Since the emergence of Ethereum in the last round of bull market, there has been a wave of public chains in the currency circle.
Most of our peers who have invested in 2017-2018 have deep memories of the last wave of public chain craze, various high tps public chains, DAG public chains, account model innovation public chains, and of course eos, which was once in full swing. Countless development competitions bowed down. Now that the round of bulls and bears has passed, the elite development of the eos ecology either switches to the dot ecology or returns to ethereum defi.
In the new round of bull market, the public chains of the year are as old as yesterday, but now the hot topics revolve around dot, dfinity, avax, near, and Dongtu specialty ckb and cfx are no less contenders to replace neo in the new cycle.
What are the barriers to the public chain? This question actually implies a premise question: what is a public chain?
If the public chain is considered to be a large-scale open distributed database, it is natural to pursue advanced technical parameters.
However, the longer you work in this industry, the more you find that the public chain is more than that.
From a technical point of view, the public chain certainly has the attributes of a distributed database;
From a financial point of view, the public chain undertakes the functions of public ledger and clearing house;
But the most interesting and often underestimated attribute is the socio-organizational attribute of the public chain: an open global collaborative network without trust. If you go deep into the community of each public chain, you will find that each public chain has its own discourse system, believed values, culture, and unwritten rules of collaboration. . . Like each of the different tribes, the anthropological, sociological and organizational issues involved have not yet been studied on a large scale.
If the above is interpreted from the discourse system of a centralized company, it is cultural values and company systems, one soft and one hard, to ensure the efficiency and output of organizational collaboration.
However, due to the decentralization and transnational nature of the public chain, the construction and inheritance of these two systems are more complex and changeable, more flexible, and therefore more difficult to build
In the final analysis, technology is not the core barrier of the public chain, but ecology is.
But this does not deduce that the public chain does not need technology. On the contrary, advanced technology is the premise of the poker table on the public chain, but it is far more than that if it is really successful. It also needs:
Healthy and prosperous original ecology: the best community developers (just an excellent core team is far from enough) win the world. These excellent community developers will continue to explore the latest application scenarios at the forefront of technology, just like eth's defi; Ecology is easy to talk about but not easy to do. The foundation needs to burn money, send people, and contribute. Most importantly, it needs to grasp the strength, when to focus on pushing, when to step back and give the stage to community developers, and when to "set things right" , which is similar to legitimacy mentioned repeatedly by vitalik this year. A spiritual symbol with religious leadership qualities The most powerful religion only relies on stories and abstract teachings, it is btc The next most powerful religion to concretize the above into concrete individuals is eth, For other public chains with the potential of religious temperament, dot and dfinity have the most temperament, avax is worse, and near is more of an engineer temperament.
As an open global collaboration network, without generous ecological support, returning the captured value to the community, and without values that can inspire the heart, how can we motivate and unite the best developers in the world without company boundaries? It is definitely not enough to rely solely on the development of the core team, which is reflected in the recognition of the valuation of the secondary market, which is the difference in the recognition of the valuation of network vs engineering companies. Reflected in the requirements for founders, it is the difference between the requirements for spiritual leaders/technical politicians vs. CEOs of technology companies.
At the two extremes of the spectrum of how to start an ecology, there are eth and bsc:
eth: A more decentralized promotion of ecological construction, similar to a balance between Plato's elite oligarchs and the public; bsc: Promote ecological construction with an extremely centralized attitude, and (to a certain extent) harvest a virtuous circle, and use centralized resources to feed back decentralized ecological construction;
The development of bsc is a very interesting case, which provides a thought-provoking question: Can promoting the ecological development of the public chain in a centralized way find another way, avoid the competitive advantage of eth, and finally achieve a virtuous circle? Similar cases include sol (but sol has more technological innovations, while bsc focuses on the application layer), with ftx resources as the starting pusher.
However, it is worth noting that the current bsc ecology is still dominated by imitation and micro-innovation of eth's originality, and at the same time it is very dependent on the positive circulation of funds in the bull market cycle. The next challenge for bsc is how to be more decentralized, and Develop more original and innovative developer ecology.
In the field of public chains, technological innovation is not scarce, but consensus is scarce. Just like today when capital is abundant, capital is not scarce, but cognition is scarce.
I hope that the new generation of public chains, come on!
