Meng Yan, deputy dean of the Digital Asset Research Institute, shared the characteristics and essence of Web 3.0 and the development trend of DeFi.
Original title: “Web3.0 Dialogue Marathon | Interview with Meng Yan: Web3.0 is a return to the original intention of the Internet”
Interviewee: Meng Yan, vice president of Digital Asset Research Institute, co-founder of Youzheng Liantong
For a concept with an extremely grand narrative, extremely rich content, and extremely flexible connotation, the definition and characteristics of Web3.0 are always in high-speed dynamic changes, and the WebX laboratory hopes to open a long-term dialogue marathon to explore Web3. The boundary of 0 will also be an important project for the continuous iteration of the Web3.0 technology and ecological development research report.
Meng Yan, Vice President of Digital Asset Research Institute, Co-founder of Youzheng Liantong
Can Teacher Meng share which areas he has focused on recently?
I myself have been focusing on research in the field of digital assets and DeFi. Recently, our team is designing and developing a decentralized algorithmic banking protocol and is considering how to put compliant assets on the chain in this protocol. Different from the general asset chain, our project is more inclined to the STO category. The core difference is that the STO itself must meet a series of compliance requirements, so including qualified investors, KYC certification, anti-money laundering, etc., these requirements will affect STO itself imposes certain technical restrictions, resulting in a lot of resistance and friction when the general existing DeFi is directly connected to the STO. At this time, DeFi may need to make some adjustments, but in general, these are minor issues, mainly as part of off-chain assets on-chain. The troublesome part of the token economy is that different legislative districts or jurisdictions have different regulations, certifications and tolerances for Token. DeFi is also a global market, so there are indeed some ambiguities or some risk. Therefore, there is actually some controversy about which jurisdiction we design our token economic model according to the norms. Of course, this aspect is relatively strict in China, but even under strict conditions, China still has room for the implementation of the token economy.
Regardless of whether it is for asset chaining or a token economic model, the external constraints should be given at the beginning of the design. New constraints cannot be added when the design is close to completion, and the original design may be completely invalid. Therefore, the jurisdiction’s regulations and tolerance for tokens should be considered as important initial conditions.
In fact, is NFT also solving this problem now, and is it different from what you are doing?
What we are doing now has a certain relationship with NFT. To be precise, we want to make digital financial “notes”, but we believe that traditional financial notes are not suitable for digital finance, so we must reinvent “notes” based on the specific needs of DeFi and digital finance. This kind of thing is definitely NFT, but it is different from our popular NFT direction. Now popular collectibles such as artworks and crypto cats have a certain market, but we still care more about doing DeFi first. Indeed, because this part is an important infrastructure for the entire Web 3.0.
I would like to ask you to share with us, from your perspective, what is the essence of the core of Web3.0?
Different organizations and different people use this term to describe completely different things. For example, the Semantic Web (Semantic Web) also includes intelligent agents (Intelligent Agent), but in fact the Web3.0 we are discussing today comes from the co-founder of Ethereum, Dr. Gavin Wood, and there are many different names in this direction. For example, the Internet of Value and the Open Web. I prefer to call the decentralized Internet because the word more accurately summarizes its essence or key characteristics. No matter what it is called, it represents everyone’s consensus. Ethereum 2.0, Near, Filecoin, and Polkadot are obviously moving in a very clear direction.
I think Web3.0 is a new Internet platform, a new computing paradigm. In a sense, it is a return to the original intention of the Internet. The decentralized Internet must be similar to our current Internet, from hardware to software, to network services, to network protocols, to value layer protocols, to the application layer, a multi-level integrated system, we call it the technology stack ( Stack). Blockchain spans many different levels in this system, playing a core role in the storage layer, computing layer, and value incentive layer. Therefore, the blockchain is a core infrastructure for Web3.0 and a real Game Changer. This is my view on the relationship between Web3.0 and blockchain.
I don’t think it’s time to summarize the essence of Web3.0, but I would like to point out five characteristics of Web3.0:
Decoupling computing and specific computing devices: Web3.0 constitutes a new computing paradigm, where computing and storage are separated from specific devices, and computing and services will not be shut down due to problems with specific devices. The service is real, you can access and use it, but there is no specific machine to support this service.
Realization of identity authentication and data confirmation based on cryptographic technology: Unlike the traditional Internet based on centralized institutions and databases for authorization and authentication, identity will surely become a sovereign asset. This identity is not only a person’s identity, but also includes machines, etc. The identity of the terminal in Web3.0.
Data recording and storage are carried out in a non-tamperable way: In Web3.0, data storage tends to never delete or modify, but to accumulate data, but the premise of this model is extremely low storage cost and extremely large scale. Big.
Resource allocation and collaboration are carried out through a token-based market mechanism: different from the previous centralized authorization deployment method, the two parties optimize the allocation of resources through token transactions.
Decentralization and transparency in equity distribution.
At a deeper level, a little divergence, I think Web3.0 is actually the infrastructure of the ubiquitous machine intelligence era. I personally think that Web3.0 and blockchain are not for human use in the long run, but for ubiquitous machine intelligence, and are the basic tools and mechanisms for mutual transaction and cooperation between large-scale machines. We are now using the thinking framework of carbon-based civilization, and blockchain, including Web3.0, represents a new paradigm of silicon-based civilization, which is not well understood by everyone.
Which category of Web3 do you think the work or field you are currently engaged in belongs to, or what is the relationship with Web3.0?
What we do is DeFi, which is actually the value layer protocol of Web3. DeFi is equivalent to Http, which itself has certain application value, but it is mainly an infrastructure, a protocol used to support upper-layer applications. Only after the DeFi step is consolidated, will there be a large number of decentralized applications such as Douyin, Twitter, Amazon and Taobao.
What do you think of the current DeFi idling problem?
This is true at present, but in fact it is constructing a great infrastructure by means of idling. Its purpose is to wait for the upcoming explosion of Web3 applications and provide financing, payment, issuance, listing, and circulation for these Web3 applications. , Including infrastructure for mortgage lending. Only when a large number of Web3 applications have emerged and the traditional financing model has been subverted with the help of such infrastructure, everyone will realize that DeFi was originally prepared for these applications.
In other words, in fact, the upper layer that DeFi needs to serve is not perfect, so its value has not really been reflected?
Yes, I think DeFi will be worth 10 trillion US dollars in the future, because the decentralized applications of Web3 are actually intelligent agents, which automatically conduct large-scale transactions and liquidation in the DeFi world. The user’s use of the Internet will not be much different from what it is now. You only need to protect your digital identity and you can never log in and use various services at will.
We see that the current DeFi is still moving to the traditional financial game. Do you think DeFi itself has any valuable innovations?
In fact, open finance and DeFi are not completely equal. Open finance is a value proposition, and DeFi is the most resolute technological realization of this value proposition. If the central bank and commercial banks can be very open and can open up their own infrastructure, many financial services no longer need to be licensed, and the idea of open finance can be realized. But in fact it is impossible. Traditional finance does not like openness.
DeFi uses a very decisive technical means to make it only open in this form, which is very extreme, but I think it is necessary. So the most important feature and value of DeFi comes from its openness.
Second, the most important contribution of financial infrastructure or financial institutions is to provide liquidity for the entire economy. DeFi’s mechanism can provide better liquidity than traditional enterprises, partly from trust, from openness and transparency, and partly from its programmatic execution, which embeds liquidity logic as code.
But now there is a question, where does liquidity end up?
Yes, this problem is because the current DeFi has not been integrated with the real economy, so what everyone sees is that liquidity is speculation. I personally think that this is inevitable at this stage. Frankly speaking, the stock market is also like this in the early days. Everyone should be tolerant and patient with this matter. The DeFi world will evolve a hundred times faster than the traditional stock market, and we may see it in a few years, but it will take time.
Moreover, when DeFi is combined with the real economy, it will not first be integrated with the very real parts of the real economy such as manufacturing, real estate, and processing industry in one step, but with the real economy within the digital world, such as advertising, games, The media, I am both confident and patient about this matter. The current core issue is indeed how to integrate DeFi with the real economy. There are many ways to combine this kind of integration. I am more optimistic about asset integration and put offline data assets on DeFi.
What do you think are the connections between DeFi and offline real assets? Or where is the first landing direction?
The reason why I think DeFi is a better entry point for many offline assets is because this connection point is relatively simple, and money is their connection point. For example, a company turns its stocks into tokens and issues them on the chain through regulatory approval. These tokens can be appropriately circulated with digital assets in the DeFi world, such as bitcoin and other assets can be raised. If combined with the token economy, the company itself and the digital assets raised can be used to incentivize the community and users to complete the entire business closed loop.
At this stage, we avoid directly using blockchain to transform users and transform enterprise processes. For example, decentralize systems such as ERP and CRM. This is actually far away, and it may never happen, but we are directly in At the value level, the relationship between offline assets and online data assets is the most reasonable and has the least friction.
In other words, the connection between DeFi and offline real assets requires more digital credentials as a buffer, not directly related?
Yes, at this stage, it is through digital assets instead of exploring more business logic, because in the end it is not the blockchain to transform the business logic of the enterprise. I have not been particularly enthusiastic about this idea, because I think There is no need to put a large number of internal business logic on the blockchain, and the blockchain is not born to do these things. The blockchain is created to connect machine intelligence.
We actually see some synthetic asset projects, where users have invested some digital currency, and use this platform to invest in real assets such as stocks and bonds. Does this fit your current vision?
First of all, this practice is illegal in China and very vague in the international arena. Some of these platforms are actually gambling platforms based on certain asset prices. They are not real investment platforms at all. Therefore, I have reservations about these types of applications, or even negative ones. The direction we are most concerned about is actually the digitization and chaining of assets with real value and incentives from companies, offline institutions or communities, and how such assets can participate in the DeFi ecosystem. Such assets often have the characteristics of low liquidity, high risk, and non-compliance problems. DeFi provides a solution. We often say that the chain is governed by the chain. In a sense, some DeFi algorithms It is to play a supervisory role. It must ensure that assets have sufficient collateral when they obtain liquidity, have strong liquidity, and so on.
In fact, when talking about DeFi, people will be worried. Will this kind of openness bring chaos in order?
At the beginning, it will definitely go through such a process. When the entire industry slowly communicates with the regulators, and some infrastructures are gradually completed, people will find that infrastructure such as DeFi has the existing ability to eliminate and manage chaos such as speculative gambling. The platform is beyond reach.
What people are more puzzled is, who established the order in DeFi in the end?
First of all, governance behaviors related to people can and should be combined with traditional centralized authority. Centralization of governance in human society is still a governance method that is difficult to circumvent. But beyond this sense of reality, there must also be idealism. In the long run, when most of the mobile Internet, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence are integrated with DeFi, a large number of transactions and collaborations between machine intelligence are mutually exchanged by audited and tried-and-tested code combinations. Define order.
You have also seen that there are many words such as DeFi, digital finance, and open finance on the market. Can you tell us about the correlation and difference between these words?
I understand that it is a set of links. The outer link is digital finance, followed by open finance. Open finance is actually a proposition with values. I believe that since the digital economy provides a set of code-driven identity authentication and Data asset confirmation mechanism, so many reasons for traditional financial privileged operation and closed operation are not valid. Anyone has the right to participate in finance. The information available on the supply side and the demand side of finance is symmetrical, and its liquidity and efficiency will obviously far exceed the existing finance. And DeFi is just an extreme means of achieving open finance, because there is no way to achieve open finance with DeFi, and it must be 100% open.
You have been studying the token economy. You mentioned the value of the token economy in DeFi before. In the field of Web 3.0, do you think the token economy has any value in other applications?
The value of the token economy is very large. In fact, it is a protocol or a community that quickly completes resource aggregation through the Token representing the value, forms a scale and completes a self-starting mechanism. The vitality and significance of this mechanism are transcendent in human society, including the machine society in the future. Maybe in the future, we will not use blockchain and use quantum computers, but the token incentive will continue to exist. Token economy is a cooperative mechanism that conforms to the laws of market economy, but the design of tokens is really difficult. Generally speaking, income must be distributed according to contributions, and the entire environmental constraints must be considered in advance, including compliance, technology, and people. Wait.
When talking about the features of Web3.0, you also mentioned decentralized storage. Compared with other sectors, the development of storage is still lagging behind. Do you think there is a better technical route to achieve the low cost we really want? , Large-scale distributed storage?
Some people have also talked about reusing the existing low-cost Internet distributed cloud storage that has done a good job, and superimposing the token economy on top of it, such as encrypted storage and multiple redundant backups. Achieve the blockchain, including Filecoin, to achieve this goal. But I think we can still give more time to observe, don’t rush to conclusions, the blockchain may not be able to keep up with traditional cloud storage.
Source link: mp.weixin.qq.com
