At 4:00 pm on February 24, 2021, Mask Network founder & CEO Suji Yan visited the Uniswap Chinese community. Hosted by the co-founder of BlockArk, Captain, he conducted "Mask Network: Building an Encrypted World Entrance with a Decentralized Social Network" in the Uniswap Chinese community The theme of the AMA event, this live broadcast event is supported by BlockArk, ChainNews, Odaily, Block Beats, Encryption Court media support, live sharing content is organized as follows:

Before the event begins, let me briefly introduce BlockArk. BlockArk is an investment bank and marketing agency in the encrypted asset industry. It manages ArkStream Capital, a primary and secondary fund focused on cryptocurrency. BlockArk integrates investment, branding, market growth, and strategic consulting, and is committed to promoting the growth of Web3.0 unicorns.

Before the event begins, let me briefly introduce BlockArk. BlockArk is an investment bank and marketing agency in the encrypted asset industry. It manages ArkStream Capital, a primary and secondary fund focused on cryptocurrency. BlockArk integrates investment, branding, market growth, and strategic consulting, and is committed to promoting the growth of Web3.0 unicorns.

The theme of today's AMA is "Mask Network: Using Decentralized Social Networks to Build an Encrypted World Entrance", and the guest is Suji Yan, the founder and CEO of Mask Network.

Suji Yan, is the founder/CEO of Mask Network. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Computer Engineering Department dropout to start a business. Former Qdaily & Caixin Media independent reporter, former self-driving unicorn Tusimple engineer; spare time RadicalxChange, University of Colorado Boulder (University of Colorado Boulder) Media Enterprise Design Lab and other economic and legal scholars Co-author; Covered by Wired, South China Morning Post, Wall Street Journal, Reference News, etc. At present, I mainly focus on open source software, decentralized Internet and encryption technology (the company's product mask.io tessercube, etc.).

Suji Yan: hihi~ Hello everyone, I am Suji

Captain: Welcome Suji to our AMA! Today's AMA event is divided into two stages. The first stage is the theme question and answer. I will ask 7 prepared questions in the form of one question and one answer. After the 7 questions are over, it will enter the second stage, free question and answer. Group friends can freely ask guests questions, and guests are free to choose about 5 of them to answer. The small partners who are selected for the question will share the reward of 70 MASK together.

Well our AMA is now officially starting.

Captain: The first question, since we paid attention to your project, you have iterated several versions. You changed your name from Maskbook to Mask Network, and now you will present it in front of the market with a brand new MASK token. Can you tell us something about it? What is your vision for the future? In order to realize such a vision, what solutions and products does MASK propose now?

Suji Yan: Thank you Captain. Thank you for your long-term attention.

Mask Network was originally called Maskbook and it is also the core product and protocol of our team. We first started in 2018, and the vision has always been consistent. We believe that the future world belongs to the decentralized and open new Internet, and the peer-to-peer network and blockchain are very important components.

I have been in contact with Bitcoin Core and Ethereum Foundation since 2016 and 2017. Especially during the bubble in 2017, we noticed many things outside the bubble. Our goal is to build a bridge from Web 2.0 to the future Internet, Web 3.0, etc., so that Internet users can go directly to the new world.

https://news.mask.io/zh-Hans/2020/10/10/mask-network

You can see this link

For example, we all have the encrypted red envelope function.

On January 27, 2020, we and MakerDAO jointly launched the Lunar New Year red envelope activity on Twitter. The activity attracted more than 2,000 active users to participate in 3 days.

It also attracted the participation of Vitalik~

In addition, during the severe epidemic period, we also helped Gitcoin to implement the fundraising function, and we can directly donate stable coins to NGOs such as the Red Cross through Mask.

Now you can recognize Gitcoin links on Twitter and make donations as long as you install the Mask plugin. This is also the first time that it can help these disadvantaged groups to raise decentralized tokens.

The rise of DeFi has also given us opportunities, and we have successively launched the market + transaction functions.

We found that when DeFi was on the rise, many people would use social platforms to collect the latest news.

Uniswap founder Adams has used our products for transactions.

Captain: Thank you Suji for introducing Mask's products and vision to us one by one.

Captain: You have just finished the ITO of MASK, and there have been 2 rounds before. Many users in the group have experienced your products, and there may be some hardcore users who have used your functions such as sending red envelopes, trading, and checking market prices. Then let's talk about your products first. First, a core question. Are these products MASK Network itself? I saw a big V commented that you just made a tool for financing through twitter, and once you get bigger, you will be blocked by twitter. What do you think of this?

Suji Yan: Thank you for supporting the ITO. Those who have snatched the $LRC and $mTesla ITO, as well as Maker red envelopes, etc. should all get the airdrop.

MASK ITO is also very grateful for everyone's support and understanding this time, during which there were twists and turns. Until now, Infura/Quiknode, including many official core projects of Ethereum, such as the founders of MetaMask, have been assisting and helping us online, including the miners of Spark Mining Pool, who have also helped us share a lot of traffic, which is beyond our expectation .

Our three ITOs have significantly increased the gas fee of Ethereum, which partially blocked the network. This is what we want to avoid, but we also want to allow as many people as possible to participate.

Talk about ITO/red envelopes, file storage, or Uniswap integration-are these the mask itself? Actually not.

Mask Network itself is a middleware network, a bridge, or a gate. Everyone knows that the Internet and the blockchain are two completely separate worlds, whether it is a fully centralized chain such as FB's Libra or Twitter's Bluesky has been procrastinating without progress, or Reddit is cooperating with the Ethereum Foundation while locking WSB (game stop vs. the main battlefield), which is a paradoxical problem.

What Mask Network needs to do today is the bridge and the gate of the new world itself. We did not do DEX, but not only aggregate DEX, but also aggregate DEX and Internet portals. We did not do our own NFT, but cooperated with artists or NFT platforms , but it can embed NFT on the Internet on any platform.

This bridge is the Mask Network itself. Projects such as Uniswap, MakerDAO, Loopring or Mirror are all users of this bridge, and $MASK is the governance token of this middleware network.

Regarding the question of "some big V commented that you just made a tool for financing through twitter, once you get bigger, you will be blocked by twitter", I wonder if you have followed the progress of the Twitter founder and the officially supported Bluesky team?

In fact, the progress is very slow. We recently released a report white paper, and we have translated many languages. Our team also communicated with Bluesky in depth, and cooperated with them in the projects that they officially selected very carefully.

Among them, the most mentioned ones are Mastodon and Activity Pub, and there are some others such as SSB (scuttlebutt) gunDB, etc. They have also come to our joint conference before. (At the end of last year, Vitalik also came, and Glen, the author of the radical market), we have a deep cooperation with Mastodon (they are the largest adopter of Activity Pub), and have also long-term funding (Mastodon's Chinese name is officially called Mastodon), I won't disclose who we contacted inside Twitter.

I have some confidence in twitter. We also have twidere, one of the largest third-party clients of twitter, to continue to support operations. I personally feel that the founder of twitter, Jack, is still very supportive of decentralization. This morning, his other listed company Square Just bought a lot of bitcoins. We have a lot of conversations, and we can share them with you when we have the opportunity~

In addition, what everyone does not know is that the Internet is set up by several standards committees, such as W3C ECMA. W3C was established by Sir Tim, the inventor of the World Wide Web. He also recently supported decentralization and made solid. We also have a particularly good relationship. ECMA has also formulated various web standards such as the standard Javascript for programming on the web (is it a bit like the programming standard evm on web3, which is mainly controlled by the Ethereum Foundation), and we are the only members of ECMA that are related to decentralization .

Other members in this area include MetaMask (we also cooperate with Little Fox, cto dan has been helping, representing consensys and the official wallet of Ethereum), Coinbase (the largest compliance exchange), and our company in the United States (sujitech)

https://www.ecma-international.org/news/ecma-international-welcomes-new-members-2/

Off topic The programming standards on the web were invented by Netscape (Netscape), and then ecma was responsible for the standards. The inventor is now brave ceo braden.

The founders and team of Netscape singled out Microsoft and remained invincible. Today, they are the founding partners of the famous fund a16z, and our investor and consultant Balaji is also the former partner of a16z and the former CTO of coinbase. These inherited stories are particularly interesting.

Captain: This answer is too hardcore hahaha! Indeed, our current Internet and blockchain itself are extremely fragmented, and the market urgently needs a solution to help everyone enter the world of web3.0. The bridge built by MASK can help users better enter the world, and these native products can play this role. It can be seen that you have also received the support of many bigwigs in the web2 era, and everyone is looking forward to the future development of MASK!

Captain: Our next question is still related to ITO. This time ITO is very hot in the market, but everyone has given some feedback. For example, the Ethereum node was overcrowded on the first day, the twitter page could not be swiped, and the Ethereum The gas fee is too high, etc., will ITO be a regular issuance method in the future? Will you consider open source contracts so that more projects can use your tools for token issuance (such as mesa)? If so, are there better solutions to these problems?

Suji Yan: Regarding ITO, after we have access to a series of functions such as market transactions, such as uniswap cmc and transak mentioned before, we discovered that we are actually slowly opening up a whole line of open finance, and made a Aggregation, but there is still a missing function, which is ITO (Initial Twitter Offering)

For example, the first to participate in our ITO is a very well-known project, Loopring. At that time, the event limit was 500u per account, and within three minutes, $LRC worth about $50,000 was sold out, which was a great encouragement to us.

Later, he and mirror also participated in our ITO and issued $mtsla.

Regarding our own $MASK ITO issuance this time, at the original ITO time, our partner node provider (Quiknode) went down 20 minutes before the start, and the service showing how much traffic was also down.

Quiknode and infura (the consensys subsidiary of Joe, the ethereum joint venture, and metamask is also a consensy subsidiary), one of our strategic investors is also planning to invest in quiknode, and they are also shocked, because this is a very rare thing that happens, and they will call immediately Go over (opposite midnight) to ask.

Our first reaction was to switch to the infura-based 'Ethereum official' (considering the addition of consensus+metamask, basically semi-official) nodes.

Later, after a simple estimate, it was found that the traffic was so huge that it would even overwhelm infura, because it was not clear about infura’s dynamic expansion plan, worst-case analysis, all services using infura may be in danger (such as metamask etherscan), so it was temporarily decided to delay for 24 hours .

We were also very anxious after that. On the one hand, it is because so many people participated, and on the other hand, it is also thinking about how to solve it.

I would like to thank a few friends here. Our investor hashkey helped to communicate with quiknode urgently and their founder was also woken up. I also contacted Xu Xin, the owner of Spark Mining Pool, and Uncle Miao, and Dan of metamask Lianchuang, executive of consensys and founder of infura.

We finally decided to use the most advanced solutions of China's largest mining pools Spark, Quiknode, and Infura, as well as some dynamic load rules, (we call it ta Four King Kong) to successfully go online within 24 hours.

Captain: I remember that Infura was hanged once before, which had a great impact on the entire network.

Suji Yan: This instantaneous traffic should exceed the metamask, and some unexpected node providers have gone online (they have been offline), and it is also a great test for the entire Ethereum ecosystem. The last round of ito gas took off directly from 200 .

Take off to 4k, also thanks to mable for milking us.

Metamask told me not to panic last time eos almost killed all eth nodes. .

Mask ito at least did not directly accidentally injure infura, but this also shows that the number of live people on the Ethereum chain is still very limited. For example, we airdropped almost all governance users, only 20,000 people, this time it was really unexpected.

Captain: The explosion of MASK on the entire network has brought about a huge test for the Ethereum network haha.

Suji Yan: On the one hand, it shows how many people on the Internet yearn for the new Internet, whether it is buying assets or stocks and giving red envelopes; on the other hand, it shows that the eth2 layer2 evm compatible chain is really imminent.

We will also strongly support these solutions such as layer2 and evm compatible chains. Everyone should have seen the news. The future ITO will be an important long-term issuance method for us.

Everyone may know that mask network has cooperated with layer2 and several dexes to organize activities. We will not only issue tokens, but also issue stocks, NFT, and directly connect and cooperate with various dexes, or cross-chain.

Our tools will also be completely open source, including some preventive thinking about eliminating scientists’ plans. I believe that ITO does not need to compete with mesa and lbp, but empowers and links ~ allowing hundreds of millions of Internet users to directly enter the new world of decentralization.

Add some screenshots of node providers~~

Quiknode and consensys executives/infura founders, thanks to all partners for their support~

Captain: If one party is in trouble, all parties will support it.

Captain: As you mentioned just now, you once raised the GAS of Ethereum to 4000. The congestion of Ethereum has greatly hindered the entry of new users. After all, no retail investor can accept a transaction fee of hundreds of dollars. At present, it seems that you still rely on the Ethereum network, and you want to use the social network as an entrance, which may be greatly affected. After interacting with the ITO contract, we feel that your technology is really powerful, and you have made a lot of optimizations for the required gas, but it is still difficult to fundamentally solve this problem. Have you considered Layer2 solutions, or are they compatible with other chains that support EVM, such as BSC?

Suji Yan: Regarding the consideration of Layer 2 solutions, or compatibility with other chains that support EVM, yes, definitely yes. We are optimistic about layer 2, including the zk camp, and loopring has already cooperated.

Optimism in the op rollup plan is about to go online and has been maintaining exchanges and cooperation. Many of our previous investors, including DCG, have also invested in several layer2 companies. In addition, there are evm compatible chains such as bsc heco, which is the "Ether L2" of the exchange. , xdai/mattic is also very innovative.

If today’s Ethereum does not expand, and does not enter a new era where eth2 layer2 and evm compatible chains coexist, each ITO will have to be dealt with by major King Kongs. It is definitely not a long-term solution, and it will be devastating to ordinary eth users. High gas.

Mask Network is a network that aggregates multiple chains. These are partners that we will definitely support, including independent chains such as solana, near, and Polkadot. We have always had a good relationship with us. Solana near provides joint development funds. Dot us I have also been in web3 camp since 2020.

Captain: OK, thank you for your answer. With the addition of layer2 solutions, the threshold for users should be significantly lowered, attracting more people to enter the web3 era through your entrance. Due to time constraints, we hope to leave more time for group friends to interact, so we reduced the original 7 questions to 5, and now we go directly to the last question.

Captain: Let’s talk about the MASK token for the last question. What is the token economy of MASK like? what function? Do you have more detailed information for LBP after the ITO? For example, what is the starting price and what is the decay curve? For some users who have not participated in LBP, do you have any suggestions?

Suji Yan: mask is a governance token, as I just mentioned, we have aggregated nft dao dex and transaction quotes, etc.

It is recommended that you pay attention to our official website mask.io

Or join our tg grouphttps://t.me/masknetwork_cn

Or add hellomskkk to join the WeChat group to participate in more discussions~~

About lbp, we will release a tutorial later, you can pay more attention to our official account to get the latest news~

Captain: Okay, you can get LBP-related information by following official channels.

【Free question and answer session】

【Free question and answer session】

Q: What specific aspects of cooperation will MASK and Uniswap have?

Suji Yan: We have now connected to uniswap. After installing our plug-in, hover the mouse over $xxx such as $UNI on twitter to directly view its market and perform swap.

Q: Is there an airdrop reward for users who fail ITO? I spent 0.3 Ether for ITO today, and pulled 3000GAS twice in a row, but I still failed and suffered heavy losses.

Suji Yan: We have issued a notice on twitter. For users of this ito event, any contract interaction will be airdropped. Please wait for the official news for details.

Question: Is there a mistake in hellomskkk WeChat, and it cannot be added. In addition, will Mask have the opportunity to cooperate with domestic platforms such as Weibo, and what kind of opportunity is needed to have the opportunity. I look forward to answering this question.

Suji Yan: Sorry for the typo, it's @hellomaskkk

Question: Hello suji, I have been using your products since the Lunar New Year last year until now, but the maskbook support for mobile devices has always been poor. The mask app even directly embeds a Twitter web version, often accompanied by crashes. Crashing, unable to connect...Have you come up with a better solution for the mask experience on the mobile terminal in the future?

Suji Yan: Thank you for raising this question. This is our old user. We will work hard to develop the mobile terminal in the future, including the mobile terminal of twidere and mastodon. Please look forward to the combination of the three in the future.

Question: @Suji Yan, what are the areas of mask's follow-up public welfare activities in cooperation with the government?

Suji Yan: We previously helped an ngo organization to provide technical support for virtual currency donations. The ngo was called the Green Society. At the beginning, Vitalik, Maizi, Platon, etc. all joined in the donation, and we will strengthen cooperation in this part in the future.

Captain: Okay, due to time constraints, today’s AMA is over here. Thanks again for Suji’s wonderful sharing. Those who are selected for the question can privately chat with sumi@BlockArk assistant registration information. Thank you for your active participation!