On the morning of October 10th, the "Reconstructing the Internet, Sodium Can Be Different - DFINITY Sodium China Online Launch Conference" organized by Odaily and DFINITY was successfully concluded.Click the link to watch the exciting content

In the second session "Embracing the public, does the blockchain need a new infrastructure?" In the themed round table, we invited five blockchain practitioners to analyze the direction and future of the public chain and application landing for us. They are Mable Jiang, Executive Director of Multicoin Capital, Uncle Hong Jun, Co-Founder of Ourea, Dora, CMO of Hashquark, Paul Liu, Senior Engineer of DFINITY, and Zhang Shuhao, Executive Editor-in-Chief of Block Rhythm, the moderator.

At the round table, Uncle Red Army expounded a representative point of view, that is, the common problem encountered by the public chain - positioning problem.

"Technically, many public chains may have various powerful things in them, but who cares about this? I think a better positioning is that it can solve a problem in a specific scenario, but I am most afraid that any problem can be solved. Solved. I feel that Filecoin has this kind of taste, and everything can be stored. But why do we need such a service? A better positioning is that it provides a specific solution in combination with specific businesses, even if it is a small entry point , to meet a specific scenario, starting from a small point failed to form the so-called network effect.”

For the progress of Ethereum 2.0, which everyone is most concerned about, Dora made a vivid metaphor.

"The switch from Ethereum 1.0 to 2.0 is like changing the tires of an airplane on an airstrip. It is such a difficulty and complexity. Because there are so many assets, users, developers, and the entire ecology on Ethereum 1.0, you want to put It is not an easy workload to cut them. Overall, the progress is relatively smooth. When it comes to developers making real adaptability solutions, it is relatively early. The beacon chain, including the testnet, is only the first Systematic migration still needs a long process, but some teams on the market have already had some preliminary ideas, such as HashQuark's EtherPocket will provide users with Ethereum 2.0 Staking and node management and liquidity solutions, and the current development progress is smooth. The specific implementation needs to wait for the determination of many standards and parameters of ETH2.0.”

Paul Liu pointed out several major practical problems facing Ethereum switching.

"What everyone agrees with is that the existing ecology on Ethereum is a great advantage, but it is also a relatively big burden. Moreover, some attacks on Ethereum in recent years are mostly due to its design. In fact, there are system flaws, and the security is not considered enough, so that everyone shoots themselves in the foot many times. I believe that 2.0 still needs to be compatible with each other. If the current flaws are inherited, it will be good for it There are certain obstacles to the development in the past.”

Mable Jiang shared a "more interesting progress beyond 2.0".

"When it comes to the team that carries out adaptive work, I think the most natural to do this is the mining pool. Whether it is Hashquark or other domestic mining pools, it has natural customers and has already done research in the financial field. Yes. Ethereum 2.0 has strengthened this demand even more, so you will find that the arrival of 2.0 does not make the ecology more decentralized but more aggregated. The same service provider may provide several services at the same time, which is more interesting than 2.0 progress."

For more exciting sharing, welcome to view the full text. The following is the essence of the round table organized by Odaily:

Zhang Shuhao: Hello everyone, I am the host, Zhang Shuhao, the executive editor of Block Rhythm. First of all, please introduce yourself briefly.

Paul Liu：Hello everyone, my name is Paul Liu, and I am in charge of the underlying protocol at DFINITY.

Mable jiang：Hello everyone, I am Mable from Multicoin Capital. Multicoin Capital is a Sino-US investment fund. We have primary funds and secondary hedge funds. Our colleagues are located in Austin, Texas, New York and Hangzhou. I am also very happy to meet you on the second day after the festival.

Dora：Hi, I'm Dora from Hashquark. We are also an early investor of DFINITY, and we will also have some layout and actions in the DFINITY ecosystem, and we look forward to communicating and sharing with you.

Uncle Red Army:Hello everyone, I am Uncle Red Army, from the Ourea Wuya community, we have been serving and operating the project side. On DFINITY, we have also made a related Chinese community called Guoke Universe, and have translated a lot of articles about the project. We welcome you to communicate more in the community in the future. 

Zhang Shuhao Q1: Since the beginning of this year, DeFi has achieved rapid development as an innovation in the application layer. It not only promotes the birth of new assets, but also poses challenges to the blockchain infrastructure. Between Ethereum, which is often criticized for being congested, and EOS/Tron, which is faster but less composable, and some new solutions, which direction do you think can develop faster will become our next solution. Highly available infrastructure when an application layer bursts?

Mable jiang：We have already discussed many public chains before. In addition to the lowest Layer 1, I am more concerned about the more important facilities in different stacks, such as the blockchain data index project The Graph, which I am more optimistic about.

Multicoin Capital invested in The Graph two years ago, but at that time the demand for indexing and querying data on the chain had not yet arisen. Now, for example, popular DeFi projects have a large amount of data that needs to be indexed for asset statistics , to monitor price changes, as well as changes in different liquidity pools, etc.

In fact, The Graph is just one of them. We believe that Layer 2 middleware represented by The Graph and products that can serve developers well are worthy of attention.

Paul Liu：It was also discussed in the last round table that DeFi itself can explode because it greatly reduces the difficulty of developers, and, as a decentralized platform, it gives everyone a relatively fair way of competition, because you The code of can be seen by other people, and therefore can be believed by others.

But from the user's point of view, it is still very troublesome, and the procedures in the process are very cumbersome, so one of the most important aspects of DFINITY is to simplify the process for users to use the application.

Dora：My point of view may be slightly different from the previous two.

The explosion of DeFi this time is a test of Ethereum and many public chain infrastructures. I think the performance of Ethereum is not as bad as expected. For example, some public chains blindly invest in DeFi, and finally go down directly However, there have been no major accidents on a network as large as Ethereum, so I think Ethereum has withstood the test.

In addition to performance, security is also important. Ethereum has gone through such a long time, and its security must have been confirmed in the face of so many attacks. Chains like EOS and TRON have super nodes, and Ethereum has a higher degree of decentralization. I think it has more credibility and inherent advantages in doing DeFi.

The last point is that from the perspective of developers and ecology, the moat of Ethereum is still very deep.

Therefore, based on these points, I think that Ethereum will still be the bottom layer for DeFi or other applications to explode.

But on the other hand, I don’t think this means that the application layer can only be done by Ethereum, like Polkadot and DFINITY, they are very leading in terms of architecture and consensus, and more importantly, they also have a broad mass base. Polkadot has done a lot of interaction and airdrops for the community in the early stage. However, DFINITY did little in this regard before the launch of the test network. Next, I think that public chains such as DFINITY with advantages in technology and performance can do more work in the community and users. I think there is still a chance to break through of.

Uncle Red Army:Let's talk about the next outbreak of applications, we can briefly review the process from the beginning of Ethereum to the present. The earliest positioning of Ethereum was the world computer, and the themes of DeFi and open finance were only developed after the ecological development. When the early infrastructure was still relatively lacking, the demands of the world computer were relatively large and difficult to realize. DeFi, which I think is a small and beautiful product, is more suitable, but this does not mean that the future development will be like this.

There will be different iterative changes at different stages. In the early stage, we do some simple things. Later, with the maturity of technology and ecological development, we can do some things that we wanted to do but could not do. The concept of world computer will be proposed again. Of course, the connotation will be richer and more practical.

Zhang Shuhao Q2: The ways to improve the performance of the husband chains mentioned above are mainly through consensus algorithms. Another hot spot this year, Filecoin, and its storage sector represent the rise of a new consensus. I really want to know how the guests think about them. Will the unique storage mechanism become an all-round infrastructure like Ethereum? Or is it limited to supplementing storage facilities?

Paul Liu：I think file storage is definitely a direct application of Filecoin, but if it is limited to this, it seems to limit the breadth of development. In fact, in terms of file storage, we have seen many other solutions, both decentralized and centralized. Some decentralized solutions claim to be very cheap. I believe that Filecoin will face more competition. .

From the application level, I think the development of the entire DeFi is still based on the transparency and composability of decentralization. Composability is the most fundamental point. But I don't see a strong breakthrough in Filecoin.

Uncle Red Army:This is the same problem encountered by other public chains, that is, the problem of positioning.

Technically, many public chains may have all kinds of powerful things in them, but who cares about this?

I think a better positioning is that it can solve the problem of a clear scene, or solve a specific problem. It doesn't matter even if it is relatively small, but I am most afraid that any problem can be solved.

I feel that Filecoin has this kind of taste, and everything can be stored. But why do we want a service that can save everything? A better positioning is that it provides a specific solution in combination with a specific business, even if it is a small entry point, to meet a specific scenario, and it fails to form the so-called network effect from a small point. I think that Filecoin wants to do storage, and it is a problem that needs to be faced in combination with specific things.

Mable jiang：I found that there is a common problem in storage projects, that is, its economic incentives will make some people criticize how to balance the input and rewards of miners on Filecoin is a problem. I don’t think anyone has thought of a solution.

Let's talk about applicability. Someone inspired me before and said, is it possible for the storage project to develop in this way, that is, combine a certain public chain such as Ethereum, and directly make an Ethereum USB flash drive, which is in line with the ecological products of the Ethereum ecosystem that have storage needs.

This kind of combination is an interesting point I see, but you will find that everyone is doing their own projects in their own way, without considering how to match them in the entire Web3. If they are combined, there are still many things that can be done.

Dora：I mainly want to add one point, the issue of regulation.

If Filecoin is still positioned to store everything in the future, then who will guarantee the legality of the stored information, and how to pursue responsibility once illegal content or related problems appear. If this problem cannot be solved, Filecoin can only be reduced to a grand fantasy from the real landing.

Everyone talked about the application scenarios. In fact, I think that everyone’s demand for on-chain storage is not as great as imagined. The source of this demand is that many people use the traditional Internet development path as a benchmark, first from infrastructure and then to Storage, but a centralized approach is more effective in solving some problems. So at this stage, I personally think that the demand is not that great. Speaking of combining with more specific scenarios, I think that some current works of art and NFTs in the form of streaming media still have relatively high storage requirements, and there may be room for imagination when combining the two.

Zhang Shuhao Q3: The previous issues were relatively macro. If we talk about the most concerned thing in the short term, we may have to mention the gradual deployment of Ethereum 2.0. According to the observations of the guests, the progress of Ethereum 2.0 this year, how are the products realized, and have they met people's expectations? Are there any development teams already working on a 2.0 adaptation solution?

Dora：Ethereum 2.0 has always been the focus and layout of Hashquark. We have a metaphor for ourselves. The switch from Ethereum 1.0 to 2.0 is like changing the tires of an airplane on an airstrip. It is such a difficulty. Because there are so many assets, users, developers, and the entire ecology on Ethereum 1.0, it is not a joking workload if you want to cut them over.

From the practice of Hashquark, we not only ran the official test network, but also replicated the Ethereum test network, and ran hundreds of thousands of ETH on it to do a stress and security test. Overall, the progress is relatively smooth Yes, we found some problems though. But I think it is necessary for such a huge system-level switch.

It is relatively early to talk about the real adaptability solution, and the beacon chain, including the test network, is only the first step.

Of course, we have already made EtherPocket products for Ethereum 2.0 products. Since the 2.0 feature tokens will be locked for a relatively long time, providing liquidity is a core. In this regard, Hashquark will try to cooperate with liquidity providers including exchanges. cooperate. If there is a good Ethereum 2.0 product team on the market, I hope everyone can recommend it to us.

Uncle Red Army:As far as I can see, there are mainly 2 points that can be laid out.

Everyone knows that the staking of Ethereum 2.0 is 32 ETH as a mortgage. With the large user base of Ethereum, there will inevitably be a large number of nodes, but the threshold for users to set up a node is still quite high, so some products have been announced one after another. I think that if there is an open source or decentralized version of hosting in the future, it may receive more attention. The other is the service of increasing liquidity. There are also some related projects launched on other PoS chains. We are also very curious about the innovation on liquidity on Ethereum 2.0 in the future.

Paul Liu：It can be said that the existing ecology on Ethereum is a great advantage, but it is also a relatively large burden.

The development of Ethereum 2.0 is not the same as our DFINITY building a network from zero to one. We can make very bold attempts and use some new algorithms and new mechanisms, but a little change on Ethereum will be correct The existing ecology has a great impact, which is why they are very cautious about it.

Another obstacle is that some of the attacks that have occurred on Ethereum in recent years are mostly due to the fact that his EVM/Solidity design has system flaws, and the security is not considered enough, so that everyone shoots their own with guns many times. foot. I believe that 2.0 still needs to be compatible with each other, so that the current defects can be inherited.

In addition, the biggest goal of Ethereum 2.0 is to improve performance, but in fact its efficiency will not be particularly high. It mainly improves throughput through sharding masters, so what is the difference in its DFINITY?

DFINITY was based on a shard network from the beginning. Ethereum 2.0 first set up a shard network and then expanded it, so it also needs to verify the blocks of other chains through the beacon chain, and finally reach a consensus. The release of Ethereum 2.0 The block time is 12 seconds, and the final confirmation is about 10 minutes. We don’t need to do this on DFINITY, so relatively speaking, it only takes 2-3 seconds for us to reach the final transaction confirmation.

Mable jiang：As for the team that carries out adaptive work, I think the most natural one to do this is the mining pool. Whether it is Hashquark or other domestic mining pools, it has natural customers and has already done research in the financial field. . Ethereum 2.0 has further strengthened this demand, so you will find that the arrival of 2.0 does not make the ecology more decentralized but more aggregated. The same service provider may provide several services at the same time. This is also an interesting development beyond 2.0.

Zhang Shuhao Q4: In addition to the important progress of Ethereum, in recent months, some highly anticipated projects with excellent background have been launched one after another, including DFINITY. For these projects that have been prepared for a long time but have a new ecology, what do you think about the development prospects? How, how much room for imagination? Which ecosystems are you optimistic about?

Uncle Red Army:DFINITY is still a relatively optimistic project for me. A big difference between it and other chains is that it feels that it is a decentralized blockchain itself, and it is also an Internet project. The target is the decentralized AWS (Amazon Cloud), so the first day of DFINITY Just out of the circle.

I personally understand that the core feature of DFINITY is the concept of "code as a service" proposed by it. The reusability of future code can be greatly improved, making it more convenient for developers to develop. On the other hand, DFINITY lowers the threshold of deployment, which can minimize the friction of developing services.

Next, some interesting propositions are in front of us. Whether DFINITY will learn more from the experience of the blockchain field or the Internet field.

Paul Liu：I am most optimistic about DFINITY, and the uncle of the Red Army also said that it can be combined. If you only look at the composability of business logic, then smart contracts can provide a better solution, but if we expand the composability from business logic to a complete set of user-oriented solutions, that is to say, you still need to build Your own network, such as a server, set up your own firewall, what kind of developers to hire, and how to solve the problem of traffic peaks. To be honest, 90% of the current solutions may be centralized, and they all have to do these things by themselves.

Once the composable threshold of the entire solution is released and this becomes decentralized, this is a platform imagined by DFINITY. The goal of DFINITY is to allow developers to directly write code, and then upload the code, and users can directly access it through browsers and domain names, without calling new APIs and new protocols, so that different links can operate, so that all links can It runs on a decentralized and trusted platform, and at the same time greatly simplifies the developer process. So I think DFINITY's breakthrough is very good.

Mable jiang：We discussed at the very beginning, what is the positioning of a public chain, I think this is very important. As far as picking the ones I am more familiar with, Solana was selected, but many people don't understand it. It is not a well-known public chain.

In fact, from the very beginning, its underlying logic was written more suitable for exchanges. At the beginning, it thought that I wanted to be a very high-performance exchange. Everyone joked before that transactions are very important applications on the blockchain. I think there is nothing wrong with this. The financial and transaction attributes are indeed financial innovations that the blockchain can bring, so in fact, I think that many public chains It is very meaningful to have a direction and landing scene, and then build its ecology around that area.

Dora：I think this question is about the public chain ecology, including the ecological development of DFINITY.

First of all, from the perspective of Hashquark, for high-quality projects, we basically hope to become contributors and participants in their ecology. For example, in the Ethereum 2.0 mentioned just now, we have made an Ethereum Staking and a network query tool EtherPocket. On the Polkadot ecosystem, we built Polkacube and obtained official grants; on DFINITY, we will build a browser based on the network neural system, as the entrance to the DFINITY world, a comprehensive solution that can meet user needs.

Then talk about our experience as a developer. Our focus on the public chain is nothing more than being able to give developers enough support and we can obtain some information about the public chain in a timely manner. What I said here is relatively straightforward. After developing on several public chains, we feel that DFINITY still has many deficiencies.

Compared with the excellent Web3 Foundation, the market announcement and the funding of the ecological project z have been done very well in several dimensions. At least we can feel a very warm atmosphere in Asia or China. .

The construction of DFINITY feels much weaker. The SDK provided to developers has actually been available for a long time, because Hashquark has relatively in-depth communication with the official, and joined their closed test network very early, but outsiders don’t know many things, just It will lead to a disconnect between them and the team, or people don't know how far the project has developed, so they have no way to care or consider whether to participate. When the SDK comes out, I think the atmosphere can be created.

Uncle Red Army:Let me add one more sentence. This Paul Liu can convey everyone's concern about ecology. Just now Dora raised a very good point.

Paul Liu：Everyone's opinions are very good. I must convey that we have only recently started to invest in the community, so there is still a lot of work waiting for us.

Zhang Shuhao: It can be seen that everyone is still very optimistic about DFINITY. Just like what Dora and Uncle Red Army mentioned just now, high-end projects like this can do more sinking, which may be more friendly to users and developers. Well, the above is all the content of the whole table, and finally thank the guests for their wonderful sharing.