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Lai Xin, chief engineer of Thunderchain, is introducing Thunderchain
On October 25th, this is the Hong Kong station of the Thunderchain Technology Salon.
ThunderChain has recently held technical salons in many cities, and the April-July period is a long developer competition, which seems intensive. If you compare it with the recent technical salons and hackathons held by the industry, it is logical. A London-based hacker told me that he participated in 5 or 6 blockchain-related hackathons in half a year. Before coming to Hong Kong, Odaily had just returned from a hackathon in Oxford, and there were several hackathons in Beijing before that.
The proliferation of technical activities makes people feel that the atmosphere of this industry is changing.
"I don't think the technology is difficult at all, the headache is the talent." Li Tianxi, an executive of Dafu Group, pointed out the status quo of the industry in one sentence at the Thunder Chain Salon last week-the blockchain is not short of money, but short of people.
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5000 public chains, 1400 developers
Lack of users, lack of developers.
"No matter what kind of product you make, the most fundamental thing is to look at the user situation. Does anyone here know how many blockchain users there are in the world?" Ma Shuangyang, the product manager of Thunderchain, calculated the following figures: The blockchain accounts for less than two thousandths of the total population, and it is still in a very early stage.
"I have made a sorting out here. The world has a population of about 7 billion, and Internet users are about 4 billion, which means that the penetration rate of the Internet is very high. How do you calculate the 4 billion? I add Facebook, WeChat, etc. together, and this It is the large-scale users of the Internet.
(Another data is attached for developers’ reference: the age of blockchain users is mainly concentrated in the age group between 25 and 40 years old, and the distribution of users is very concentrated. In terms of the ratio of men and women, in 2015, I Looking at the statistics, female users account for 10%. After three years of development, this data has been significantly improved. At present, female users account for 17% and male users account for 83%. When our developers are doing DAPP development, this is our current stage. Overall picture of users that can be infiltrated.)
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Blockchain developers are in short supply
There is still a gap of 5 WeChat between the number of users of the blockchain and the Internet.
Even if the blockchain has 5000 public chains. This is another data that Ma Shuangyang reminds everyone: According to China's official standard statistics, there are about 1,372 developers of mainland blockchains, but there are 5,000 public blockchains. "That is to say, the number of public chains is more than that of engineers, so there is a serious talent gap problem. In the past, practitioners often joked that blockchain is a situation where there are more experts than talents. There are many experts and few talents. There are a lot of people who are actually engaged in development are very scarce."
Going first means that more effort is needed to pave the way. Just like Wang Liming, a partner of Fenbushi Capital, said to Odaily: "It is impossible to come up with a shocking idea in a hackathon, but the event can let more people know about the blockchain and leave some seeds in the hearts of the participants." The intention of ThunderChain is similar, hoping that "developers here can migrate to the blockchain".
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Bottom first or application first?
As a product at the operating system level, the public chain is often the most motivated to build an ecosystem. Because they require "a browser, or a spreadsheet," making them as ubiquitous an infrastructure as the Internet and personal computers.
Blockchain is a technical bottom layer, which is destined to be too far away from users, and needs to have applications close to users.
Just like ordinary users certainly do not know the World Wide Web, they only know how to enter the URL in the browser to surf the Internet. But every web page is actually based on this agreement. Mosaic was the first graphical World Wide Web browser and the spark that ignited the Internet. The Internet was originally far away from the public, and was only used for military or university academic research, and it was too difficult for ordinary people to use. The advent of Mosaic made the World Wide Web. Its core team then created Netscape, which made Microsoft tremble. Netscape's IPO marked the beginning of the Internet era. Since then, countless browsers have appeared, but the underlying layers are all based on the http protocol.
40 years ago, no one thought they needed a personal computer. Two young men at Harvard developed the first electronic form, VisiCalc, in the company attic. They started a software company and bundled the spreadsheet software with Apple computers. "This program is so easy to use!" There was no Excel at the time, and everyone bought Apple computers to use this program. The spreadsheet program not only drove sales of that computer, but of personal computers as well. Before that Apple computer, computers were clunky, bulky machines from IBM. VisiCalc became the first and most popular commercial program on personal computers, and is known as one of the main catalysts for the rapid growth of the PC industry.
The public chains are looking for or incubating people like Hagerty who can bring the blockchain to users. At the same time, developers also need a platform that helps them quickly deploy applications.
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SUV believes that APP and infrastructure are actually co-evolved in the response cycle, rather than belonging to separate stages that are completely isolated and unrelated to each other
"Whether we have DAPP first or explore the infrastructure first, that is, the development of the so-called public chain, this question is more like a chicken and egg problem, and there is no conclusion. I personally think that this is mutual promotion and spiral. Ma Shuangyang's view is similar to that of the well-known investment institution USV. USV believes that APP and infrastructure actually develop together in the response cycle, rather than belonging to independent stages that are completely isolated and unrelated to each other.
All in all, whichever platform can capture developers will capture the future.
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What do blockchain developers need?
So the question is, how can we attract more developers? What are the pain points and needs of developers?
Startups are also the ones that need the most help. According to ThunderChain research, start-ups need support in terms of technology, traffic, and capital. "For example, if I make a product, where do the users come from? I just mentioned that the cost of user education is extremely high, so there is a question of where the users come from. My cost is very high, and it may be higher than the cost of the original centralized APP. This cost Who will bear the burden? Because start-ups are short of funds, and it involves the issue of funds.”
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developer needs
In these three aspects, ThunderChain provides relevant productization and support means:
1. The underlying technology is the foundation of the public chain.
Lai Xin, the chief engineer of Thunderchain, concluded that the main chain faces four main challenges: (1) performance, how many requests can be processed per second (TPS); (2) efficiency, how long does it take for a request to be confirmed; ( 3) Scalability, how the bottom layer supports its horizontal expansion when the enterprise business develops; (4) storage, how to store large blocks of data, and the storage space of a single node on the block is limited.
She said that Xunlei has made some progress in solving these problems. "First, we achieve million-level TPS. Second, we can achieve second-level confirmation. These two achievements are based on shared computing services. Now Thunder's shared computing services have more than 1.5 million nodes deployed in users' homes ” She further explained that the improvement of performance and efficiency is mainly achieved through the DPoA (Proof of Agent’s Ability Proof) consensus mechanism and the architecture of homogeneous multi-chains.
As for storage, the Thunderchain file system TCFS was released in July, which is specially used to store large blocks of data on the blockchain, and the hash information of the data is uploaded to the chain. Laixin said that in addition to anti-tampering and reliability, the file system needs to consider economy. Each node on the blockchain needs to store a full amount of data, and it would definitely be uneconomical to design the file system in this way. Therefore, TCFS uses redundant coding technology to improve storage efficiency. "A file is normally saved, and there are three servers on the centralized cloud computing platform. The overall storage capacity of a 10M file is 30M. In our environment, we don't save 30M, nor do we save three copies, we only need 20M."Second, smart contracts are related to the learning threshold for programmers.
Laixin said that the virtual machine of ThunderChain now supports EVM, and in the future it can support virtual machines developed in various languages such as C++.
In addition, in order to lower the threshold for writing. ThunderChain makes the general solution of blockchain in various industries into a quick integration template. Even developers who are new to blockchain development do not have a good understanding of development, and can do quick integration, which is equivalent to standardizing the blockchain integration process. Developers can quickly do access to complete business development, and can also do their own secondary development on this basis. The open platform of ThunderChain also has a sandbox environment, which is convenient for developers to do debugging.
3. Xunlei has 400 million users, and XunleiChain stated that it will use these traffic to help developers promote applications.
Related productized services include LinkToken exchange and LinkToken mall under the LinkToken ecosystem.
Ma Shuangyang believes that the first batch of developers are facing the problem of traffic support, and at the same time, the cost of blockchain user education is extremely high. Because users are accustomed to the way of interacting with centralized Internet products.
Therefore, ThunderChain makes the exchange of LinkToken more like the use characteristics of Internet products. By integrating the third-party SDK and scanning, the third-party APP of the business jumps to the LinkToken pocket to complete the payment process. In the LinkToken Mall, developers can launch their own businesses and products, acquire users in it, and exchange required cloud services in it.
4. In terms of funds, Xunlei Chain will cooperate with venture capital institutions to provide funds, plus a free policy.
The execution of each contract on Ethereum requires gas consumption. Ma Shuangyang said, "We have zero cost. Developers who do access with us in the first year are free to use, and the cost you spend will be returned to you in the second year. It lasts for one year on a monthly basis. .”
Louis, a developer at the scene, believes that storage is the bright spot of Xunlei. The reason why he pays attention to the Thunder Chain is because it says it will solve the storage problem, otherwise "it will be very troublesome to solve it by yourself". He believes that it is not difficult to solve this problem especially for Xunlei, which started from BT.
However, Thunderchain also has many problems that need to be solved. For example, Ben, a developer at the scene, was surprised that ThunderChain, which is "positioned as a public chain", requires developers to sign up to settle in. Logically speaking, public chains should be permissionless. In addition, the general public chain is open source, developers will read the code of the public chain before deciding whether to develop on it, but currently the Thunder Chain is not open source.
Several developers including Shi Lei, Ben and Louis are observing emerging public chains, but they all said that considering development security and stability, they would still choose Ethereum. However, there is still a big bottleneck in the performance of Ethereum. The gene sequencing project HGBC chose to deploy on the Thunder Chain, which is the star project of the latter. Its founder Lin Jing also said that at present, how to ensure the correctness of on-chain data, how to satisfy the authorization of finer-grained data, and satisfy the whole process of on-chain are still challenges for HGBC and ThunderChain.
I am Lu Xiaoming, editor of Odaily. I am exploring the real blockchain. Please add lohiuming for breaking news and communication. Please note your name, unit, position and reason.
I am Lu Xiaoming, editor of Odaily. I am exploring the real blockchain. Please add lohiuming for breaking news and communication. Please note your name, unit, position and reason.
Reference articles and related reading:
Internet Yesterday, Blockchain Tomorrow
The first stop of the ThunderChain Technology Salon: How to make a million-level TPS
