The privacy computing public chain PlatON has entered the third phase of Alaya “meta network” on October 24. On this occasion, Dr. Feng Xiao, founder of Wanxiang Blockchain Lab and founder of PlatON, chatted with us about the PlatON project. Origin, and revealed some future plans for PlatON 2.0.
Interview & Writing: Pan Zhixiong, Research Director of Lianwen
With the launch of the main public chains this year, the blockchain ecology is entering a new stage. Dr. Feng Xiao, the founder of Wanxiang Blockchain Lab, believes, “ This year is the first year that the overall framework of the blockchain is completed and it is moving towards large-scale applications. The past ten years are the first stage of the blockchain . There are huge opportunities for development in this year.”
In the past few years, many public chain project teams have been born, and everyone is exploring specific new technology directions, such as privacy computing, consensus algorithms, cross-chain storage, distributed computing, and sharding technology. If you talk about the hard-core public chain with the most noteworthy technology, you will definitely be able to avoid PlatON, the project that has invested the most scientific research strength in cryptography, especially privacy computing.
As the chairman of HashKey Group, Xiao Feng, who has invested in almost all public chain projects, his other identity is the co-founder of PlatON. Because he believes that all the core technologies of the blockchain come from the public chain, it is necessary to invest top-level resources in the research and development of the lowest-level technology , so as to have the opportunity to reach the world’s leading level.
And PlatON chose “privacy computing” as the core research and development direction of the project, recruiting top cryptography researchers from all over China and the world to explore secure multi-party computing (MPC), homomorphic encryption (HE), and zero-knowledge proof ( ZK) and other cryptography technologies are implemented at the bottom of the public chain.
Xiao Fengxiang revealed that in order to find Chinese researchers related to cryptography and privacy computing, they read a large number of papers, participated in related top conferences, and communicated with industry experts, and finally found these cryptographers as PlatON Provide algorithm models, and PlatON’s team of engineers is responsible for engineering implementation.
When talking about potential landing application scenarios, Xiao Feng said that he will initially cut into fields such as medical and industrial Internet. These scenarios are very suitable for using blockchain and privacy calculations, and PlatON does not exclude assets or assets in the cryptocurrency world. Application, developers can also use PlatON to implement these scenarios.
Although PlatON may be the most evening line of all public chain projects, it will not adjust the direction and launch date of the project due to changes in market hotspots. Since its preparation four years ago, it has been steadily advancing according to the plan of the white paper. Moreover, PlatON’s R&D and mainnet launch process is very cautious, and a multi-stage and long-term testnet has been arranged to ensure the reliability and stability of the mainnet launch.
Recently, PlatON has officially entered the third phase of Alaya “Meta Network”. On this occasion, Xiao Feng talked to us about the origin of the PlatON project and revealed some future plans for PlatON 2.0.
Project launch: Find top experts from cutting-edge papers in cryptography
When seeing the name of PlatON for the first time, it is estimated that many people would think that the source may be the English word Platform (platform), but in fact the name of PlatON is derived from Plato (an ancient Greek transliteration of Plátōn).
Plato was a famous ancient Greek philosopher and an Athenian. Most of his works were recorded in the form of dialogues and he founded a famous academy. Plato was a student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle. The three of them are widely regarded as the founders of Western philosophy. They are known in history as the “Three Western Sages” or “Three Greeks.”
PlatON said, “One of the important reasons for this English name is that we trace the entire theory of computation, as far back as Leibniz, and even the great philosophers of ancient Greece, as well as the greatest philosophers and philosophers of all Western philosophy and even the entire Western culture. One of the thinkers-a noble tribute to Plato.”
The white paper of the project was released on a blockchain forum in San Francisco on July 19, 2018. However, Wanxiang Blockchain Lab began researching, preparing, and finding technical infrastructure that the public chain lacks. Direction, that is something close to 4 years ago. Xiao Feng told us, “ To understand the blockchain , we must be exposed to public chain technology, and synchronization must also be exposed to cryptography. We need to directly develop a public chain and touch these most challenging parts in order to bring to the open source world Something completely innovative. “
When looking for specific technical directions, Wanxiang Blockchain Lab read all papers in cryptography-related fields at home and abroad, and found out the Chinese authors among them, and then conducted in-depth communication and learning with them, and finally found such a few A cryptography expert joined the core research team of PlatON. Finally, the core direction of privacy computing and more specific modern cryptography fields were set, including: secure multi-party computing (MPC), homomorphic encryption (HE), zero-knowledge proof (ZK), etc.
PlatON stated that they are not limited to a certain cryptographic technology, but maintain a strong investment in cryptographic technologies such as MPC, ZK, and HE. From a practical business perspective, many business needs are limited by data privacy and cannot achieve project landing. , MPC can just solve this pain point.
Status of the industry: Public chain platforms are fully opened, with their own suitable scenarios
2020 is the first year of the large-scale application of public chains. All public chains that form the overall technical framework of the blockchain have launched the mainnet this year, and finally delivered a series of more complex and diversified public chains for the industry and developers. The chain ecosystem includes Polkadot (Polkadot) focusing on cross-chain technology, NEAR focusing on sharding technology, Filecoin focusing on file storage, Oasis focusing on privacy, Solana focusing on performance, etc.
In addition, this year we also paid attention to the second outbreak of public chain applications: Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Compared with the upsurge of using blockchain for financing at the end of 2017 and 2018, DeFi’s application ecology is more durable and rich, and it can also provide users with a wider range of low-cost financial services.
Xiao Feng believes that each new public chain is making breakthroughs from a different technical perspective. Each public chain has its own characteristics and focus on the direction, such as cross-chain, sharding, consensus algorithm, file storage, privacy calculation, etc. Because all public chains are open source, I don’t think there is competition among them. Each public chain is a cooperative relationship, and each chain has its own more suitable scenarios.”
Part of HashKey Capital’s investment portfolio contains many public chain infrastructure projects
Although the current application duplication ratio in different public chain ecology is relatively high, PlatON may be one of the few choices for the business needs of large-scale and general privacy calculations on data.
However, there is still some distance between the launch of the public chain network and the stable operation. It is not as fast as everyone imagined. For example, there is a gap of two or three years between the launch of Ethereum from the main network and the outbreak of two applications. Xiao Feng said, “After the overall block chain framework is completed, I estimate that in the next 3 years or so, the block chain network will continue to iteratively optimize, and many people can make great applications on it.”
Application scenarios of PlatON: Medical, Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, Finance
PlatON is positioned as an open blockchain platform that provides private computing for large-scale commercial data.
It is impossible for most commercial organizations to put user data and business data on any centralized platform, and blockchain is particularly suitable for such a permissionless network foundation. Because it is open source, commercial organizations can audit the platform to ensure security. At the same time, they can use cutting-edge cryptography technology to implement multi-party data general calculations, and it can also ensure that any party’s data will not be leaked.
Xiao Fengxiang revealed that PlatON has conducted in-depth cooperation and development with some industries that particularly require privacy computing to ensure that there will be real landing applications after the PlatON network is officially launched. And PlatON will also incubate some other application scenarios to maximize the privacy computing advantages of the PlatON platform. In terms of specific industry scenarios, PlatON will initially choose medical and IoT, industrial Internet and other fields.
Xiao Feng believes that the current so-called Internet of Things and Industrial Internet are actually more like local area networks. The data between various organizations is not fully connected, so it can be called “Industrial Internet 1.0”, and PlatON will promote “Industrial Internet 2.0”. Blockchain has become an open platform connecting various enterprises and upstream and downstream, and various institutions can perform collaborative computing without sharing sensitive data. The core of the Industrial Internet is the “Internet”, and it is an open wide-area Internet.
In addition, blockchain is also very thorough in disrupting the financial industry. In this year’s DeFi ecosystem, we have seen a lot of disruptive innovations that do not require a lot of investment costs. For example, Xiao Feng likes to use Uniswap as a case: “A few young people only need to write a few hundred lines of code, and it may take tens of thousands to subvert. , The exchange industry with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. In the future, this situation will become more common. Perhaps 500 lines of code can disrupt a company or industry. At the same time, there is no cost, no investment, no operation, no It requires office space and only a computer that can be programmed, which means that there is almost no cost to start a business.”
However, PlatON’s layout of the financial industry is different from the current DeFi ecosystem, and will focus more on the tokenization (securization) of physical assets. Xiao Feng said, “Although we do not exclude those native assets on the chain, we will pay more attention to the tokenization of physical assets, that is, the digitization of assets, and the digital assetization. Only in this way can DeFi be more compliant.”
Because of the tokenization of physical assets and financial applications based on blockchain smart contracts, ordinary users will be able to enjoy at least two advantages: the separable circulation of physical assets (securitization), and the programmability of assets. In terms of programmability, you can fully learn from the development of the current DeFi ecosystem. There are already many mature and open source applications in the industry.
The future of PlatON: Distributed AI
After the PlatON mainnet goes live, the above application scenarios can be gradually implemented. PlatON has also been thinking about what more basic components and capabilities the future public chain can provide in the development of the past few years. Their answer is a new concept: distributed AI.
Xiao Feng told us that in the upcoming PlatON 2.0 white paper, he will explain why he focuses on the vision of “distributed AI”, as well as the path and method to achieve it.
The logic is also well understood. PlatON is a platform that provides privacy computing for data. With the accumulation of data, it is naturally suitable to add machine learning or artificial intelligence as the basic components and capabilities of the public chain. The required organization can be realized through PlatON.
This is an important infrastructure for breaking the data monopoly, and entrepreneurial organizations also have the opportunity to make breakthroughs in the fields of AI and machine learning. In the Internet industry, only companies that have the most user data can use AI and machine learning to train models and develop them. But in the world of blockchain, if all data is controlled by users themselves, and then the bottom layer of the blockchain can provide a data exchange market, many startups will have the opportunity to obtain a large amount of data to develop AI applications.
In fact, some of the functions described in the PlatON 2.0 white paper will be online at the 1.0 stage. For example, PlatON can already be connected to the world’s most widely used open source machine learning platform TensorFlow during development.
PlatON has been connected to the most widely used machine learning platform TensorFlow
However, large-scale commercial applications need to start with understanding and learning before they can gradually adopt this completely new thing. The implementation and development speed may not be as fast as the native applications and native assets on the chain. However, Xiao Feng is still very optimistic. He believes that in the past Ten years is only the first stage of the blockchain, and the next ten years as the second stage will have huge development opportunities.
Just like the typical Uniswap project he likes, as the blockchain infrastructure matures, smart contract programmers and entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to sway their creativity on the public chain platform, with low threshold, low code, and low Capital and low operation methods provide more equal entrepreneurial opportunities.
Xiao Feng said, “It doesn’t matter if the business fails, the cost of trial and error is extremely low. Only public chains, such as permissionless networks, can provide such commercial infrastructure.”
