond likes to include follows, while high-profile accounts like Wall Street Silver expressed a contrasting opinion.
In addition to his involvement in ZK cryptography, Buterin has recently proposed solutions to mitigate the miner extracted value (MEV) problem. This problem arises when validators profit by arranging transactions within a block to exploit arbitrage opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible.
However, this practice leads to network congestion, increased trader slippage requirements, and higher gas fees. To address this, Buterin suggested implementing MEV minimization quarantine techniques, using inclusion lists, and reducing the requirements for running a node.
In other news, Daan Crypto Trades predicts that if Bitcoin doubles in value, Stacks will experience a 4x increase by 2025 in the X Hall of Flame magazine.