Polkadot, Solana, Nervos, NEAR and imToken discussed the development direction of the public chain, the second-tier expansion and governance issues.
Organize: imToken
On July 24, imToken, Nervos, NEAR, Polkadot, and Solana co-hosted the “Public Chain Future” Hangzhou offline seminar to share the current status and future of various public chains, and discuss the issues of Ethereum that everyone is concerned about. , Whether each public chain has other development directions or entry points for open discussion. The following is a record of the core content of the event.
Moderator: Our first question is actually to openly discuss and communicate with you: Do you think there is a chance to solve these problems currently encountered by Ethereum? Especially in terms of governance and how we promote these problems in the development of Ethereum, do we have a chance to solve them? On another point, we have seen some manifestations, is it possible to cause fundamental problems, causing Ethereum to produce some very difficult to repair consequences, which may be fatal. Third, I think the public chain side can also talk about it, that is, Ethereum has indeed gone through five or six years. It may have reached such a stage now, but other public chains have not exposed or exposed them relatively rarely. The question, is it because they have not yet reached this stage? In the future, there may also be problems encountered with Ethereum now, or is there a way we can solve such problems?
imToken: If you want to break the game or try to bring some changes, it may be that Layer 2 wants to try to make breakthroughs, changes, and innovations. We practice in Layer 2, instead of making so many attempts and changes on the common protocols of Layer 1 . But can this attempt be done only in the general Layer1? Actually otherwise, Filecoin and NEAR are also experimenting, and even we are experimenting on Layer2. When there is a real result, it has really been verified, and we will put it on Layer 1 and slowly make changes. I think this is a more suitable approach for the Ethereum public chain, rather than the entire community of participants staying in quarrels and disputes. At this time, energy is consumed on these things. This is my view of it as a participant.
Nervos: I think the governance issue can be divided into two parts. One part is the need for governance, that is, I need governance; the second part is the way of governance. Just now everyone talked more about the way of governance.
I think this is a problem that Ethereum has to face as an innovator, because in 14 or 15 years, Ethereum did not take into account many of the following factors, including performance, consensus expansion, PoS, and so on. This is a great reference for the following public chains and can be alleviated to a great extent. So I believe that the new public chain will encounter fewer governance problems than Ethereum. Of course, this is not without its advantages. I think this is what it must experience as an innovation to get ahead.
The second point is how to manage the problem. I think it is obvious that as the earliest community of blockchain, as a community, the most ideal governance is to take everyone’s right to speak into consideration. This is the optimal strategy. But in reality, many people cannot express their right to speak.
Nervos will have a governance center called Nervos DAO, and we will give a part of block rewards to Nervos DAO every year. Just like the first point I said, as a later public chain, we think we have a clearer view on certain points, so our demand for hard forks and new and highly changing needs are not special. high. Especially the RISC-V virtual machine we use, RISC-V is a hardware instruction set, and its changes or the formulation of its instruction set are very serious and thoughtful. Therefore, there is almost no change in our instruction set. Compared with Ethereum, these are two completely different choices or destinations, so I think we have two aspects.
We have no answers to governance issues. We hope to find answers together with the community or the entire industry.
Moderator: What is your current governance, do you do it first in the community, or what kind of process, will there be?
Polkadot: As for the Polkadot ecology, everyone knows the upgrade of Substrate. In fact, this is divided into active and passive. After you have an idea, even if you want to skip democracy to upgrade, or you have to go through a vote in a democratic parliament, this is actually a paradox. It is equivalent to removing sudo, and the governance of the Substrate chain will be delegated to the community.
This is the first thing I want to say positively.
But the point I want to discuss more expansively is true democracy and false democracy in the blockchain world. This is very interesting.
In fact, I personally think that although Ethereum is an off-chain governance, it looks very centralized, but in fact it is a true democracy, because any decision-making you promote, it is impossible for all kinds of voices to be able to express adequately. And because the stakeholders involved are wide enough, you can’t fool around. You can understand that political correctness is a way to put rights in a cage. As long as you insist on process justice, some of the problems can be avoided.
Polkadot seems to be truly democratic. All the tools and all the process design are in accordance with the settings of the UK and the European Parliament. There has been a separation of powers, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and every code improvement needs to be publicized. It is indeed True democracy. Its tools provide a good pavement for its future decentralization, but we cannot say that it is now completely decentralized like Ethereum.
NEAR: I think this question is essentially-how to build a decentralized open society by a centralized organization.
From the beginning, when there was only one development team and only one company in the ecology, in fact, decision-making and governance were the most efficient. One development team had the final say, deciding your technical orientation and your entire architecture design.
What we see now is that there are some democratic mechanisms implemented on the blockchain, such as majority voting. For example, there is no problem with public discussion of a certain technical solution. But it seems that in the overall democratic program design, we may not have seen particularly breakthrough or excellent governance projects.
imToken: When you discuss how to do governance, I think when you start a company or discuss company decision-making, what we ultimately pursue is not how to govern, but the good results of governance. This is what everyone is pursuing. So there is a problem here. In fact, many things cannot be verified, so we need to have a set of rules of procedure to strive for the ideal governance result.
But in terms of blockchain engineering projects and product projects, it is actually possible to do such a verification process. I just mentioned Polkadot’s complete rules of procedure and democratic process. In fact, kusama is a very interesting setting, that is, you verify and run the governance plan you want to do again, just like we are doing Internet products now. , We do A/B test, first use the tools to reduce the controversy of decision-making, with a better result, we naturally know whether this is what we want to pursue.
Moderator: So Ethereum lacks a kusama.
imToken: In fact, Ethereum lacks Layer2. In fact, I have seen that many people who want to verify will go to Layer2 for verification. In the end, I think it is a more suitable solution and it is maturing. A set of governance decisions that have been verified under the Internet system of China is different from society.
Moderator: Actually, the reality is not very active, so the cost of experimenting in Layer 2 will be lower.
Celer Micheal: I feel that the hierarchical perspective is not limited to expansion, of course, it is actually very helpful for the final governance. Whether it’s the front-end user experience or the bottom-level storage, we need to connect these two things together.
I feel that Ethereum has already achieved this step, and EVM has done a unified work at least for users. But I feel that it further separates the bottom layer from the application layer. Whether it is in terms of performance, technical architecture, or governance, I feel that there must be a relatively large cut. Because in the future, these things may be governed, and sometimes in the case of more users, we will have a more democratic decision-making process, including voting by token holders or more open discussions. Of course, at the bottom, my personal preference is that there is no need for special democracy. In fact, things that are biased towards the bottom, I personally feel that democracy is not particularly needed. Because we say that the blockchain can be forked at any time, including Bitcoin also has such a trend, but who will win or lose in the end? I think this is not something that can be decided now,
When the application layer is facing to the majority of users, these governances are still possible, but I think the bottom layer is biased not to do it through computing power. This is my personal opinion that may be more radical. In the absence of computing power, I personally don’t like the use of PoS at the bottom, so I prefer Nervos, especially in the all-in-one machine. I think the bottom must be PoW.
Moderator: The question just now got a lot of opinions. Next, let’s not talk about Ethereum itself. We know that both Layer2 and ETH2 of Ethereum are advancing in accordance with the rhythm. Layer2 may be launched 1-2 this month or next month, and ETH2 may be transferred at the end of the year or early next year. To PoS. In my opinion, these may be performance upgrades as the core. Whether it is TPS or a single transaction cost, it can be improved and reduced. I don’t know whether there are any deficiencies in the public chain, or in your opinion, from Ethereum itself, which can be filled by other platforms?
imToken: I would like to cite a case. Many times we consider these issues from the user-centered perspective. When we find that more public chain designs, we only design from the top level and do not consider what users actually use. As I said at the beginning, Key is the key link for users, as well as scenes and public chains. How can they be connected here? How does the fund flow? Where is the weak link? This is a question that needs to be considered in the real connection. We can’t just stand there and say that we want to do a lot of ecology, which is useless at all.
So I think Nervos has two points that complement the current shortcomings of Ethereum: First, it supports any password domain, so that the traditional Web2.0 cryptography can form a new account system, and this account system is There is a lot of flexible space, so the most critical part of the first link, Key, Nervos has this ability. Second, the problem that most users will face on the blockchain is the uncertainty of transactions. Because a transaction is published on a public network, not a private network or an independent network. The transaction pool or transaction packaging and sorting mechanisms in the public network, or even the uncertainty of the blockchain state, will cause uncertainty in transactions, which is a very big pain point. But from the perspective of the public chain, you may not be aware of the subtle user common problems. So like the Nervos model, when a user sends a transaction, we already know whether the transaction is feasible. So these are the two biggest pain points that users can feel on Ethereum at present, and this is what Nervos can supplement, supported by its flexible and basic cryptography system.
Bifrost, the parachain project party of Polkadot Ecosystem: I think it is more flexible for developers to carry applications in the form of parachains. In fact, we can develop a little more complicated than smart contracts, but we can have more freedom Bigger.
For example, r-staking derivatives. In fact, our vision is to provide derivatives for the PoS network. In this process, the current thinking is to pass the Polkadot cross-chain bridge. It is possible to interact with each other through the homogeneous chains and parachains within Polkadot, and solve them through heterogeneous chains. In this case, I think what is done for the ether is a functional supplement.
I think that in the end, every public chain must be a unique business for everyone. For example, if you have high performance, or you have a more decentralized governance or operation method, you must have your own special form. Therefore, the final game is actually to develop their own unique fields, and then through some forms to get through, it may be more like an interactive state between parachains and parachains. So I think from the point of adding in the future, each public chain should have its own unique point.
Moderator: I would like to ask a question, does Bifrost belong to a relatively proprietary public chain? It is a more professional and specific service. If you bid for a parachain, will you feel that it is overkill and can it be used on other chains? Do this thing?
Bifrost, the parachain project of Polkadot Ecosystem: To make a parachain , you must first have assets and users, and the second is to be your developer ecosystem. We certainly hope that derivatives can empower developers, reduce user capital costs through development, and provide developers with derivatives. But who will use this derivative? I think we are divided into two steps now: The first step is to have assets and users.
Polkadot: Let me go on. Web3.0 was proposed by Dr. Gavin Wood in 2014. It will be a world of data security, privacy, and then completely decentralized. In the era of smart contracts, there is no way to fully support a particularly complex Web3.0 world.
We can think about what applications we have now. All we can think of is DeFi. In fact, this will be similar to the very early days of the computer era. We did not have any particularly rich applications. We would not have thought that today there is such a multi-functional and huge Internet world in the Internet era. So this is the vision of the blockchain that Gavin wants to achieve, which is Web3.0. His vision is realized with the vision of relay chain + parachain. This architecture is different from Ethereum. The relay chain is a meta-protocol, a Layer 0 protocol, and each Layer 1 parachain blockchain above it supports different functions and supports different functions and specific scenarios in different scenarios in Web3.0 Chain of functions.
Therefore, I think Polkadot is not a public chain in the first place, it is a multi-chain system. What does it add to Ethereum? In fact, it is not called a supplement. In fact, its biggest innovation is to subvert the design of all previous projects. I directly designed a Web3.0 architecture on the underlying architecture, rather than a simple public chain architecture.
Moderator: Many problems are not entirely public chain problems, many of them are application problems, including what the wallet entrance experience looks like, and what the application entrance experience looks like. I understand that what Ethereum wants to do is the bottom layer. You may feel that If you don’t have Ethereum, this is the final state, that is, you don’t need to know, you only need to use these applications, but you still rely on applications and wallets as the front end.
Polkadot: Your question is very good. What do I think is the state of most public chains? First of all, the main users of its services are not users, not the C-end. According to Chinese Internet technology, many people are not serving the C-end, but more to the B-end. It is like a contradictory duality. We know that we are truly capable of developing applications on it, but I first need to develop applications, and then someone will use the application, and then the business model of my chain can be reversed. At the same time, there are many low-level things, such as accounts, which are developed with public chain numbers. So what I just mentioned is indeed a phenomenon, and there is no one that can be solved well at present.
Moderator: We just talked a lot about applications. At present, the supervision of the domestic blockchain industry always feels that there is an unstable phenomenon. I think we can understand how everyone is considering policy risk avoidance. In particular, it includes all aspects of personnel, operations, investment managers, and applications.
Nervos: I will answer on behalf of our NFT project. I just explained that the NFT solution we make does not touch digital currency at all times, whether it is an issuer, holder, or trader. We have created a Mibao account, which is Mibao.net. There is no balance of digital assets in it, but it can receive NFT. The on-chain fee it consumes when transferring is also automatically issued by NFT. We use technology to help them issue NFTs, and they don’t have to pay for digital assets. Therefore, it is in compliance with the current laws and regulations in the country.
Moderator: So you belong to the role of providing technical services?
Nervos: We provide a kind of technical service, but this kind of technical service, due to the possibility of its underlying public chain, prevents users from having to touch digital assets.
Participants asked: Some time ago Alipay posted NFT-related things, but in fact it is not related to NFT as a whole. In fact, the problem now is that once your NFT is allowed to enter, the supervision cannot prohibit you from transferring it. Is this a bigger problem?
Nervos: This question is very good. There is a point here, that is, the public chain must be allowed to enter, and it must be open to the public. But for any service, the service that the C-end user comes into contact with must be centralized. For any of your apps, it must have a server that can filter some information for you. So, under the supervision system of any country, we can filter out the supervision of that country, but in fact, there is this information, that is, the user’s wallet will not be displayed. Of course, you can use other wallets instead of my wallet. But whose wallet you use, that wallet needs to be supervised, and the problem is that wallet.
Moderator: It sounds like a common regulatory logic, whether it’s a wallet or various.
imToken: Actually, we considered this issue when we started to do it in 2016, not to say that the supervision is strict today. When we started in 2016, what we wanted to do was decentralized, and did not rely on our centralized services as much as possible. What we can do is that the private key can still be taken out after all services are hung up. Second, even if you change a node, you can see your assets and transfer assets. This does not depend on imToken, as long as you can have this app, or even rebuild this app from our open source library. , We can do this, we started in 2016.
