Olaf Carlson-Wee, former board member of the Tezos Foundation, founder of Polychain Capital. He recently accepted an interview with Tezos Commons to share his thoughts on Tezos and the blockchain trends and innovations that excite him in 2020.

Question 1: Polychain Capital is one of the most important early cryptocurrency funds since 2016. Four years on, the cryptocurrency space has changed dramatically. What innovations in the blockchain space in 2020 are Polychain excited about?

One area of ​​great interest to me is the automation of corporate structures.

Systems such as MakerDAO and StakerDAO (StakerDAO is an ecological project of Tezos, which has received investment from Polychain and Lemniscap), they look a bit like companies but their products are smart contracts. The tokens replace the shares of the company, whose role is to aggregate the income generated by the successful operation of the smart contract.

The above is a field. Another thing we're excited about is the iteration of Proof-of-Stake as a consensus mechanism and behavioral innovation that drives cryptocurrencies. Take, for example, Bitcoin mining, and the function hashrate you're trying to optimize. Bitcoin mining is used as an incentive mechanism to successfully generate a sustainable hash rate.

And one of the things we're thinking about is how to use similar cryptoeconomic incentives for other kinds of human collaboration problems. So we're looking, can you build other types of human behavior or network effects other than bitcoin mining and hash rate, and we're really looking forward to the answer being yes.

Question 2: Polychain Capital is one of the largest Tezos bakers. Besides that, you talked about Tezos on multiple occasions. How is Tezos different compared to other PoS protocols?

Tezos is the only cryptocurrency that I think is scalable and has a formal upgrade mechanism. In fact, it is the only non-monetary P2P system in the world with a formal upgrade mechanism.

What may make Tezos unique relative to other types of P2P systems is that it has a Sybil-proof voting mechanism. It is a vote weighted by the number of tokens, if you hold more tokens, you have greater voting power.

This upgradability is an important feature. Other P2P systems or cryptocurrencies do not have a formally definable mechanism for upgrades that would extend sustainability. It does not require rough community consensus. I think rough community consensus is a naive way to approach a cryptocurrency that is potentially worth trillions of dollars and capable of carrying trillions of dollars in financial transactions.

I don't think you can scale these types of systems with rough community consensus. The only way is to never let the system upgrade. This is how Bitcoin works. I think this is another very legitimate way to upgrade the P2P system. Obviously this has advantages and disadvantages.

So Tezos, to me, is the only system that is scalable and has a formal upgrade mechanism. This is different from other systems in the cryptocurrency space and the whole P2P system.

Attached is a comparison of the fundamentals of Tezos at the beginning of last year and the beginning of this year, from the loss-making fast chain

【Early last year】

1 The matter between the team and the foundation has just been resolved, and the project has been launched smoothly and developed in an orderly manner

2 The "Athens" proposal is about to go online, and the first smart contract platform that implements democratic governance is about to open (the reason for the rise from more than 2 yuan to 7-8 yuan from the end of February to the end of May last year is largely because of this)

3 The concept of PoS and Staking is in its infancy

4 Launched at the worst moment, the price fell to the bottom following the bear market, and the market value ranked outside the 20th place, far behind the other two (EOS and ADA) of the original Ethereum killer Yusanjia

5 There was a discussion on Twitter, and a group of Shitcoin enthusiasts like it, but the discussion mainly revolved around the market value has fallen below the fund held by the foundation, and everyone thinks it is undervalued

6 Apart from Gateio, there are basically no relatively large exchanges (Huobi was also listed later, but I forgot whether it was at the beginning of last year or the end of 2018)

7 There are no applications on the network, and there are no special use cases. STO is very suitable for Tezos (chain governance has anti-fork continuity), so it has been proposed by many people.

8 The foundation’s lawsuit was resolved, the foundation’s control was regained, and the foundation changed its leadership for reorganization

【Earlier this year】

1 The project is developing slowly and orderly, and the active addresses are growing slowly. Although it is slow, it is already one of the few projects with address growth in the bear market

2 The main network has experienced Athens, Babylon, and Carthage. Although there is an unrelated fork project harassment by Dune in the middle, the governance is relatively mature. DAO has gained a lot of practice and attention in Ethereum in the past year, which has also increased everyone's dissatisfaction with Ethereum governance and interest in other governance-based public chains

3 PoS and Staking have become popular, Tezos has become the first project supported by Coinbase, and the first batch of projects supported by Binance has become the benchmark of PoS and Staking economy in the market

4 The price has risen tenfold (in mid-February, it is currently cut from the highest price), and the market value has reached the top ten. Compared with the two first-generation Ethereum killers at the time of ICO, it has surpassed ADA, and now the market value is half of EOS

5 Twitter's discussion tags are close to Twitter's popularity Wang Ripple and Chainlink, and have become one of the most popular discussion projects on Twitter. There are a lot of big Vs shouting orders

6 The big exchanges that were supposed to be listed have all been listed this year, such as OKEX/Coinbase/Binance, etc.

7 There are still no applications on the Internet. Basically, the current state of the Internet has no use cases except for Staking. Defi/NFT and STO may be three directions. The male founder is engaged in the integration of DeFi and Staking, and the female founder is engaged in joint Marvel. NFT and STO are quite eye-catching. Last year, assets of nearly 3 billion U.S. dollars were pulled. The issuance of STO based on Tezos is also an achievement worth showing off.

8 The foundation released its financial report in the middle of last year, with more than 600 million US dollars in funds. It just released the latest financial report a few weeks ago, and it still has more than 600 million US dollars