On February 29, Huobi announced the launch of the Huobi public chain testnet, which is a regulated blockchain operating system for the financial sector, jointly developed by Huobi Group and Nervos Foundation.

At 8 pm on March 4th, we had the honor to invite Mr. Lu Guoning, the co-founder of Nervos and the head of the Huobi public chain development team, to visit Bayut Community. We also invited Dai Dai, the founder of CypherJump and the head of DeFi Labs Teacher Chao, as the guest host, conducted in-depth interviews and dialogues with Teacher Lu Guoning.

The following is the content of AMA, welcome to check~

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Generation Super丨CypherJump

We know that the three major exchanges are currently deploying their own public chains. The Huobi public chain, which has recently deployed a testnet, has caught my attention. Unlike OKChain and Binance Chain, which focus on DEX performance, Huobi Chain focuses on DeFi, with the goal of "providing high-performance services for various financial assets."

The general idea of ​​an exchange doing a public chain is to prevent being revolutionized by DEX, and its own chain mainly serves the business of [transaction]. So we also see that, for example, Binance Chain did not intend to support smart contracts from the very beginning. It means that its philosophy is to go the way of trading to the end, and it does not seem to care about DeFi.

From the perspective of Huobi public chain developers, where can this chain do better than the current Ethereum DeFi ecosystem?

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Lu Guoning丨Nervos

It is still too early to talk about the revolution. It is too early to draw such a conclusion whether the public chain of the exchange can really prevent the DEX revolution. The biggest difference between an exchange’s public chain comes from its own positioning, including the practical problems that can be solved and the strategic judgment on the future development of the public chain.

Let's talk about practical issues first.

First, the issue of long-tail coins being traded on exchanges. From the public information of Binance Chain and Okex Chain, we can see an obvious design tendency. Both chains can solve the problem of long-tailed coins.

For the top exchanges, especially for the trading pairs that support hundreds or even thousands of currencies, through a DEX Chain, the transaction is not so active, and the trading varieties with relatively little demand can directly pass the DEX on the chain. Trading is very practical. In some cases, you can also transfer trading pairs with excellent performance in on-chain transactions and liquidity to centralized exchanges to provide better transactions based on centralized and mature infrastructure. Efficiency and lower transaction friction.The second is the issue of regulatory transparency that can be achieved through DEX. Note that the regulation here refers to general rather than dealing with specific regulatory authorities.

The operation process of a centralized exchange is an opaque black box for most users. On the one hand, mature exchanges will invest huge costs in security. This part of the hard investment is actually extremely huge, but the investment in technology is not enough.

On the other hand, the exchange also needs to cooperate with a complete set of sound systems to ensure the security of users' assets and transactions. This is also a very huge investment and resource redundancy.

When DEX is introduced, various advantages of the blockchain can be used to realize transparent supervision through the chain, and reduce the cost of supervision and auditing. Not only external users can participate in the supervision process, but also the internal audit of the exchange , will also benefit from it.Third, the exchange public chain can decouple the platform currency from the exchange itself

, Let’s take Binance Chain as an example. Initially, BNB was issued through ERC 20 on Ethereum, and was traded inside Binance Exchange, and then migrated to Binance Chain.

Let's assume a random scenario. If the exchange is shut down for maintenance for a few hours, the Chain will not stop and can still keep running. All businesses that rely on the platform currency on the chain will not be affected, so the platform currency issued by each exchange At present, it seems that there is a trend to continuously enhance the financial attributes of the platform currency, and empower it through the exchange public chain to play a more important role.Fourth, exchanges have huge advantages in doing DEX Chain.

The current development trend of DeFi technology attaches great importance to the interoperability of various chains and protocols, but one thing that is overlooked by everyone is that DeFi has a strong dependence on DEX as the financial infrastructure of the blockchain, especially when there are exchanges. The DEX in providing oracle price information is much more reliable than uniswap, a community project with low liquidity, at least at the moment.

For example, some time ago, due to the attack on DeFi caused by flash loans, if a large exchange stood up to do DeFi, there would be a great opportunity to solve this kind of problem, and it could become the pinnacle of the DeFi world.

Let’s talk about the strategic judgment on the future development of the public chain.

In the field of blockchain, especially in the field of public chain development, no matter the technology or the concept of the chain, it has not yet developed to a mature and stable stage. It is still in the early stage of the development of blockchain technology. This is the consensus of the industry .

Exchanges participate in the public chain battle, especially the top exchanges. On this issue, they are faced with huge uncertainties in the future. In fact, it is difficult to make judgments and decisions, so each top exchange For exchanges, when to do it, and how to do it, it is an extremely prudent decision.

Even today, looking at the three leading exchanges, whether it is Binance Chain, OKChain, or Huobi Chian, which is jointly cooperated by our Nervos and Huobi, they all practice the strategy of Think big, start small, and move fast. The key to this strategy is implement.

From the point of view of execution, the exchange public chain started in 2018 may be limited by the technological development at that time, as well as the difference between the exchange and the real original team in the public chain field, and choose to customize based on existing open source projects Or modifying a public chain is a pragmatic approach, but using third-party open source code will definitely be subject to some restrictions and constraints of the code itself.

For example, the chain using the Cosmos SDK itself does not support virtual machines, and can only run native contracts. In terms of technical architecture, it must be linked to Cosmos to truly exert its capabilities. Considering whether it is really necessary to link to the Cosmos Center Hub, from Both the business decision-making level and the economic model design level are facing many adjustments, and at that time, the IBC design of Cosmos may not have been launched, and the IBC launched now still has various problems of one kind or another. These are from the entry point Just choose to implement the problem that a chain cannot escape based on the existing code framework.

We chose to cooperate with Nervos because the team behind Nervos has accumulated many years of experience in the field of public chains. We have been deeply involved in the underlying development of Ethereum from the early stage, and in the past, we have designed and implemented CITA Chain and Nervos CKB.

It is mentioned in the title that Binance Chain does not support smart contracts from the very beginning. I think this is a matter of technical details. It is not impossible to extend support for virtual machines on the basis of Cosmos SDK and execute smart contracts through virtual machines. However, the result depends on the engineering implementation, and there is no obstacle in theory.

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From the public account NervosCommunity

So I can’t come to the conclusion of whether to care about DeFi. The DeFi ecosystem, especially on the asset side, has experienced explosive growth in recent months. I believe that all public chain project parties must face up to DeFi and consider fully supporting it.

The core of the future development of the exchange public chain is how to position it. Here we start with the positioning of the Huobi public chain. The positioning of the Huobi public chain is considered in the longer term, so we start with the chain itself instead of DEX as the starting point. . Huobi Chain is positioned as an independent innovation-oriented blockchain operating system that can be supervised in the financial sector, and is an infrastructure for global asset digitization and financial markets based on blockchain.

So based on this positioning, we need to be clear that our goal is to strive to become a global financial public chain and support the needs of trillion-level financial application scenarios. Under such an ambitious goal, we need to start from scratch for every design of Huobi Chain, starting from the best and starting from the spirit.

First of all, Huobi Chain is the world's first public chain that provides an on-chain compliance and regulatory framework, comprehensively and deeply supporting compliance and regulation.

If the target is financial infrastructure, then regulation must be considered and embraced. Huobi Chain is fully capable of supporting compliance and regulatory frameworks on the chain. It integrates decentralized digital identity (DID) at the bottom layer and designs smart contract execution authority , The overall supervision solution that combines the identity characteristics of users. At the same time, innovatively put forward the concept of "supervisory node".

Second, Huobi Chain can be tailored for financial derivatives scenarios and support financial application developers to create applications independently.

Huobi Chain adopts the self-developed Overlord consensus algorithm, and the consensus efficiency has been greatly improved compared with PBFT, Tendermint, Hotstuff, etc.

In terms of programming languages, it supports multi-language and high-performance smart contracts: Huobi Chain supports users to deploy smart contracts, so that the chain has the ability to develop complex applications and provides possibilities for the realization of vertical business. The virtual machine adopts the open source RISC-V instruction set, the tool chain is relatively complete, and the compatibility is stronger (gcc/gdb/llvm compatible). At present, many developers in the community are developing Ruby, Python, TypeScript, Go around RISC-VM , Rust and other interpreters, the future ecology will be more abundant.

With these design optimizations, the current measured throughput on the Huobi public chain test network can reach thousands of TPS. Of course, we know this is far from our goal. In order to meet the needs of a large number of users and transactions, Huobi Chain will support third parties to develop and operate sub-chains based on the Huobi public chain protocol: Huobi public chain opens side chain access, providing side chains for users with special requirements such as special compliance and high performance. Link into services to meet in-depth customization needs.

Some other platforms may focus more on the application of encrypted economic transactions, but Huobi Chain has been moving in a flexible and regulatory-friendly direction from the beginning of design, which allows Huobi Chain to have more room for imagination. Become a financial public chain facing the future trillion-level financial market.

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Nervos itself is a technical public chain, and Huobi Chain is a financial public chain. Why do you provide technical support for Huobi Chain? If the domestic DeFi ecology develops on the Huobi Chain, will it be a kind of ecological resource grabbing for Nervos and other public chains? (Why do you say that the two chains are not competing but complementary?)

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Lu Guoning丨Nervos

In fact, we all agree with a point of view that the future of the blockchain will definitely be able to carry more usage scenarios, and it should definitely not only be the current achievement. In the face of the diverse needs of people in the future, different blockchains are needed to meet them.

First of all, people's demand for asset security and decentralization is people's original demand for blockchain. The reason why people choose blockchain technology is because blockchain is the only known technology for the decentralized issuance of assets. It provides people with asset recording, transfer and contract functions without any permission. Anyone can dispose of the blockchain assets they hold at any time. This allowed the privatization of property to be implemented 100% for the first time.

The public chain for this type of demand must be a PoW public chain, because PoW is the safest and most decentralized consensus mechanism known so far.

Nervos CKB is a public chain created to meet people's asset decentralization needs. It guarantees its own strong security and strong decentralization capabilities through various flexible and comprehensive designs. At this level, Nervos CKB is a truly decentralized blockchain infrastructure that does not require access to the blockchain, and anyone can join the network. No matter who it is, as long as people have the demand for asset security and decentralization, they can put their assets on CKB.

At the same time, people will also have a demand for decentralized transactions of assets. A platform that can accommodate such demands must be a compliant and open financial platform, and such platforms must be able to meet local regulatory requirements. Most of the members of the Nervos team are from China. In China, we also hope that the blockchain can change the existing financial infrastructure and ecology to meet people's needs for decentralized asset transactions.

If you want to promote such a vision in China, you must have resources. At present, it is not banks or financial institutions that have the most resources to achieve this goal in China, but enterprises that are born out of the blockchain field. They have accumulated enough resources to transform the existing financial ecology and interests. pattern.

At this point, there is no other than Huobi. In China, Huobi has resource advantages and pursues an open financial platform that can serve more users, reduce costs and increase efficiency. Making finance more efficient and making wealth more free is very much in line with Huobi's values.

Therefore, the two chains, Nervos CKB and Huobi Chain, are not competitive but complementary.

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In the past six months, I have communicated with the top leaders of many public chain teams. In terms of direction selection, some teams are determined to invest a lot of resources in deploying DeFi; Developers are encouraged to explore each scenario. How does Nervos plan its public chain strategy and ecological development? Will there be any actions on the DeFi track?

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Lu Guoning丨Nervos

DeFi has made great progress in the past two years, which is a light for us in the blockchain field. Especially in the past two months of 2020, DeFi has developed like a blowout in the amount of collateral locked on the asset side. I think there are two opportunities for the development of DeFi.

On the one hand, the development scale of Stablecoin has changed from quantitative change to qualitative change. On the other hand, the ecological development of Ethereum has accumulated a certain number of users, and the development environment and ecology, especially the development of EVM smart contracts are becoming more and more perfect, and a large number of developers have gathered to explore the interoperability of contracts. The attempt to construct new forms of financial services has resulted in a large number of new projects, products, and services springing up in the entire ecology, making the entire industry full of imagination for the potential and future of DeFi.

DeFi is a must for the future. In other words, the future-oriented public chain must provide the greatest support for the development of DeFi in terms of infrastructure. The original intention of the development of Nervos Network is to provide a multi-asset value storage public chain at the bottom, and To support the rich application ecology of the upper layer, the role of the entire Nervos Network is to provide infrastructure support for the future encryption economy ecology. The overall planning of Nervos Network actually coincides with the current development goals of Defi.

In particular, it should be emphasized that Nervos has great advantages in carrying multi-asset value storage. Nervos' unique Cell model is something that can affect the entire asset programming paradigm.

On the one hand, a series of innovative protocols and products of DeFi are limited by the performance of the current public chain itself, as well as the weak support of programming paradigms for asset programming and asset cross-chain, while the design idea of ​​Nervos is to provide asset issuance and safe custody at the bottom layer, and It can be mapped to the upper layer very flexibly to execute business efficiently.

The main layout of Nervos CKB in 2020 is the developer ecology and infrastructure improvement. As the core team and community improve the Layer 2 ecology and community according to the established plan, these will soon work on CKB.

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Nervos spends 30 million US dollars as an ecological development fund? For investors, how to evaluate or explain to investors, is it worthwhile to arrange the funds in this way?

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Lu Guoning丨Nervos

Yes, we announced the establishment of a $30 million fund in January 2020 to incentivize development teams and projects that help Nervos develop infrastructure and ecology.

The goal of Nervos 2020 planning is to have a robust global developer community and to speed up the process of building the developer community as much as possible. The global technical community of Ethereum took five years to achieve today's results. The industry will not give another five years to another project, so we must try our best to catch up and shorten this process as much as possible.

The title is straightforward. When asked how to explain the arrangement of our funds to investors, our opinion is that Nervos CKB has spent two years of accumulation, and has released the underlying public chain online, but it cannot be repeated in five years. We have to go through the whole process within one or two years. If we have capital reserves and are capable, if we can’t make good use of the advantages of capital and resources, through reasonable allocation of capital resources, the maximum To promote the development of ecology and community to the maximum extent is that it is impossible to give investors an explanation.

After the launch of the CKB mainnet, we have been emphasizing that we will focus on the development of the ecology. Ecological prosperity is a particularly important part of the Nervos network. In the early stage of ecological development, especially in the early stage of promotion, we talked about many excellent teams at home and abroad, and they all showed interest in cooperating with us.

In the process of discussing cooperation with these excellent teams, we found that both parties need a clear cooperation method, especially how to use our ecological development fund to motivate these teams that can help our ecological construction.

The Grants plan is a very suitable plan for us to promote ecological development. The whole process, including the submission of proposals and the review process, is publicized in the community, and the whole process is open and transparent. This cooperation model has received positive responses from many teams, and we have also adopted this plan Get more opportunities to meet many world-class excellent teams to discuss cooperation.

At present, we have received more than ten proposals, many of which are excellent and distinctive, and some teams have already received Grants. I believe in our attitude towards the development of ecology, and I also believe that the infinite flexibility of CKB can support the wonderful ideas of our partners.

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What are the benefits to the Nervos ecological construction of the project that has received the Grant? For example, what kind of imagination space can Bitcoin SPV Utils and P-wallet have?

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Lu Guoning丨Nervos

The process of the Grants program is all open and transparent. Because we have to learn by doing in the early stage of the Grants project, we are very cautious in the review of the projects. Currently, the projects that have received the Grants have been screened and evaluated layer by layer. We believe that the first A batch of these projects will play a pivotal role in ecological development.

The first project to get Grants is Bitcoin SPV Utils, the project leader James Prestwich is the founder of Summa.one, Bitcoin-SPV is a set of libraries used to handle communication between Bitcoin and other chains, supporting cross-chain communication, including Exchange, relay and bridging, in layman's terms, can realize the cross-chain from BTC to CKB.

The second project is an open source IDE editor customized for CKB, which comes from the powerful Obsidian Labs team (Obsidian Labs). The emergence of IDE can greatly reduce the development threshold for developers. Developers only need to focus on the smart contract development itself, and leave other complex and tedious work to the IDE. As the infrastructure of blockchain projects, IDE can greatly accelerate the development speed of ecological developers, and can also attract more developers to easily and conveniently join in ecological development.

In addition, we have received a large number of project proposals submitted by small partners in the community. Here I would like to share a very amazing project: p-wallet, which comes from Frank of the Thunder Rabbit team. p-wallet can make CKB assets available everywhere. We can send and receive CKB with Ethereum address through p-wallet, and can directly deposit DAO. In the future, it will also support mainstream public chains such as BTC, EOS, and Tron.

In other words, all users with these public chain addresses can become a part of the Nervos ecosystem without feeling. I was very shocked when I saw this product, because the idea is very imaginative, and it is very cleverly combined with the underlying advantages of CKB.

The p-wallet wallet can be embedded into most of the wallets on the market, such as Coinbase, imToken, Trust Wallet, Cobo, TokenPocket, Bitpie, Alpha Wallet, Math Wallet, etc... No matter whether they support CKB now, through p-wallet immediately You can use these wallets to send and receive CKB directly. What is even more imaginative is that in the future, dApps in the CKB ecosystem can directly access all the above infrastructures through pw-sdk.

This allows us to see another possibility of CKB ecological development, we can:

Accommodate existing blockchain users to the greatest extent; maximize access to existing blockchain infrastructure; maximize the proximity between developers and existing blockchain users and existing blockchain infrastructure The distance between them; to adapt to the future blockchain development trend to the greatest extent.

We're actually very proud of that, and that's what we're looking for, that strength that comes from the community.

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It is difficult to be a public chain, and it is even more difficult to be a pow public chain. Because it spans the mining circle, chain circle, and currency circle. Personally, I am not familiar with the mining circle and find it very mysterious. Some people say that miners have no faith and only pursue profits. Mining coins means selling coins to pay electricity bills. Is it really? What is the layout of Nervos in the mining circle? How does Nervos deal with miners' smashing?

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Lu Guoning丨Nervos

Yes, building a PoW public chain is much more difficult than we imagined. For a PoW public chain, miners play a very, very important role. The question raised the question of whether there is any belief. I don’t think so. We can use belief to restrain ourselves, but we should not use belief to judge others. This is a basic principle. I would like to say that miners play a pivotal role in the PoW ecology, and they invest a lot and bear huge uncertainties. These are facts that are easily overlooked.

From our point of view, since we have chosen the path of PoW, we have chosen to coexist harmoniously with the miner group. In terms of protocol design, we must fully consider the interests and demands of the miner group, so that we can better cooperate with the miners, and in the future In the process of collaboration, the value of security provided by miners is of great significance, but not all miners understand how important the work they do is to us, and the reality is that miners do not always talk about value and meaning with us, But based on some simpler reasons, they especially supported us. Many details in this process actually moved me very much in retrospect.

Everyone knows that the cold start of the PoW chain is very difficult. It seems that in ancient times when the medical conditions were not good, the birth of a baby was no different from going to hell for the child and the mother. Let the hard work of the past two years and the hard work of the team go to waste. For the cold start of the PoW chain to succeed, it must be able to attract miners to invest in computing power to provide security protection for the main network.

Therefore, in the early stage of the mainnet launch, in order to attract the support of miners, we invested a lot of energy to publicize and promote the miners circle. I have participated in many activities and meetings organized by miners and mine pools to promote and promote the use of Nervos. PoW consensus algorithm and attract miners to mine.

In the process of dealing with miners, whether we are talking about our understanding of PoW or the concepts we insist on, miners are the group that understands us the most, agrees with us the most, and is also the group that can most resonate with us.

We have done five rounds of mining competitions during the testnet. In the early stage, it was CPU mining, and in the later stage, it was mining with graphics card. But no matter which stage, we have received strong support from major domestic mining pools and miners.

It has only been more than three months since the main network was launched. I agree that there will be market fluctuations in the short term, but we are all long-termists. We always believe that many designs of CKB can stand the test of time. We have firm Confidence and plenty of patience.

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There is a point of view that private equity cannot be used for PoW projects. In this way, miners and private equity investors are rivals, and the result is mutual harm and no consensus can be reached. What do you think of this point of view, and how to deal with this risk?

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Lu Guoning丨Nervos

Very good question, in my impression, no one seems to have asked me this question in AMA or similar occasions, and this question involves the choice of a development line.

It took nearly ten years for Bitcoin to gain people's consensus on him, and it took seven years for Ethereum to achieve today's results. You will find that these projects start from an extremely scarce resource, through the continuous operation of the community, through the continuous expansion of the scale and boundaries of the community, and constantly attract talents and resources, and develop bit by bit. We can put This development is called community success.

Another way is to use the power of capital, especially in the early stage of development, the power of capital can help you, allowing you to take a path that others may need to take in a few years in a short period of time. Then go to the resume community. The final outcome is still to rely on the community to obtain the resources and talents needed for long-term development through the community.

Taking the commercial route is very dependent on the comprehensive ability of the founding team and the judgment of the future. Only when there is a set of future-oriented solutions can we really rely on the power of capital to get out.

There are two routes, one is the community route and the other is the capital route. In fact, these two routes can help the project to develop successfully. There is no better or worse, and it has no direct relationship with the essence of PoW. It is not to say that PoW must choose the community route instead of the commercial route.

We have seen the success of Bitcoin and the success of Ethereum, but in the past so many years, there have actually been countless PoW projects, starting from the community, and attracting a lot of resources, and finally moving towards projects that are all over the place. It is all, and it will cause a huge waste of resources. If you take the capital route, it is essentially a huge early risk and uncertainty that is borne by institutions and early investors. No project can guarantee success, so institutions And professional investors can better balance the risks faced by early-stage projects, and we cannot turn a blind eye to this risk.

So if you put it today, if you have an idea, can you take the community route? Our judgment is even more difficult, because the current blockchain industry has long been infiltrated by capital, especially the development of the public chain, which has developed to the stage of capital-driven, and through the drive of capital to promote the division of labor and refinement of the industry , it is no longer the stage of slash-and-burn farming that just started five or six years ago.

If your idea cannot be realized in time, or the iteration speed is not fast enough, it is likely that the later public chain projects will absorb the experience and ideas of the predecessors, and use the power of capital to quickly achieve surpassing, so you choose pure community mode development, your Competitors are other capital-driven projects and teams, and the time window given to you by history is so fleeting, how do you choose?

If you want to redesign a better and stronger chain, you need to invest huge resources. And these investments are not everyone can imagine. Therefore, we must get enough resources from the initial stage, strive to catch up, and try to shorten the distance between us and our goals.

Of course, we understand that there are disadvantages in using the power of capital. We do not deny that everyone will have their own trade-offs, but in fact, after obtaining the resources for survival and development, it actually speeds up the process of expanding the Nervos ecosystem. Each role in the ecosystem Consensus will also be gradually reached in the rapidly advancing time stream.

For a long time, we have been providing resources for Nervos ecological construction, including the Grants plan and so on. We believe that Nervos can grow up healthily and will catch up with its predecessors in the near future.

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This year is very unusual. From an industry perspective, what trends are you focusing on? What are the most noteworthy aspects of nervos' roadmap this year?

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Lu Guoning丨Nervos

In 2020, in addition to continuing to improve the CKB protocol layer and on-chain development, we will also focus on three things: developer experience, Layer 2 technology, and the continued growth of the developer community.

The Nervos core development team will continue to improve the developer experience, providing more optional smart contract programming languages, more powerful RPC, more mature SDK and more complete documentation. In terms of Layer 2 technology, including the Muta-based chain measurement solution, we will also do the Rollup solution and the layout of the Channel Network on CKB at the same time. In terms of the developer community, we are actively digging and looking for excellent blockchain product development teams around the world to introduce and promote Nervos public chain technology to them.

2020 is destined to be an extraordinary year from the beginning, and we also hope that more partners can join the Nervos ecosystem. At present, we have launched the Regional Community Leaders Program, and we welcome community members who understand local culture and have profound insight to join us to enhance the influence of Nervos on a global scale.