Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
"Anxiety. Compared with the Internet, blockchain has more limited scenarios. So before China's strongest troops come in, we have to work hard in limited scenarios."
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On January 9, 2020, 20 blockchain practitioners from various fields gathered at the 2020 "FAT" Summit Forum and Awards Ceremony hosted by Odaily to discuss the past and future of public chains, applications, assets, and investments.
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In addition to technological breakthroughs, the public chain needs to find better scenarios
If the public chain in 2018 focused on solving the scalability problem, then in 2019, the focus of the public chain will be on how to solve the interoperability of the public chain.
A single chain is not enough to support various applications required by global users. Therefore, the public chain should strengthen the interoperability between multiple chains, break down data islands, and form a more open blockchain network scenario.
On the other hand, Ethereum, which represents blockchain 2.0, is also preparing to launch 2.0 in 2020, which is highly anticipated.
Anatoly Yakovenko, founder of Solana, commented that Ethereum 2.0 bets on possible problems. These problems are really not easy to solve, but their solutions are very theoretical.
In addition to performance, Parity Asia Engineering Director, former Zilliqa co-founder, and CTO Jia Yaoqi said that the public chain should also find better landing scenarios.
"Judging from the situation in the past year, both investors and the market are more and more inclined to solve more realistic problems. Is there a better landing scenario for the public chain? Whether it is open finance that is more popular overseas, It is still the landing scenarios of various alliance chains in China, and everyone is exploring whether there are blockchain application scenarios that can really bring profits to developers and enterprises." Jia Yaoqi said.
For the current status of fewer applications on the chain, Anatoly Yakovenko predicts that in 3-5 years, the blockchain is expected to give birth to super applications like Google.
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Difficulties in blockchain landing: users do not feel the need
When it comes to blockchain applications, the first question people ask is, can it not be solved by traditional methods or Internet methods?
Therefore, the advantages of blockchain compared with traditional information technology or Internet technology need to be more clear.
Li Xi, co-founder of Easy Group, summed it up concisely, "The difference between the blockchain and the Internet is that the blockchain uses the guarantee of the underlying technology to solve the trust between people."
He Yingqi, general manager of BTG Homeinn Blockchain Technology Co., Ltd., is concerned about the disadvantages of blockchain compared to the Internet: "The application scenarios of the Internet are very large, while the application scenarios based on blockchain are limited."
After clarifying this point, He Yingqi said that since the central government set up such a high banner for the blockchain, “Our team is still quite anxious. Because this means that China’s strongest troops will come in actively or passively, so we have to be in China as soon as possible. Work hard in limited scenarios."
Regarding the current difficulties in the implementation of the blockchain, five practitioners summed up one point: "The biggest difficulty is that the public's awareness, perception and participation are far from enough."
Li Xi said frankly that Easy Group is trying to apply the blockchain to public welfare. "We let users see the hash of each donation and tell him that your donation has been put on the blockchain, but we found that the user's perception is Very weak. They don’t think about whether the technology behind this is blockchain technology or centralized technology.”
"For C-end users, there is currently no good way to let them feel the changes brought about by the blockchain." Li Xi was a little helpless.
Indeed, if users do not have a clear demand, the chain will lose a lot of motivation.
Luo Qionghua, Director of Operations of Ant Trusted Evidence Deposit Judicial Chain, introduced the second problem we encountered during the exploration. Partial + blockchain scenarios may be "pseudo-demand".
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"This year is optimistic about the combination of Bitcoin and DeFi"
The blockchain industry is naturally inseparable from assets.
Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency and a bellwether of industry cycles. Now that the market has been depressed for several months, the influx of new people and money is increasingly important to the "industry recovery".
When talking about "high-net-worth users' interest in Bitcoin", Li Yao, senior vice president of Cobo, said that this group defines Bitcoin as an "alternative asset". Financial institutions enter the industry.
But at present, traditional institutions are stalled due to various concerns: the lack of legal currency deposit channels in China, the lack of compliant custody licenses or supporting insurance, and the difficulty of auditing digital currencies.
"So far we can see that PwC and KPMG can audit digital assets, but this industry is very complicated. For example, the snapshot data size of an exchange for a day may have tens of gigabytes of storage space. It will greatly increase the workload and audit difficulty of the audit company."
Of course, the industry will not stand still. Many practitioners believe that technological means such as decentralized custody can bring the same trust as supervision.
"I am optimistic about decentralized custody. Trust is the most needed. If no one can provide this trust, the actuary of any company will not be able to calculate the risk of digital asset loss, and will not be able to price the risk, so no one can. Underwriting.” Wang Li, co-founder of PayPal Finance, believes that decentralized custody will fill the first gap in industry compliance.
DeFi, which has become so popular this year, seems to have "launched an attack" on the centralized financial system (CeFi).
Li Yao concluded that in the first half of 2019, the value of the entire DeFi market was only 270 million US dollars, and now it has reached 890 million US dollars, a nearly three-fold increase, indicating that the market is in a stable upward stage.
But Li Yao also highlighted the two major challenges of DeFi.
First, the operating threshold is too high. Therefore, there are currently less than 20,000 DeFi users worldwide;
The second is the contract level. At present, large-scale DeFi products are developed based on the smart contract of Ethereum, but is this contract safe? Probably not. When users put $1 billion in smart contract-based products, it is believed that hackers have enough motivation to steal it at a cost of $100 million.
"If DeFi wants to be better implemented in the future, one is to improve its ease of use, and the other is to improve security." Li Yao said.
Compared with the above two aspects, the combination of Bitcoin and DeFi may be expected to be realized faster.
"In 2020, I am personally optimistic about the launch of DeFi products at the Bitcoin level. After all, its activity is three times that of Ethereum. RSK (Bitcoin sidechain) will be a good attempt." Li Yao said.
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Capital: 2020 will invest in middleware
To solve the above-mentioned problems, it is inseparable from the hard work of the cultivators, and it is also inseparable from the capital blessing of venture capital.
When it comes to venture capital in the past year, as Huang Lingbo, vice president of Fenbushi Capital, said, 2019 was a very confusing year for obvious reasons.
"The underlying technology of the blockchain industry itself has not been strongly developed. The second is that many popular applications, including DeFi and DApp, are difficult to form a large-scale or sustainable development in the end. From 2018 to 2019 Many hot spots in the first half of the year have finally become calm and rational, and the bubbles of previous illusions have begun to burst." Huang Lingbo said.
But considering that the blockchain is very early, this kind of confusion and trough is really normal. If you don't insist on doing "bearers", "bearers" will easily fall behind. In addition, many assets are now in a price depression, so there are also many institutions that bucked the trend in the second half of 2019.
"In the secondary market, especially in the second half of the year, we will do some excavation and investment in the top 100 projects by market value, and we will choose a certain project according to its transaction volume, fundamentals, development of the main network, community situation and price. The project invests and gets relatively good returns. Although it is a low point, there are still good opportunities." Huang Lingbo said frankly.
Talking about the direction of investment in 2020, Huang Lingbo believes that the launch of high-quality old-fashioned public chain projects, such as Polkadot and Filecoin's ecology is worth considering.
"The mining of Filecoin itself and the ecological emergence of the protocol layer, or the emergence of the polkadot parachain and the protocol layer, may be a wave of opportunities."
Zhang Liao, founding partner of Tongzhou Capital, and Yuan Hao, partner of Fundamental Labs, are interested in middleware.
"Middleware projects, to be honest, are much more real than many public chains I have seen. They are mainly used to improve the applicability of the blockchain or improve the developer's development environment, etc. Now these projects are often relatively small tool projects , the volume is small, and the needs to be solved are small, but the implementation and demand are strong." Zhang Leao commented.
From the unique insights of these big names, we can feel that 2020 is still full of challenges, but it also contains many surprises. For more insights, please click on the relevant topics,Learn more about.,Learn more about.
