The recent rapid spread of the epidemic around the world, coupled with the financial and economic problems that have accumulated for many years, has caused severe shocks in the global market through the fuse of the epidemic. The ten-year bull market in the U.S. stock market collapsed, and circuit breakers occurred four times within a month.
The digital currency market has also fallen from a recent high of more than 10,000 US dollars to a minimum of 3,800 US dollars, and has now risen to more than 6,000 US dollars. This year may be a big test for the blockchain industry, whether it is mining, public chain or DeFi.
How do public chain project parties view the global market turmoil? How is the anti-risk ability of the public chain team? How to survive this cold winter? What directions are worth exploring this year?
So we invited the top three voters YAS, Harmony, and QuarkChain to share their views from the perspective of the public chain.
There is a lot of content, and it will be divided into multiple articles to share. The following are some opinions, welcome to read.
Buffett丨CryptoBuffett
Welcome a few guests, you can say hello to the community members first, and briefly introduce the projects you and your team are working on.
Xiang Yazhen丨QuarkChain
Let me introduce myself first. I am the CMO of QuarkChain and one of the first three partners who participated in this project. Before that, I graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University and Johns Hopkins in the United States.
I first worked in finance on Wall Street for 2 years, and in Silicon Valley for 6 years in the Internet, so I can be regarded as a veteran of the Internet. Mainly engaged in Data Science, as well as the direction of product.
Let me briefly introduce what QuarkChain is. QuarkChain is a relatively flexible and highly scalable blockchain underlying architecture based on sharding. In terms of sharding, you have heard a lot this year, because it is mainly Ethereum 2.0, and there are probably seven or eight projects that are currently using this technical framework.
But when it first came out in early 2017, it was actually a technology that was questioned a lot by everyone. At present, we are the first public chain that successfully implements state sharding, and at the same time, we are the first project that is doing heterogeneous sharding in terms of high throughput.
Lan Rongjian丨Harmony
Hello,I am Lan Rongjian, the co-founder and CTO of Harmony. I was responsible for the search infrastructure construction of the Android app store at Google. I was also one of the early founders of the ABC blockchain community in Silicon Valley. My research direction during my doctoral period was space-time Query (spatio-temporal querying) and map-based visualization aspects.
Harmony is a high-performance public chain project based on state sharding and PoS. Our design uses a secure random sharding process. While ensuring security and decentralization, it can greatly improve the transaction processing capabilities of the system, and The cost of transaction processing is distributed to multiple shards, which greatly reduces the cost of transaction processing.
Our core technical team comes from Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc. The founder Stephen Tse previously founded the map social service software Spotsetter, which was later successfully acquired by Apple.
Harmony's goal is to provide the most secure and efficient infrastructure for the global decentralized economy. Recently, we are preparing to launch the staking function, and the annualized return is very generous. Everyone is welcome to participate when the time comes.
Gale丨YAS Network
secondary title
What is the team's belief in the blockchain?
Buffett丨CryptoBuffett
The currency market has plummeted recently, and the global economy is unstable. Many people believe that Bitcoin is not a safe haven for funds, and it is also a great test for the project. At present, the public chain does not have a good profit model except for the secondary market.
Excuse me, what is the source of your team's belief in the blockchain? How do you view the market? What is the current team's ability to resist risks?
Xiang Yazhen丨QuarkChain
The recent US stock circuit breaker is the issue that everyone is most concerned about. Let's talk about US stocks first. Structural problems have always existed. The growth model after 2008 is to lower the cost of capital and borrow crazily, so the company is highly leveraged and the company repurchases shares crazily.
From 2009 to now, the company has repurchased 5 tn shares, but if the economy continues to operate as when there is no epidemic, there will be no problem. Because at least everyone has cash flow, and no one is unemployed. This is the inertial logic of the US stock market.
The second question is a derivative of the first. It is the issue of policy space. A large amount of debt makes it impossible to raise interest rates. Therefore, the interest rates of central banks in various countries are very low, and there is little room for interest rate hikes. Now that the interest rates have been reduced to zero, there is no room for interest rate cuts.
This financial downturn should not leave Wall Street with corpses and various unemployment like the last time, but it will have a greater impact on Silicon Valley. After all, Silicon Valley is the beneficiary of the 2008 financial crisis. Capital is cheap and people are looking for any growth regardless of the cost. It doesn’t matter if they don’t make money and burn money at all. It seems like yesterday that a large number of Wall Street people were attracted by million-dollar options and flocked to Silicon Valley in 1516.
Under the influence of the US stock market, everyone will find that btc was also almost cut in half at the beginning, and even fell below 4000 during the panic, mainly because everyone felt that cash should be king during the panic, which caused a stampede effect.
At that time, many people asked me whether btc would return to zero, and whether the secondary market in the entire currency circle would disappear. But after that, everyone will find that the U.S. stock market continues to break and refresh history day by day, but BTC has gradually stabilized. Today it is directly pulled back to 6000.
BTC was born in the last round of financial crisis. According to our words, let alone a child, it is already very strong and can take care of itself. This is the whole financial environment.
Under the global community, China may be the only place with less impact, and the 340,000 new infrastructure will also help the current key industries recover, including the blockchain technology mentioned in 1024 last year.
Why is the blockchain so important in China? Because smart cities are our strategic development direction, and the four main components are the Internet of Things, 5g, artificial intelligence and blockchain. Therefore, although the global economy is not good, there is a great opportunity for the domestic blockchain industry to land.
I just said so much that you may be a little confused. What does this have to do with QuarkChain?
I don't know if you have heard of hadoop. We hope to become the same blockchain open source protocol as Hadoop. On the one hand, we welcome people with technical skills all over the world to use our blockchain bottom layer to build their own chains, or dapps.
Just like Facebook and other companies use hadoop to build their own big data kingdom. On the other hand, if there is no technical ability, we also provide enterprise solution to help customize the solution. At present, the enterprise application of blockchain is still in its infancy, and those who are willing to pay are concentrated in China, because the supervision is mainly on the alliance chain for the time being.
I just analyzed the environment for you. So we have developed a heterogeneous sharding framework from scratch. This framework is QuarkChain for the public chain and Quark-Union for the alliance chain. And we also have a mechanism to get through the two. Now we mainly receive orders in China to provide enterprise services, and continue to build open source communities overseas to let more people know about heterogeneous sharding and QuarkChain.
Lan Rongjian丨Harmony
Recently, the global economy is very turbulent. The U.S. stock market has been blown several times, and oil prices have plummeted. In order to rescue the market, the Federal Reserve started the era of zero interest rates, carried out a new round of large-scale quantitative easing, and bypassed banks to start buying commercial paper assets. All of this can only show that the traditional financial system is full of problems, and systemic risks are always present. There is a cycle between accumulation and eruption, and financial crises always erupt with the economic cycle.
The risks of the traditional financial system mainly come from credit problems and risk mismatches, such as the credit rating problem of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and the risk covering problem of subprime assets, and the fact that hedge funds in this crisis cannot achieve under the Volcker Rule The problem of forced liquidation due to risk hedging is difficult to avoid in the traditional financial system.
The reason is that the credit framework of traditional finance is ultimately determined by people. If those who create financial products do not abide by the rules, trust will eventually collapse.
And this is precisely the problem that the blockchain system can solve. Replace human-based trust with code-based trust. Any rules can be implemented in the form of smart contracts, and cannot be tampered with. It is open and transparent, so that the trust relationship formed in the middle Indestructible, which can provide a foundation of trust for many financial activities.
The birth of Bitcoin is actually to use the logic of the blockchain to realize the role of the central bank and completely avoid the risks brought about by currency over-issuance. Many Defi projects are also using decentralized methods to replace traditional financial services, such as lending , and transaction matching, etc.
Therefore, our confidence in the blockchain comes from our firm belief that at many levels of society, especially in the financial system, code-based trust will gradually replace human-based trust, because the latter is unreliable on a long-term scale of.
For the market, everyone is expecting that Bitcoin can become a safe-haven asset. The sharp drop in Bitcoin has hit everyone hard. They feel that the safe-haven property of Bitcoin is just empty talk, but I think it is still too early to draw conclusions.
First of all, the current market value of Bitcoin is still very small, and the current Bitcoin cannot accommodate a large amount of funds for hedging. Secondly, one of the factors in this crisis is the extreme lack of liquidity in the market. When the stock market plummets, in order to pay the margin in time, people will definitely sell Bitcoin, which is highly volatile and risky, to provide liquidity of.
But all this does not mean that Bitcoin is not the target of value storage. In the second half of this crisis, Bitcoin may still remain strong when other assets fall on a large scale, or even skyrocket. At that time, Bitcoin will make people all over the world See the vulnerability of the traditional financial world while building faith in a new machine civilization.
After the new round of financing last year, our team is still relatively cautious in asset management. The current asset allocation is relatively safe, so please rest assured. At the same time, we are also using the acquired Quidd project to explore monetization channels.
Gale丨YAS Network
The recent economic situation is very bad, Bitcoin has not become a safe haven for funds, and even we have seen the traditional safe-haven tool gold also cannot escape the decline. Although the decline is very rapid, there are no major problems in the overall economic structure and the prospects of the blockchain industry. The disaster is only temporary. The market is still in panic recently, and the risk of buying bottoms is relatively high now. YAS started with free airdrops. Under the leadership of the initiator AP, we have built a stable main network. Now the main network of YAS has The same development environment and functions as EOS. At present, we have built a decentralized exchange CODEX on the EOS main network and the YAS main network, with several deep and good trading pairs and a decentralized dividend mechanism.
secondary title
Where is the value of the public chain?
Buffett丨CryptoBuffett
The next question is also more acute. We can find that there are no new public chain projects for financing. Some people think that the story of the public chain has been told. How much to change.
We can't help but wonder, where is the value of the public chain? What changes can it bring to the economy or the real world? In addition to performance, what attributes should public chains have in the future? Want to support cross-chain and privacy?
Xiang Yazhen丨QuarkChain
Before going deep into the question, I want to give you a little science.
At present, the underlying architecture of all blockchains, including Bitcoin, including anonymous coins, such as Monroe, Zcash, and even the relatively new Grin smiley coin, including programmable smart contract platforms ETH, EOS and all public chains The underlying structure is a combination of four elements. The current bottom layer of the public chain has a fixed framework for these four elements. Once a consensus, a transaction model, a ledger model, and a token economics are selected, they cannot be changed.
Consensus mechanism (POW, POS, DPOS, PBFT, etc.)
Transaction model (BTC type transaction model, different virtual machines virtual machine, privacy transaction model, etc.)
Token Economics
Token Economics
This is my summary of some problems in the public chain industry:
1. The first problem with the public chain is pure hype. Some of the previous public chains are actually the four-dimensional arrangement and combination just mentioned, and many chains do not need to exist. For example, I use the A of Bitcoin, the B of Ethereum, and the C of EOS to piece together the modules of the four elements, so that it becomes a new public chain, and a new coin can be issued. Did not bring any value to the industry.
2. Excessive belief in TPS. The problem now is that the existing TPS solutions can far meet the current needs. It is not that TPS is not important, but that only solving TPS cannot solve the problems of the entire industry.
3. Most public chains have made breakthroughs in one of these four elements. Most of them are working hard on the consensus. These are worthy of our affirmation, no matter in any direction, whether it is a virtual machine, or a consensus, or a ledger, or token economics, making real industry contributions on these can promote the progress of the industry .
But if a breakthrough is achieved in a certain element, is it necessary to make another chain? In my opinion it's not really necessary. At present, you can reach the latest in the industry, but with the development of technology, when new technologies come out, there is no way to iterate and evolve continuously. Integrating new technologies is equivalent to just taking a small achievement It has become a dead frame, which is actually of little significance.
For example, now I have developed a faster and safer consensus PoX, so I made a new public chain, hoping that everyone will use PoX, but then a better consensus PoZ appeared, this public chain Because the bottom layer is fixed, PoZ cannot be incorporated into its own system.
4. The wave of the public chain has always been telling the same story template, first to improve TPS, second to build a community, third to launch the main network, and fourth to continuously launch a bunch of DAPPs.
At present, dapp only supports smart contract tokens like erc20. Compared with native tokens such as eth eos, the functions are limited. So everyone can only create new chains. For example, ether cats are making their own chains.
5. The fixed underlying structure of the public chain causes the public chain to select customers instead of adapting to them. For example, customers need to use a consensus, and only support b consensus. Say no, the public chain can't do it, so you can find someone else.
After these problems, we can deduce in which direction a good public chain should develop and improve in the future.
The first must have high throughput. Although TPS is not a problem, it will definitely not work if the basic needs are not met.
The second is to be flexible and upgradeable, and have the ability to continuously absorb new technologies, so that this chain can always be on the road of evolution without being left behind. For example, you have to allow those who want to be chains to be chains, and those who want to be DAPPs to be DAPPs. Those who want to issue native tokens can issue native tokens instead of smart contract tokens.
The third is to become a more open platform. There are no barriers for developers, miners, and users to enter and exit, and the cost is low. Even if everyone has different characteristics, they can work on a common bottom layer, so as to give full play to their respective comparative advantages. Just like the saying in sociology that "everyone is beautiful in its own way, and the beauty is shared in common", finally reaching the realm of harmony but difference.
In the past, someone would tell me that new public chains are constantly appearing, and some old public chains are also dying. Will there be a new public chain that will emerge one day and dominate the world? At that time, I asked him how old is new? Because I think technological development has no end. If you are in a relatively fixed arrangement, there will always be new technologies.
From Ethereum 1.0 to 2.0, everyone found that I had no way to upgrade 1.0 to 2.0. I could only throw away 1.0 and start over with 2.0. Such a loss, for example, if a mobile phone using 5G cannot communicate with a mobile phone using 4G, and a mobile phone using 4G cannot communicate with a 3G mobile phone, then the mobile communication market will be in chaos, and there must be no one. used. This kind of hard fork upgrade will change the community and the original basic disk, and finally cause losses.
But if the entire architecture is already very flexible, new things can be connected to the old ones, and everyone can coexist flexibly. As long as new things come out, they can be reflected on the new shard chain. For example, we can add shards of privacy coins, shards of stable coins, and even Libra. Make the new functions compatible with the old functions. By continuously adding functions, on the one hand, it can ensure the steady growth of the basic disk without loss, and on the other hand, the network functions can be gradually upgraded.
Therefore, the definition of public chain in a broader sense is not only the main network + dapp, but also the cross-chain represented by Polkadot cosmos, and the heterogeneous fragmentation represented by QuarkChain, which makes the framework more flexible and can even support the underlying architecture of the public chain .
Lan Rongjian丨Harmony
This is what I think here. There is indeed no new public chain coming out recently, but this does not mean that the public chain has been completely iterated. The current Ethereum still has performance problems, and in the recent sharp drop in currency prices It showed up again.
Although other public chain projects have improved performance attributes to a certain extent, they have abandoned security and decentralization, which actually completely deviates from the essence of blockchain. Currently, the only solution on the market that can improve performance while ensuring security and decentralization is sharding technology.
Ethereum 2.0 is trying to solve performance problems through sharding technology, but the progress is very slow. Both Harmony and Ethereum 2.0 are public chain solutions that combine sharding and PoS. Our main network v0 has been launched last year. The currency has completed the docking of the exchange, and the next step is the launch of Open Staking, which marks Harmony as the first public chain project to realize sharding and PoS.
In addition to performance, another element required as the infrastructure of the future decentralized economy is privacy protection privacy. In fact, many economic activities actually require privacy protection, such as bank transfer information, etc. At the same time, these activities need to meet regulatory review. This requires that the public chain can meet regulatory review and verification while providing transaction privacy.
Prior to this, privacy and supervision were almost in opposition, and they could not have both. However, some recent cryptography research results, using zero-knowledge proof technology, have been able to complete the necessary calculation audit work while protecting transaction privacy.
This year can be said to be the first year of the practical use of zero-knowledge proof technology, and many new research results this year have already met product-level requirements. In the next few years, privacy and zk will be the driving force behind the explosion of more applications. We at Harmony are also doing intensive research on zero-knowledge proofs, and will launch functions such as private computing and transactions this year.
Gale丨YAS Network
The YAS public chain project has not raised funds, and the token distribution is completed through free airdrops. We believe that the value of the public chain lies in a community with consensus, "a strong community is a strong blockchain". Therefore, the security of the public chain is more important than the performance, and the management of the community is a more important and valuable thing.
Although there are more and more main networks now, the blockchain is a change in production relations. If the public chain is still thinking about how to solve the problem of production efficiency, of course it will be the opposite. Solving the problem of inter-chain asset transactions is very important.
YAS's exchange CODEX is working on research on cross-chain transactions, and is currently conducting a test called MPA (Market Anchored Assets), which is to anchor such as foreign exchange, crude oil, futures and any digital assets on the YAS mainnet value, so as to realize cross-chain asset transactions. The goal of CODEX is to connect all known main networks and realize "decentralized cross-chain transactions" under the background of "big main network".
