In the Digital Economy and Open Finance Forum on the morning of December 6, Meng Yan, the co-founder of UZC and the vice president of the Digital Asset Research Institute, delivered a speech entitled “DeFi is the value agreement layer of the new digital economy”. Meng Yan mentioned in his speech that blockchain is not for human use, but for the future intelligent society composed of humans and machines, and between machines and machines, and this intelligent society constitutes a financial network. From this perspective, DeFi and industrial blockchain are not contradictory concepts, but can be combined with each other to form the end of blockchain.
The following is the full text of the speech compiled by Babbitt:
Meng Yan: Thank you host, thank you everyone. It is a special honor to return to my hometown of Wuhan. When the host introduced me just now, he quoted some of my recent views. Indeed, I have some new knowledge of DeFi recently, and I will share it with you here.
The future of blockchain is the financial network of a ubiquitous intelligent society
When I came to Wuhan this time, I heard a lot of high-level views, such as yesterday’s opening speech and a wonderful speech by Professor Li Guoquan from Singapore. For example, Director Jin Jian mentioned that they are adding various things to smart devices. Network identification, establish various blockchain communication protocols. There are also speakers from Inspur and from several organizations, who are all mentioning the combination of blockchain and the Internet of Things. He Bin, the guest who will speak later, is the founder of imToken. His topic is about the end of DeFi. Now more and more people have begun to form a consensus on the general direction of the entire industry, DeFi, and the future of the blockchain. In fact, whether we do blockchain or DeFi, we need to pay attention to what is in front of us, but we also need to look up to see the general direction, what is the end of the industry as a whole, and in which direction.
I recently read a book called “The Real Business Opportunity of Blockchain”. This book mentions that the future blockchain is divided into three stages, three years from now, that is, from 2020 to 2023. In the stage of innovative application solutions, 2023-2025 is a complete application solution for the blockchain, but the true face of the blockchain will not be seen by more people until after 2025.
After 2025, what is the future direction of the blockchain train? I dare to say that the blockchain is not mainly for human use, but for the ubiquitous intelligent social network composed of billions of people in the future and trillions of smart devices. If people pay for each other or cooperate with each other, in fact, the significance of blockchain cannot be fully utilized. We can even go a long way on the basis of existing technology, including centralized technology. Only when everyone truly understands that the future society is a new kind of ubiquitous intelligent society consisting of billions of intelligent primates, that is, humans, and trillions or even tens of trillions of smart devices, can they fully understand What problem does the blockchain exist to solve?
In the book I just recommended, it is pointed out that blockchain will be integrated with artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things after 2025 to support enhanced blockchain applications. Such a future is that all people interact with a large number of smart devices. What is a smart device? Your mobile phone is a smart device, a computer is a smart device, a mining machine is a smart device, an unmanned vehicle is a smart device, a drone is a smart device, smart highways, traffic lights, sensors, etc. The number of smart devices in the future may reach tens of trillions or even trillions. After such smart devices are connected to each other, what can the blockchain bring? Without blockchain, they can also be connected to each other, and they will make autonomous decisions based on their goals in accordance with predetermined AI algorithms. But only after they are connected, plus blockchain and tokens, can these devices collaborate on a large scale.
When these smart devices collaborate on a large scale, there will be several profound changes. First of all, until today, people are the main force creating wealth, but in the future, smart devices will become the main force creating wealth. Secondly, only talents can consume today, and smart devices can also consume in the future. I venture to predict that in 50 years, more than 95% of the world’s wealth will be created by smart devices, and more than 95% of consumption will be spent on smart devices.
Therefore, we will face a society completely different from the present, and a future completely different from the present. The theme of this conference is to believe in the future. What is the future? What kind of future should I believe in? Please think about such issues.
The problem to be solved by the blockchain is that between any two agents in the world, between people, between people and smart devices, between smart devices and smart devices, it can be done without any intermediary. Safe and reliable transactions are carried out under the protection of smart contracts. The frequency of this transaction can be arbitrary, and the scale can also be arbitrary. The large one can be a transaction of hundreds of billions, and the small one can be a transaction with 17 decimal places. . Blockchain is prepared for this world.
Industrial blockchain and DeFi have the same goal
When we understand this point, we can understand the two blockchain lines that are currently appearing in China and the world. One route is the industrial blockchain based on our country, or called blockchain +, the future mentioned It is that we want to combine the blockchain with the real economy. Another future is DeFi, which is developing rapidly and vigorously internationally, which emphasizes the use of blockchain to reconstruct finance. Are these two things contradictory? In fact, there is no contradiction at all, they work towards each other. If we look forward to the future where humans and smart devices coexist and form a financial network together, this network must have both finance and smart devices. We in China plan to make smart devices first, and then access finance. Foreign countries plan to do a good job in finance first, and then access smart devices.
Just like the project Mr. Woz said just now, I think it is a preview of the future blockchain application model. Use smart methods, smart devices or smart measurement methods to understand energy consumption and energy saving performance, and then express this performance It is a pass. Only after it is expressed as a pass can it enter the decentralized financial market for circulation. This happened to be the basic model proposed when I attended the Babbitt conference in July.
I don’t think that the industrial Internet and open finance are in a contradictory state. On the contrary, when we look at the end of the future, they are completely complementary. That is, we must pass the industrial Internet, pass cross-certification, credible storage, and then convert credible data into credible assets. Through cross-certification and the measurement of smart devices, we convert credible energy-saving data into digital assets, which represent energy, and then pass through necessary technical and legal procedures to generalize, and then enter traditional financial institutions or It’s the DeFi market, which generates financial value through circulation. Under this paradigm, you can imagine that our entire industrial blockchain and open finance are actually pointing in the same direction.
The future of blockchain infrastructure can be expected
Of course, we are very happy to see that this matter will not be too far away from us. Many people are very worried about whether our infrastructure can support it. We see that our blockchain infrastructure is growing rapidly. In the development and future of the blockchain just mentioned, the blockchain does play a central role. I just talked about the end result. Obviously, it is impossible to rely on today’s blockchain infrastructure to support 7-15 transactions in one second. The limitations of smart contracts and the expensive storage cannot support what we just said. In the end, we must make a huge technological breakthrough, and such a breakthrough is happening. In the past 12 years, the blockchain infrastructure technology has shown a cyclical forward fluctuation of 3-4 years.
In 2008, the Bitcoin white paper was published. In 2013, Bitcoin eliminated very dangerous bugs and finally entered a stable state, achieving 100-fold growth. Everyone remembers that Bitcoin first attracted attention in 2013. In fact, it took three or four years to go from bud to harvest. Its success has caused a lot of projects to follow up. Some projects are just simple imitations, but one of them is Ethereum. It was proposed in 2013, and after 3 years, from the bud to the harvest, in 2016 and 2017, Ethereum gave birth to the last big bull market, or big bubble. At that time, the level reached by Ethereum was 15 TPS, Turing’s complete smart contract, but without native cross-chain support, it can be said that it has very poor data storage capabilities.
But its success continued to inspire a large number of new project innovations, raised funds in various ways, and then began to enter research and development. We understand that DeFi and many projects were developed from 2016 to 2018, including Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0. Now the more and more well-known NEAR and Libra are all new creations inspired by the last round of Ethereum technology. project. Similarly, they also need 3-4 years, and even because of the large span of this wave of technology, it takes longer to do research to move from the bud to the harvest period. But once they succeed, we are about to face a major technological upgrade of the entire industry in 2022 or 2023. We will face new technical facilities, which will have a basic performance of 100,000 TPS and strong cross-chain and digital assets. And smart contracts, large-scale trusted storage, multi-language smart contracts. This technical foundation will completely update our understanding of the blockchain technology, and also initially have the ability to support the endgame I just mentioned. Unlimited sharding, combined with edge computing, can effectively support the high level of smart devices. Frequent mutual interaction.
When we see things like this, of course we feel very optimistic and very confident that we can definitely get there. However, many people may still want to say, if your future is three or five years from now, what are we doing in the past few years? Will the tone in the middle fail? No, in the past few years, we have had opinions on a very important task, which is to do the value Internet or the decentralized Internet, or Web3.0, to do this.
The success of Bitcoin actually added a new protocol layer to the entire Internet, that is, the value layer. The traditional Internet is divided into a storage layer, a computing layer, an interconnection layer, and an application layer (Figure 1). The emergence of Bitcoin and Ethereum adds a protocol layer, that is, a value layer, to the Internet, and then develops into a financial layer. After this layer is added, we can transform the Internet relatively quickly and create a new value Internet application layer.
(figure 1)
Among Internet users today, 99.9% are concentrated on the application layer. Similarly, the true large-scale application of blockchain must be at the application layer. Now we are still laying the foundation, that is to say, the real mainstream users of the blockchain have not yet come in. In the future, there may be 1,000 times more mainstream users coming in, because they are participating in the application layer, decentralized WeChat , The decentralized king of glory. Although DeFi looks very popular, it is still only a protocol layer. It supports applications. Therefore, there will not be many DeFi users, nor should it be many.
Therefore, in the next two or three years, we may have to pay more attention to a problem, that is, how to make our new Internet and decentralized Internet produce applications as soon as possible. I think this is a big problem. We have to think about a question. What are the advantages of this new Internet application over traditional Internet applications? For example, if we have a decentralized Douyin, why is this Douyin better than our current Douyin? Why do users prefer to use it? It is definitely not a product. The traditional Internet emphasizes product thinking and takes the product to the extreme. Decentralized Internet applications can not lag behind in this respect, it is a victory, but this is by no means its competitive advantage. So where is the competitive advantage?
The answer is in the picture, because we have one more financial protocol layer. What does finance do? Don’t make finances mystify and sacred. The meaning of finance lies in the aggregation of resources at “the moment.” Through the support mechanism of DeFi and the unique incentive method of the token economy, our decentralized applications can aggregate various resources “at this moment” and obtain advantages that the fan economy and community economy of the traditional centralized Internet cannot match. . For example, let our bloggers have the opportunity to form a huge collaborative group of their fans through the token economy. For example, allowing social media like Twitter to use a token economy, which not only avoids the centralized system from arbitrarily controlling content, but also effectively controls those illegal content. This is possible through the token economy. Achieved.
To be precise, it is DeFi and the token economy that bring more imagination and more possibilities to the future decentralized Internet, which is its core advantage. Therefore, when we see this endgame, see the perspective, and see the close-up, we should clearly realize what we should do. At least from my point of view, in the past few years, I have studied the token economy for a long time, and helped many projects to design their token economy. But objectively speaking, only now, only the technical infrastructure is constantly growing. Perfect, when DeFi continues to develop, we finally slowly approach that goal. So now my team and I are actually developing a new DeFi protocol. Our goal is very simple. DeFi is not to continue to be a zero-sum game tool, but to strongly support the booming decentralization that will appear in the future. Internet applications, and the future ubiquitous intelligent society. This is our real responsibility for DeFi. We are about to launch this agreement, and hope that everyone will continue to pay attention.
thank you all!
