This article aims to answer: Can Serum grow into an ecosystem with billions of users and trillions of dollars?
The answer should start from two aspects:
- Why DeFi may become a trillion-dollar industry?
- If DeFi can develop into such a huge industry, why I think it is Serum that is most likely to achieve this goal.
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Amidst the weeds, it is inevitable to get lost. Everything has strengths and weaknesses. The important thing is not to be able to list them all or prove how knowledgeable they are, but to evaluate and compare these strengths and weaknesses.
Whether Decentralized Finance (DeFi) can develop into the general trend of the industry remains doubtful, and I cannot answer this question. Perhaps none of DeFi can become the mainstream of society.
Or maybe DeFi will become the mainstay of tomorrow.
01 What is the point of DeFi?
For some people, this question may seem stupid, but for others, DeFi itself is the stupid one. This part aims to answer questions for the second group of people.
I was also one of these people. A year ago, I was still very skeptical of DeFi. If you ask me what I really thought at that time, I would rate it as “slow, expensive, flawed, and underpowered.”
But a few small things changed my mind. Before talking about how DeFi overcomes its own disadvantages, let’s talk about the initial problem first, why should we spend our thoughts on DeFi?
For some people, decentralization and resistance to censorship may be enough. But I don’t think so, at least it’s not enough for our goal of being bigger and stronger. Visa, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Apple, and Nissan may write some empty checks for these values, but in the final analysis, DeFi’s massive expansion of audiences is based on showing the world the chain Architecture can make their products better, not worse.
In my opinion, the key is “composability”.
A bunch of people built Uniswap, a standard (AMM-based) decentralized trading platform. Another group built Aave, a standard decentralized lending protocol.
Now you want to build a decentralized trading platform that can implement embedded margin trading. What do you want to do? Do you want to build your own risk engine, clearing engine, DEX and other infrastructure?
is not needed!
Let’s assume that Bob has some USDC and he wants to double ETH. Thus, you can create a front end (GUI), which can be achieved with just one click:
- Use USDC to buy ETH on Uniswap
- Transfer ETH to Aave, loan ETH, and borrow USDC
- Transfer USDC to Uniswap, buy ETH
- Transfer ETH to Aave, loan ETH, and borrow USDC tokens
- Transfer USDC to Uniswap, buy ETH
(If you want the process to be easier, you can use flash loans to reduce some of these steps.)
The key point is: the projects on the chain are all public, permissionless, and written in the same language, so we can splice them together to build new things and achieve the effect of one plus one greater than two.
We only need to create a front end that can implement the above five steps with one click, and successfully build a decentralized exchange with margin trading functions.
If you want to provide loans for leveraged transactions and get the corresponding yield, you only need to splice the loan/lending agreement to the DEX. Alpha Homora implements this function.
You can use Binance (Binance) lending function and Coinbase order book function to try to achieve the same request, but the effect is probably not good. You may encounter various problems such as interest rate limits, borrowing limits, withdrawal limits, withdrawal delays, etc., and there may also be liquidation risks in the middle.
But in DeFi, all of this can be achieved.
Another case comes from Serum. Let’s assume that you want to create a fast and affordable decentralized exchange DEX on the Solana public chain.
You can learn to use Rust, build an on-chain transaction matching engine, test it, find a market maker, create a GUI, etc…
Or, you can fork a front-end GUI, link the transaction fee obtained to your own address, and then personalize the design according to your wishes. In ten minutes, you will have the most advanced decentralized exchange DEX.
Bonfida front-end GUI interface
So, why can large projects be built on Serum?
Because suppose you are Robinhood, a well-known American brokerage firm, and you need to provide high liquidity for your user transactions, then you will not need to personally contact, negotiate, compare, settle settlements, communicate quotations and so on with proprietary trading companies. All you have to do is to build a decentralized exchange front-end DEX GUI, and you will be able to achieve what you want in 10 minutes.
If you want to create a token and make it successfully online for trading, you can hire R&D personnel to develop the token, business development personnel to communicate with Binance, FTX, and Coinbase on exchange matters and so on. Or you can directly create a token and add DEX trading pairs or AMM pools. Place an order in the handicap, and your token will be ready for online trading in ten minutes.
Composability means that all DeFi-based applications can be combined with each other, and new products can be integrated into the system immediately. It is as if every project has been equipped with a financial ecosystem with complete services at the beginning.
However, the above cannot prove that DeFi is bound to continue to grow and develop.
But if DeFi is done well enough, it can show huge advantages, and it can attract and eventually persuade most companies to put their business on the chain.
You can imagine what a prosperous DeFi with one billion users will be. And this is our goal.
How valuable will DeFi at that time be?
It is difficult for us to answer now. The content we describe below can’t really estimate its value. We can only say theoretically which value it can achieve.
We can make a rough estimate for the time being.
1) If these giants unite NYSE+ARCA+CME+ICE+……, realize decentralization and charge 0.0025% (0.25 bps) handling fee for each transaction, what effect will it have?
- In this way, the daily trading volume is approximately US$10 trillion. If the 0.25bps fee reduces the transaction volume by 75%, and then 20% of the total is transferred to the decentralized platform, the final daily transaction volume will be about 500 billion US dollars.
- This will bring in annual revenue of 3 billion US dollars, and the valuation will be around 100 billion US dollars.
2) What impact will DeFi have on social media?
Social media will achieve:
- API open access
- Freely create front-end GUI, client, etc.
- Open search
- Cross-community publishing
- Resist censorship
If the public chain taking Solana as an example can maintain a fee of 0.00002 USD and the throughput is sufficient, then
For Twitter:
- Average daily cost of USD 10,000
- Valued at $30 billion
For Facebook:
- Average daily cost of $100,000
- Valued at 800 billion US dollars
It may be difficult for pictures to be chained, and IPFS or other technologies may be required. In theory, we may be able to transfer 30% of social media, and the valuation of this part is 300 billion US dollars.
3) What impact will DeFi have on structured products?
- Most structured products are easy to wind.
- Blackrock alone has a valuation of $100 billion.
- So the total value of this part can reach 500 billion US dollars.
4) What impact will DiFi have on credit cards?
- VISA’s TPS (the number of things that can be processed per second) is about 2,000 to 50,000. A block chain with strong scalability can also achieve this TPS, and its valuation is about 500 billion US dollars.
- In this way, credit card companies worth 1 trillion can be owned in the entire chain.
…And this is just the beginning.
These are very rough estimates-you can’t take it seriously. This is not the value of the blockchain, they are just the value of companies and/or DAOs that can theoretically be chained.
However, it can be clearly seen through calculations that in theory, the total value of companies on the chain can reach 1 trillion US dollars, and they can be compatible with each other.
Of course, it does not mean that this vision will happen, but that it is possible to realize it.
DeFi may fail. This will be especially true if DeFi is known by fraud and failure rather than by its most powerful product.
But DeFi may succeed. And once it succeeds, it will be a great achievement, and its size will not be underestimated.
02 What are the advantages of Serum?
Solana public chain
DeFi may achieve one billion users on the chain, valued at trillions of dollars. So what kind of blockchain can realize this grand vision?
1) Able to process tens of thousands of transactions and hundreds of thousands of orders per second
2) Able to handle 10 billion social media interactions per day, about 100,000 times per second
3) The handling fee is less than US$0.001
4) Keep up with the times
- With the continuous advancement of global technology, the throughput of the blockchain must also increase.
5) Able to handle all requests within human response time
- For most products, usually when we click a button, the expected response time is about 0.1 second, and a delay of about 1 second will make people feel very crashed.
6) Product portfolio
- If products cannot be combined, many companies will lose a lot of added value. That is to say, every industry will most likely hope to become a composable shard.
7) Be able to decentralize and remain open
Therefore, basically the blockchain needs to be developed to have the following characteristics:
1) 1 million TPS processing capacity
- 200,000 times per shard per industry
2) US$0.001 handling fee
- Excessive handling fees will result in excessive costs such as sending orders and publishing updates.
3) Growing with Moore’s Law
- Specifically, it expands overall computing power by paralleling Moore’s Law.
4) Decentralization and openness
5) 100 millisecond block time
Which existing blockchains can meet the above requirements?
almost none.
At this stage, 200,000 transactions per second in a single shard will defeat all blockchains.
What is more worrying is that even from the long-term vision, almost all blockchains cannot meet these requirements. Most blockchains, even the fastest ones, have no plans to focus on further increasing throughput. On the contrary, they are still sitting back and enjoying the aura that can maintain the demand of 100,000 users in the DeFi ecosystem at a low price.
The current processing capacity of ETH is only 15 TPS. Even ETH 2.0 does not plan to upgrade the processing capacity to the order of 200,000 TPS in a single shard with atomic composability.
Faster chains can generally handle up to 1000 TPS, and the fastest speed is about 50,000 TPS.
Therefore, the only blockchain that can truly realize the grand ambitions of DeFi is a blockchain that currently has the capacity to handle thousands of TPS and has planned to upgrade the blockchain by magnitude in the future.
In other words, it must be the fastest chain currently, and it will continue to increase its computing power as the number of components doubles.
Solona meets the above conditions. At present, it can handle 50,000 TPS, expand synchronously in accordance with Moore’s Law, and has formulated a detailed plan to plan how to achieve exponential increase in calculation by optimizing different parts of the system in the next few years. Solana’s fees are also very cheap.
Solana’s block time is currently about 400 milliseconds, but it can be compressed to about 150 milliseconds through processing.
The core element is that Solana has set goals at the beginning of its establishment, and will invest a lot of resources for future upgrades. The core team and ecosystem participants assume this mission when they join the team, and will continue to cooperate to help expand and upgrade.
If Solona fails to meet these necessary conditions, it will be both surprising and disappointing.
In addition to it, what other blockchains can meet the requirements?
Serum platform
What DeFi wants to be bigger and stronger is a suitable blockchain. But just having a blockchain is not enough: a blockchain is just a proposal to illustrate how a group of people can reach consensus if they want to join the chain.
If DeFi wants to expand its scale, users need to choose this blockchain. And there are very many users.
As long as DeFi users can reach 10 million, the remaining things can proceed on their own: For companies that are studying how to get on the chain, DeFi may become a default and obvious option.
But how should we get such a huge amount of users? First of all, we need to have a very different type of consensus: in a sense equivalent to a Schelling point (a Schelling point, in game theory, people’s natural selection tendency without communication), that is, if anyone wants to To create DeFi, we will refer to this consensus model.
Ethereum has this capability. But currently no other chain can do this.
But Serum showed a viable path. Currently, it has the most powerful DEX on the entire chain in the world, and this ecosystem is growing rapidly. Moreover, behind the scenes, some applications with hundreds of millions of users are trying to use Serum. The construction of the entire large system has begun.
Not only that, Serum has a complete support system: they promise to integrate and develop technical support, products, liquidity, and foundations. The group alliance established on Serum is very large.
This does not mean that Serum will succeed.
But this does mean that Serum has the strength to succeed.
With these foundations, step by step, we are moving towards that grand vision. This week, I have seen social media applications, fantasy sports (fantasy sports, virtual sports simulation), token casting, data storage (oracle), automatic market maker (AMM), options, cross Fully functional test version of chain bridge, and more other applications.
Where does Serum come from?
The first proposal of the Serum project was a Google document that mainly described a protocol for archiving website screenshots on Ethereum.
It gradually evolves over time until it accumulates to a quantitative change.
But its most basic characteristics have never changed:
- Serum will be completed in two months.
- The value of Serum is always just a cool decentralized application.
There is a decisive fork in the evolutionary road:
- Improve on the original basis
- Create a new chain
If you choose the first path, Serum should have been built long ago and will be able to fully participate in the DeFi boom. At the same time, it should have issued a full-featured token for sale and it has reached its peak.
By choosing the second path, Serum may develop into a platform with billions of users. But it takes months to complete the first-generation product, build a huge ecosystem over the years, and realize its ultimate vision for decades. It is still on the premise that Serum can successfully gain appeal from the beginning.
The Serum project has chosen a path that is rarely involved, so its fundamental driving force and vision are consistent with this article: do your best to realize DeFi’s most ambitious and ambitious vision.
We have come a long way since the establishment of Serum. (But after thinking about it, it was only three months.) The road ahead is still long and difficult, and it will even take a step back every two steps forward. But I think this is the way to have great ambitions.
