Moderator: Patrick, Blue Run Ventures

Guest: Xiao Feng, Chairman of Wanxiang Blockchain and Chairman of HashKey Group

Organized by: Amber, Foresight News

This article is the text content of the online dialogue between Patrick and Xiao Feng in the series of activities of the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade co-learning.

Patrick：Today, we have prepared such a series of Shanghai upgrade activities with many DAO organizations. This series of activities is to celebrate the blockchain on the one hand, and to commemorate the major milestone of the upgrade of Ethereum Shanghai on the other hand. It is also a review of the Chinese power in the Ethereum network and summarizes the contributions of the Chinese on the Ethereum chain. Of course, this is already a thing of the past. Although we often say that we don’t want to miss the past and move forward indulgently, but I think the historical things are worth taking out and reviewing carefully. Looking back at a series of important moments in the past of Ethereum, Xiao Feng Zong has always been the spiritual leader of the Chinese blockchain industry, so today, we are honored to communicate with Mr. Xiao Feng and share some things that happened in this industry in the past. Before I start, let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Patrick Liu Yong. I am now working on Web3 and AI in BlueRun Ventures, especially investing in AI application layers, so I also pay special attention to the combination of crypto and AI. So would you like to say a few words first? Or do we ask questions directly?

Xiao Feng:Yes, just the direct question, and thank you very much for giving me this opportunity.

Patrick：First of all, you actually entered China in 2014,Can you simply spend a minute or two describing the important milestones so far.

Xiao Feng:In fact, I just posted an article I wrote in the group, because an English biography of Ethereum was published a few months ago, and the publisher showed me the manuscript before, hoping that I would write a preface. Later, I saw that this biography was written by Europeans and Americans. It briefly mentioned the relationship between Ethereum and China, Shanghai, and the Chinese community and Chinese developers. The title of the article is Ethereum's Shanghai Moment.

Patrick：Very fitting.

Xiao Feng:It should be said that in the past, especially during the period when Ethereum was first launched, the domestic community and developers responded in a timely manner and devoted a lot of resources and enthusiasm to Ethereum, including translating a lot of Ethereum-related materials in 2014. I myself started to understand Ethereum in 2014, and thought it was a very great idea at the time. Because if the blockchain, as such a great invention, cannot allow others to develop or apply it, then it will be a huge loss.

Because it may be lost, whether it is blockchain technology or distributed ledgers, it can bring society, business, and especially the digitalization process that humans can bring. You may find that after ChatGPT came out, the process of digitization may suddenly accelerate. This digitalization process has something to do with all of these, that is, distributed ledgers are a globally unified network. Any entrepreneurial behavior on the blockchain network is 100% for global customers, because you only need to do things on the blockchain. It is to do things on a global network, that is, to do things on the same computer around the world. Actually think about it, that's a digital world, because in the digital world there are no time zones, no regions. This is the blockchain as such a decentralized network, a decentralized global network and a decentralized global ledger. These two things are really likely to bring huge changes to human society. Society , business, economy, life will bring about huge changes.

There is a prerequisite for this change, that is, you have to allow everyone to do different things on this network and on this ledger. Obviously, Bitcoin was originally envisioned as a global currency, so it does not intend to let everyone do things on it, and there is no smart contract, nor these things. So when I saw such an idea, it was really exciting. At that time, there was such a great thing that could do these things, and it was very exciting to allow everyone to join this network without permission. These were all seen in 2014. It should be said that the Chinese community and developers at that time were very sensitive to this, so many people started to promote it, including the one who translated Ethereum at that time. He also came from 2014 to Come from China and start learning Chinese.

Patrick：Vitalik came to China in 2014, and you also talked to him about the investment and completed the investment. Then in 2015, OpenAI initiated by Elon Musk donated 100 million US dollars, so the timeline is very tight. You have just reviewed the places where Ethereum has brought you surprises along the way, do you still see shortcomings? Because I actually read from the article that he doesn't have much money in his account, and everyone is very suspicious of him.So when you look back at history, how much money do you see left in his account? What kind of crisis of confidence did you encounter?

Xiao Feng:First, I met him in 2015, although we learned about him in December of 2014. Once in a public forum, I had a speech dedicated to introducing Ethereum. I contacted him only after the news spread. He also arrived in Shanghai in March 2015, which was not the time for Ethereum crowdfunding.

Patrick：That's even more interesting, it's about the same time that OpenAI was founded.

Xiao Feng:Ethereum was launched on the mainnet in July 2015. As mentioned earlier, the two technical systems that have had a huge impact on human society in 2015 both started in 2015, but it is a pity that they both happened in the United States, not in China. In fact, there was nothing at that time, that is, before the main network was launched, the foundation and the Tokens in their hands were locked, about 18 million US dollars in the account, and after a certain amount of money was spent in the account, I remember that at that time There should still be $3 million in the account. After all, the main network has not yet launched, and everyone will ask if the money is enough? In fact, there was no performance crisis at the time. Then some people will still ask, can your money support the mainnet launch? If not, how to do it. It happened that Vatalik was also in Shanghai at that time and happened to come to our office. Then I heard that he was in a meeting last night, and voices from all sides were asking him how to explain, but he didn't answer on the spot. I heard about this at the time. In fact, it was not for investment, but for such a great thing, to help this young man. We really only wanted to help him.

Our idea at the time was also very simple. First, we could give $500,000 in cash, and second, we also showed the community that after giving $500,000, we can continue to support.

Patrick：This is equivalent to continuous backup.

Xiao Feng:Yes, after we signed such a donation agreement with the Ethereum Foundation and gave the money to the other party, the Ethereum Foundation promised to give the Token according to the price when we donated when their Token can be unlocked on the mainnet. us. Our idea at the time was to support them. It doesn’t matter if the mainnet fails. We support such a great idea, and we don’t think about it from the perspective of investment.

Patrick：Yes, this matter is quite similar to Elon Musk's idea of ​​​​founding OpenAI at the time. At the beginning, I also wanted to make a social venture. We, Blue Rush Ventures, also have a special social venture, which is called social venture capital. This kind of social venture is not for commercial purposes. In fact, the primary starting point of your investment at that time was not commercial, right?

Xiao Feng:Yeah, we really weren't thinking about business at the time. This is why the upgrade of Ethereum this time is named Shanghai upgrade. This is a promise, so we said that we will continue to invest. Of course, the results turned out very well. The launch of the Ethereum mainnet went on schedule without a single day of delay. After the launch of the mainnet, the Ethereum Foundation actually had no problems with its financial situation. At that time, it had a lot of money. Then at the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016, Vitalik came to Shanghai again. I said that we promised that we would continue to support the Ethereum Foundation in 2016. Later, the Ethereum Foundation, including Vitalik himself, said that Ethereum no longer needs additional financial support. I said that you don’t need it, of course it’s very good, but I said that our promise of Wanxiang Blockchain Lab is not bragging, we must make it round. So we proposed to hold Devcon in Shanghai, then the whole cost will be provided by Wanxiang Blockchain Lab, and all the tickets and sponsorship income will go to the Ethereum Foundation. In this way, we intend to continue to fulfill our commitment and continue to support the Ethereum Foundation.

Patrick：This is another way of support. On the one hand, it was money at the beginning, and after money was no longer needed, it is actually a support for ecology now.

Xiao Feng:Yes, we just hope that Chinese engineers and technicians can have a chance to participate in a conference that gathers developers from all over the world to listen to your discussions. Most of the current development directions of Ethereum or the developments that have been realized have been discussed at the Devcon in Shanghai for 3 days. After that Devcon, we had a consensus internally that we must attend the Devcon of Ethereum. He discussed the development trend of blockchain technology in the next 2 or 3 years, and then it may take 2 or 3 years. It can only be realized in 5 years, but if you want to really understand blockchain technology, you must go to Devcon. After listening carefully, you will know what the development trend of blockchain technology will be in the next few years. This is also a source of Shanghai's upgrade.

Patrick：Speaking of Devcon, in fact, from Devcon 0 to Devcon 1 to Devcon 2 and beyond, Wanxiang still holds Wanxiang Blockchain Week every year. In my impression, Devcon has indeed cultivated many people, and Wanxiang has also made a very large contribution to the Ethereum ecosystem. Of course, other people related to Wanxiang or Ethereum have also made a lot of contributions. Can you tell the story of other contributions here, and also remind us younger generations.

Xiao Feng:The Chinese Ethereum community has been very active for a long time. Then of course, everyone started to promote it in 2014, and many Chinese people participated in the crowdfunding, and then there was the Ethereum community. Vitalik himself came to China a lot of times 17 years ago, because the whole community has very close ties with the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik. There are many people who have done a lot of things, some of which I don’t know, because everyone They are all in Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Chengdu, and people from different communities are making different efforts. There are the earliest core developers on the engineering side, like Xie Hanjian; Shi Haihua has invested a lot of energy in community building in China, France and other places; we have also done a little work in it; like Gulu and Cancer, they translate articles. Of course, there is a large part of Ethereum miners. Miners are something with Chinese characteristics, because Bitcoin miners are mainly in China. I am not very familiar with miners, but they are indeed for Ethereum. made a huge contribution to development.

Patrick：Then you have a very deep acquaintance with God V. If you were asked to summarize his characteristics, what keywords would you use?

Xiao Feng:I think if his keywords are used more vividly, he is similar to Elon Musk. Must be a weirdo. Elon Musk, first of all, you can see that he lives in a very small house, and secondly, he can live in the factory for two months. After the acquisition of Twitter, he also made a bed in the office. This is very similar to Vitalik, a person who does not have high demands on life. In the first 15 years when he came to Shanghai, he lived in Shen Bo’s house. He found a hotel similar to Home Inn when he came for the second time, and stayed for half a month every time he came. The community invited him, so he went to Hangzhou for a After a trip, he returned to Shanghai when it was over. So he's just a guy who doesn't feel anything about it.

Patrick：So in fact, his material needs are very low, he has the stars and the sea in his heart, but I also saw that you bought him a cat camera specially for him.

Xiao Feng:Yes, he likes cats. Many homeboys, including code farmers, like cats very much.

Patrick：Well, that's right, did the cat thing play any role in the development of Ethereum? In fact, I did a little research. There is a very expensive cat in CryptoKitty. It is rumored that it is the cat of God V.

Xiao Feng:Then I really don’t know, but cats are a pet that everyone likes, whether they are in the Crypto circle, the code farmer circle, or the otaku circle.

Patrick：OK, so here's the next question, which I think is quite sensitive, but I do want to hear your thoughts.It is V God's evaluation of you or Wanxiang Blockchain and Hashkey. I hope to use a few keywords to show it.

Xiao Feng:Neither of us discussed what we thought of each other, so I can't speak for him. First of all, Wanxiang blockchain laboratory, we invited him to be our chief scientist, he was very happy. Formal institutions to promote together. Wanxiang blockchain laboratory was doing three things at the earliest stage. One is to go to training. The original Blockchain Hackathon was in January 2016. Not only did Vitalik participate in the whole process, but we also had three mentors from the Ethereum community and from Europe and the United States. These three mentors were the first to help Wanxiang Blockchain Lab to establish its own training team. These three people have worked in Shanghai for a period of time. Because the Chinese community has made a lot of contributions to Ethereum, this is actually the return of Ethereum and Vitalik himself to Chinese companies. He has also made a lot of contributions to the construction of the Chinese community, including when we went to hold small training courses and do hackathons, and he himself comes to our blockchain summit in Shanghai every year.

Patrick：So he is still grateful, the key word is still there, grateful.

Xiao Feng:You can't say that, everyone still supports each other, which is very good. So, between us personally, we didn't say what you judged me and what I judged you. But last year, after the Chinese version of the biography "Point to Everything" was published, the biography I wrote was spread by everyone. Vitalik also saw it at the time, and asked a person who had dinner with him to contact me and talked about me. The preface I wrote said that Vitalik hadn't seen me for several years and missed me very much. It should be said that we have known each other for such a long time, especially in the early days, we worked very hard to do the same thing together, so it is really unforgettable.

Patrick：After suffering together, now should be the time to share happiness. Of course, when it comes to now, there are two simple questions,So with regard to the Shanghai upgrade, what problem do you want to solve? How far are they from the ultimate goal of Ethereum?

Xiao Feng:I think the earliest Shanghai upgrade has actually been discussed very early. Of course, it is from the perspective of ESG, from PoW to PoS, to solve the problem of carbon emissions. This must be the original driving force. In my personal opinion, the other is to solve the performance problem of the public chain. At first, there was no clear solution to solve the performance problem of the public chain. Since 2016 and 2017, I have been looking for various versions of solutions, hoping to use some technical solutions on Ethereum to improve performance slightly. I think the efforts of these two aspects finally formed PoS and the upgrades after PoS, such as sharding, layering, zero-knowledge proof, etc. Slowly until now, it should be said that before the Shanghai upgrade, in fact, the framework of Ethereum’s roadmap has become very clear since last year. This also has a process. We sponsored Devcon in 2016 and 2017. After 17 years, Wanxiang Blockchain Lab also sponsored technology development projects such as PraSaga. We were also asking for Vitalik's opinion at the time, saying what we could do for you in 2017. Vitalik recommended us to sponsor PraSaga, but in the end PraSaga became a variant. At the beginning, you could see that many developers were working hard to do these things, not to solve the problem of carbon emissions, but to solve the performance problem of Ethereum. Because Ethereum is a place for everyone to do secondary development and application, but if the performance cannot be supported, then this promise is empty.

Patrick: The ultimate goal of Ethereum must reach 100,000 TPS. How much can Shanghai upgrade achieve?

Xiao Feng:Originally, the Ethereum mainnet will never improve performance, 20 transactions per second, and it has no intention of improving this performance. My personal opinion is that Ethereum, as a basic protocol, plays two roles. The first role, it serves as a distributed main network, a decentralized network, which is responsible for solving the security and robustness of the network. The second one, as a main chain, is responsible for consensus issues, provides consensus and credibility, and is responsible for the registration and confirmation of all transaction endings. Then Ethereum is only responsible for providing these two functions, and the rest of the application is left to the second, third, fourth and even future fifth layers to solve.

In fact, the impossible triangle formed by decentralization, security, and performance is solved in a layered manner through a protocol stack, stacking up layer by layer. From the perspective of a decentralized network, it is the final confirmation of the decentralized ledger. The remaining thing is sharding, and the performance is improved by one step, and then through the second layer of parallelism, hardware acceleration, and bandwidth, the performance is gradually improved. My personal opinion is that maybe when it reaches the 5th layer, which is the real final application layer, it may be 100% centralized. There are two ways to solve performance problems. One way is to rely purely on technical bandwidth, but the problem is that regardless of hardware acceleration or other technologies like ZK, he may not be able to support 1 million transactions per second in the end. Putting all applications on a basic public chain, for a specific business scenario, the final solution to performance is centralization.

Patrick：This is what you shared before, and I agree very much, that is, the bottom layer is decentralized, while the application layer is centralized.

Xiao Feng:Yes, the decentralization of Ethereum does not rule out that a 100% centralized application is built on Ethereum, relying on Ethereum as the security of the network, relying on Ethereum as a distributed ledger for final confirmation . The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Patrick：OK, of course, this is the last time when upgrading to 2.0, many people said that miners had less right to speak. In fact, I remember that when the fork happened in 2017, developers would play a bigger role in it .As for the role of node miners or the right to speak, what do you think?

Xiao Feng:I think the blockchain itself is one, because it does not have a centralized governance mechanism, so everyone will fork if they disagree. Originally, this is the way to resolve the ultimate disagreement. The fork itself is very important for blockchain governance. of one. The blockchain can be what it is now, or it can be governed purely with the blockchain. It is also a very good way for centralized businesses to use the blockchain for governance. For example, in the current centralized exchanges, they use Merkle trees and blockchains for asset certification, which is to use some technologies of blockchains for their corporate governance or business governance. The blockchain can provide us with great help in terms of governance. One of the methods mentioned above is to fork if there is a disagreement. After the fork, look at the community and consensus, which is the will of most people. I believe that if Vitalik must do something and the community doesn't like it, then the whole community may go in another direction. So whether it is the direction he pointed out or the path he leads, he cannot force anyone to follow him, at least the vast majority of people in the community think that this direction may be a direction that should be taken in the medium and long term. From the perspective of miners, there are indeed some losses in the interests of this transition, but this is everyone's choice after all, not Vitalik's choice alone.

Patrick：I am very happy that Xiao Feng can always look at this issue objectively. I think this actually makes everyone realize that the blockchain industry is a fair and transparent industry. It is because of this that this industry can continue to go on , and solve more neutral problems now, just like AI problems. Then I actually want to ask at the end,Your views on AI, and your views on the integration and confrontation of AI and blockchain.

Xiao Feng:These two are definitely not confrontational. I think these two things should be combined to see that human society has been on the road of digital migration for a long time, trying to build a digital living space. In 1994, Pound’s Digital Survival was like a manifesto, saying that since the advent of the Internet in human society, the digital migration trend of human society has gradually emerged, and human beings tend to reconstruct a bit-based digital world. First of all, this migration is a combination of a series of digital technologies rather than being catalyzed by a single technology, including AI, distributed computing or cloud computing, and blockchain technology. The relationship between them is fusion and innovation. The second point is that blockchain, as a globalized basic decentralized network and ledger, itself provides an infrastructure for the digital world. A complete set of records is needed in the digital world, because data, rights and interests, and rights require an accounting system. Just imagine, with the help of GPT-4, everyone has the ability of a strong expert. There used to be a 10,000-hour rule, that is, if you want to become an expert in a certain field, you need at least 10,000 hours of professional training. Obviously, we don't need these 10,000 hours now, and 7 billion people can become experts with the help of GPT-4. Just imagine, even if there are 2 billion people, with the help of GPT-4 or the future GPT-5, they will become experts in various industries and create many things. Can this load be fully supported by the existing intellectual property registration management system? Impossible to support it. The distributed ledger is a good way to self-manage. In the Web2 era, although the laws of many countries restrict that some data does not belong or does not belong to the Internet platform, each customer has the right to carry, forget, and benefit from his data on the Internet, and these rights are in fact It is impossible to implement on the platform.

Patrick：Data is the new means of production, and we have already realized it.

Xiao Feng:In fact, there is no need for legislation on this issue. As long as the blockchain distributed ledger is used to store data in digital wallets, these data naturally belong to individuals and themselves, and everyone has the right to manage their own wallets. For example, if you use an EVM wallet, isn’t it natural to carry wallets for activities in different blockchains and different applications?

This kind of technology will inevitably use the blockchain to support, manage, and confirm the rights of those things created by people with the help of AI. Just as the current banking system cannot serve everyone on the blockchain, this is why DeFi is a process of financial infrastructure reconstruction. DeFi reconstructs a set of global networks and global computers to support all commercial transactions. A new financial market system. Personal management is the lowest cost option. The existing rights registration system and intellectual property management system absolutely cannot support things created by people under GPT-4. The second point is that the creation of information is almost worthless, so there is no need to use any assets to protect yourself, just say that the created things are valuable to others.

Patrick：I'm all for it. Because when it comes to AI, everyone is still very excited, but due to time constraints, we have to end the conversation. I very much agree with the point of view mentioned today. From a macro perspective, AI is a productivity tool like a sledgehammer, and blockchain, as a production relationship, coordinates all kinds of production materials and organizes these production materials. We also hold this view. So some time ago, we also specially condensed an internal article that had been discussed for a long time and then released it, which is to superimpose three waves in the next 50 years. The first is AI, the second is Web3, and the third is digital space, which is what we know today. Speaking of the metaverse, the superposition of these three waves will be the major development direction in the next 50 years. Thank you very much Mr. Xiao Feng.

Xiao Feng:Thank you, and thank you Patrick.