Ethereum is not afraid of any threats. On the eve of 2.0, is there any hope for the public chains that are just around the corner?

Remember what caused the bull market in 2017? The market enthusiasm at that time was entirely brought about by the Ethereum smart contract application IC0. This was also the first large-scale application in the blockchain industry other than payment, although it was later banned due to policy and regulatory reasons. But since the first battle, Ethereum has firmly established itself as the second brother of the blockchain industry.

As for the hot public chain wars that followed, it was nothing more than to replace Ethereum. Obviously, everyone has discovered the potential of the public chain field where Ethereum is located, so they started to create dreams with the vision of reforming various shortcomings of Ethereum. , Ethereum killers were born one by one, and the shadow of value Internet and killer DApp has slowly emerged in the minds of many competitors, but all this also confirms how correct the path chosen by Ethereum is.

Finally, Ethereum, which has been "sieged" for two years, is about to usher in its own brand new version: the beacon chain, and those powerful competitors who once seemed unwilling to show weakness have released their own "big moves" at this juncture.

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Strongest Competitor EOS

With the booming development of DeFi (decentralized finance) and the hot expectation of Ethereum 2.0, the C position of the public chain group has returned to Ethereum. And EOS, which has just passed its second anniversary in a low-key manner, seems unwilling to be a little transparent anymore. After all, it will fall out of the top ten market value immediately if it does not move.

As a result, the social product Voice, known as the "Facebook killer", announced that the official version originally scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2021 will be brought forward to July 4 this year.

For this kind of star project that once raised 4 billion US dollars, the release of Voice seems a little hasty and lacks sincerity. The haste is because ordinary users of the Voice version launched on July 4th can only browse and cannot use it. They can only receive registration invitations. Only users who have completed the registration process have the right to post messages and participate in interactions; the lack of sincerity is due to the fact that Voice, as a key application in the EOS ecosystem with high expectations, is too similar to the Steemit project that BM (the founder of EOS) used to do. It turns over, the probability is very small.

Many people may not know what Voice can do. Simply put, it is a social platform that uses tokens to motivate users to publish content. Is there a feeling of returning to the era of token economy?

According to the internal test feedback of Voice in February, you will find that it is very similar to Steemit founded by BM himself, and it is also somewhat similar to the domestic Bihu community. The difference is that Voice’s incentives are FOMO in nature. After posting content, users can use Voice tokens to upvote. If other users spend more than you, then you can get a certain amount of token income. Voice encourages Users consume tokens to put their posts in a better exposure position to get more rewards. The essence is that the more Voice tokens are consumed, the more rewards they can get.

This is very likely to evolve into a FOMO game, where the profits of users who enter the market first are paid by users who enter the market later. Once no user continues to top their own posts, subsequent users will not get additional rewards. After the rewards are reduced, will users continue to spend Voice tokens to expose their own published content?

Of course, the specific product experience will not be known until the official version is launched, but even if you don’t talk about Voice products, just look at this social track and you will know that it is almost impossible to become a killer app. For foreign users, they have apps such as Facebook and Twitter, while domestic users have WeChat, QQ, etc. How many well-known companies in the mature Internet circle have tried to break this monopoly situation, but they gave up one by one. No one really believes in Vioce Can you make a living in the social field?

What is even more sad is that after EOS shifted its focus to the Voice project, what should we do about the problems of the EOS public chain? Originally, there were few blockchain-related talents. Now switching the focus to ecological applications is equivalent to betting that Voice will have a bright future. .

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Cross-chain King Polkadot

In 2016, two blockchain technology giants met at a conference and discussed in depth the future development of Ethereum... Later they each created a new project, Cosmos and Polkadot.

Cosmos is an easy-to-use decentralized cross-chain network. It is a bit like the common USB HUB in our life. Different public chains are like different USB devices. But it is not the focus of what I want to say, because the launch of Polkadot has made Cosmos, which has not many bright spots, even more bleak.

On May 27th, the Polkadot CC1 stage mainnet was launched, and the cross-chain duo officially gathered.

Compared with Cosmos, Polkadot is a centralized cross-chain network and a sharding protocol. The underlying design of its technical architecture is much more complicated than that of Cosmos. It took more than a year to go online than the original plan, and it can be seen that it is difficult to realize. If there is a threat to Ethereum between the two, it is undoubtedly Polkadot.

At the 2018 Web3 Summit, a handsome man demonstrated to the audience how to build a blockchain within 15 minutes in the center of the stage. This handsome man is Gavin Wood, former CTO of Ethereum, author of the Yellow Paper of Ethereum, Bo Card founder.

This person has realized the core technologies described in the white paper of V God (Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin) one by one. From the EVM virtual machine to the solidity development language, he led the research and development. Without him, the current smart contract and DApp, it can be said that he is the man behind V God.

The reason why I am more optimistic about the Polkadot project is because no one knows Ethereum better than this man. As a former core developer, he is the person who understands the shortcomings of Ethereum best. The current defects of Ethereum have led to the official upgrade of Ethereum to 2.0. Ethereum 2.0 has many similarities.

Polkadot is a fragmented multi-chain network, and this parallel processing capability greatly improves scalability.

In Polkadot, each chain can be specialized with a novel design optimized for a specific use case.

The network and applications on Polkadot can share information and functions like apps on smartphones, without relying on centralized service providers to achieve collaborative work.

The advantages of Polkadot are far more than these. Not long ago, members of the Ethereum community also said: "Polkadot has reached the effect that Ethereum Serenity (Serenity, the final stage of Ethereum 2.0) will achieve."

It seems that Polkadot is very threatening to Ethereum, and it is true from a technical perspective.

But now that the days of showing off TPS are over, technology isn't everything, or even the most important thing. Does the current blockchain really need cross-chain? How many public chains are actually used by people? Will there be only top players left in the public chain field after the big waves wash away the sand? If there is no need to use it, how will it develop in the future?

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"Japanese Ethereum" Cardano/ADA

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed on May 29 that Cardano plans to upgrade Shelley in July. In the following two days, the price of ADA skyrocketed by 45%, and the increase in the first half of the year was as high as 127%. With the skyrocketing price, ADA believers appeared again.

Cardano is a new generation of underlying public chain, and ADA is its token. It claims to be the first blockchain project "driven by scientific philosophy and research-led". Because of the huge number of fans in Japan, it is also called The Japanese version of Ethereum.

This Shelley upgrade also officially turns Cardano into a POS currency, which can be used for Staking operations. Is it similar to Ethereum?

Cardano has two main features. The first feature is the use of layered technology. The settlement layer relies on ADA tokens for value circulation; the calculation layer relies on the "improved version of Ethereum" for smart contract processing. The second feature is to pursue a balance between government regulation and personal privacy, so Cardano will choose to submit information such as KYC (identity authentication) and AML (anti-money laundering) in a targeted manner.

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IPFS/Filecoin is finally here

After waiting for "IPFS" for N years, it is finally confirmed that it will be launched in August. My mother no longer has to worry about being cheated when I buy an IPFS mining machine.

I don’t know why the currency circle is looking forward to it so much. It may be that there are too many hypes. After all, the concept of an IPFS mining machine has supported nearly 500 mining machine manufacturers, but so far there are still many people who are confused about IPFS and Filecoin. It doesn't matter, what is the IPFS mining machine I bought.

To be precise, IPFS itself is not an authentic blockchain project, it is a point-to-point distributed file system, the goal is to create a more open, fast and secure Internet, to supplement or even replace the existing Internet HTTP protocol . The real benchmark of IPFS is the HTTP protocol, which is the core of the new infrastructure of Web3.0, and Filecoin is a decentralized storage network, which is the incentive layer of IPFS. The IPFS mining machine mentioned by the currency circle is actually the mining machine of Filecoin. Its function is to encourage absenteeism through tokens to help network nodes in IPFS provide storage capabilities.

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Where is Ethereum strong?

Why have so many Ethereum killers failed to kill Ethereum after two years? As the underlying infrastructure with the widest penetration rate in the blockchain industry, how does Ethereum achieve it?

First of all, Ethereum has a first-mover advantage. ERC20 tokens based on smart contracts and IC0-related applications have made Ethereum famous. Due to the large demand for IC0, the price of Ethereum has experienced rapid rises, and its popularity has increased significantly. Ethereum is almost It has monopolized the blockchain user traffic, which is the first moat of Ethereum.

When Ethereum became widely known, many blockchain technology practitioners started to learn from Ethereum technology, and a large number of innovative smart contracts were developed based on it, so Ethereum has accumulated a large number of developer groups. The users of the public chain are developers, not ordinary users, which is the second moat of Ethereum.

With the deep cultivation of developers, the Ethereum ecosystem began to develop, and all significant concepts such as token economy, DApp, DeFi, etc. were generated from Ethereum. At this time, the status of Ethereum in the public chain has gradually A consensus has been formed in the minds of users. This consensus is as difficult to break as BTC and other forked coins. This is the most important moat of Ethereum.

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epilogue

The current Ethereum has embarked on the old road of Tencent. All the technologies needed by the market, such as Polkadot and Cosmos, which represent cross-chain technology; ZIL, QKC, which represent sharding technology; ZEC, DAS, etc. Appearing in the future planning of Ethereum, even if it is technical imitation, it can imitate value.

And those competitors who cannot break through the moat of Ethereum can only find another way to find a myth of technological innovation and start a real blockchain 3.0 era; or convert users outside the blockchain industry through a so-called phenomenal application, But that will face another situation, the suppression of traditional Internet giants. In either case, the road will be rough.

What is worse than Internet entrepreneurship is that the blockchain public chain cannot be done, and there is no possibility of being acquired, but fortunately, those who pay the bill are those retail investors who pay real money.

On the road of the underlying infrastructure of the blockchain, Ethereum is relying on strong user traffic and consensus to gradually satisfy all users' fantasies about the public chain.