Xiao Feng believes that the ultimate application mode of blockchain is to become a public infrastructure through highly integrated functions, thereby lowering the threshold for entrepreneurship and promoting great applications.
Original Title: “Xiao Feng: Full Text of the Sixth Wanxiang Summit Speech-The Ultimate Conjecture of Blockchain Application Models”
Speech: Xiao Feng, Chairman and General Manager of Wanxiang Blockchain
On October 27th, the 6th Blockchain Global Summit hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Lab was grandly opened at W Hotel on the Bund in Shanghai. Dr. Xiao Feng, chairman and general manager of Wanxiang Blockchain, made his final appearance at the main venue of the summit and delivered a speech entitled “The Ultimate Conjecture of Blockchain Application Mode”. Dr. Xiao believes that blockchain technology will usher in a large-scale explosion of applications in the process of optimization and improvement. The ultimate application model of the blockchain will be to make the blockchain a public infrastructure through highly integrated functions, thereby lowering the threshold for entrepreneurship, inspiring innovation enthusiasm, and spawning great applications.
Xiao Feng, Chairman and General Manager of Wanxiang Blockchain
The full text of the speech is as follows:
It’s six o’clock in the afternoon. Thank you very much for not giving up. It is also very hard to listen to the guests’ sharing all day.
The topic of my speech “The Ultimate Conjecture of Blockchain Application Models” first stated that this is a conjecture, and maybe part of it is reasonable, but certainly not all of it. We see that the blockchain, especially the public chain, can safely say that the overall technical framework has been completed by the end of this year. Dfinity will be officially launched on December 31. At the end of this year, with projects like this one on the line, it can basically be said that the overall structure of the blockchain is completely completed. This is somewhat similar to the process of determining the TCP/IP protocol in the early 1990s.
Of course, in the next two to three years, the overall model and framework of the blockchain still have a lot of room for optimization and improvement, but it is foreseeable that starting from the end of this year, the blockchain will experience continuous optimization of the technical framework on the one hand, and applications on the other. Explosion.
How will the application of blockchain explode? This is a topic I am trying to discuss today. When thinking about the direction of blockchain applications or the degree of explosiveness, I myself organized a framework from the perspective of application layering. This framework is from the Internet to the blockchain from the top down, and from the blockchain to the Internet from the bottom up. From distributed networks, distributed databases, distributed computing to distributed ledgers. Distributed ledger is something that the Internet already has. Of course, with the blockchain, distributed storage and distributed computing are no longer the same as distributed storage and computing in the Internet concept. On the one hand, it is distributed, and at the same time more decentralized than distributed. For example, Dfinity is called an Internet computer. Why is it an Internet computer instead of a blockchain computer? Because as far as distributed computing is concerned, it is true that a large part of the content is in the category of the Internet, rather than purely on the blockchain. Although traceability and evidence storage are blockchain applications, they actually contain elements of Internet technology. Distributed ledgers are a dividing line. Going beyond the distributed ledgers and then going down and deeper, more and more blockchain is used, and more blockchain technology is used.
This is especially true when it comes to distributed governance. Both the economic model involved in distributed governance and the consensus algorithm use blockchain technology. Because if you want to use a community governance mechanism, you need to design a good consensus algorithm. Under distributed governance, going deeper is distributed applications. Distributed applications go further down and become a crypto economy. This is how a complete distributed business world is built.
It’s not that blockchain applications are only available for distributed commerce. Each level has a certain application of blockchain. It is just that some applications have a large intersection with the Internet, and some applications are more like a pure blockchain application. This is the layering I did from an application perspective. The technology of the Internet and the technology of the blockchain have been broken, and put it into several levels. Not being completely tied to the order or layering of technology will help us think about the ultimate application of blockchain.
Since the introduction of computer or information technology, we can see that in terms of application, the application of these technologies has gone through three stages. The first stage is the pure information technology period. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, information technology supported some commercial applications. The software system of the big family may have 100,000, hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code. The second stage is the Internet platform period. Internet platforms sink a lot of complex software into infrastructure. The third stage is the blockchain period. Blockchain further sinks the Internet platform as an infrastructure. Studying the entire application of information technology and digital technology, we will find that in the past few decades, we have continued to sink the application layer into infrastructure, and then bring new changes to the application layer. The sinking brought by the blockchain finally produced distributed applications.
Some people say that finance is completely scene-oriented. There is a famous saying: “Banking services are everywhere, but not in the bank.” But why does finance become scene-oriented? Are financial services provided according to specific scenarios? From the perspective of infrastructure, financial services are actually being sunk into infrastructure. Financial services themselves are very good commercial applications, and with the development of technology, they gradually become infrastructure. Take third-party payment as an example. It turned out to be a lucrative industry, and everyone sought after it, but it turned out that it didn’t make any money. Who can use third-party payment best? The answer is Internet companies. Because third-party payment has become a free industry public infrastructure for Internet companies such as social networking, e-commerce, food delivery, and bicycle sharing. From this we can see that the very prominent application layer in the Internet industry is gradually sinking into infrastructure.
Blockchain is the master of this sinking. I will elaborate on this later. From software systems, Internet platforms to blockchains, in this sinking process, software systems are actually very complicated to use at the beginning of design. For example, in the era when there is no browser, you need to use the command line to run various software in the Windows operating system. But how many people use the command line? Therefore, the original Window system is a very difficult to learn and difficult to popularize information technology application.
On the Internet platform, these complex software systems all sink. The Internet platform provides very light, very simple, and very easy to operate applications in the form of APP, such as WeChat. Although behind an application like WeChat is a huge software system that requires hundreds of thousands of lines of code to support, it is just an easy-to-use APP for users. Grandpa and aunt can also use it to send red envelopes, and even grab red envelopes faster than young people.
In the era of blockchain, APP will continue to sink. The blockchain era uses smart contracts. It is like a small program, simpler than APP. An APP requires tens of thousands of lines of code, but a smart contract may only need a few hundred or thousands of lines of code to form an application.
In addition, the Internet platform is demand-driven, that is, consumers drive the operation of the network. In the era of blockchain, it is no longer consumer-driven, but developer-driven, because blockchain is a developer-friendly network. The best-developed blockchain systems are all built by the developer community. Any blockchain system without a developer community must have no vitality.
But why is not C-driven in the blockchain era? As V God put forward this morning: Why is there no killer application in the blockchain? Because it is a killer network. It is a network driven by developers, the development of the network is driven by the supply side, and finally reaches the consumer side. It can be seen that the blockchain is completely different from the Internet, and starting a business on the blockchain is very different from starting a business on the Internet.
Below I will explain what is the ultimate mode of blockchain application through two cases. The first case is Uniswap, which many speakers talked about today. The two young men replaced a centralized system that required 100,000 or hundreds of thousands of codes or hundreds of thousands of lines of code with 500 lines of code. What does this case show? It is very predictive and predictable. Let us see that blockchain-based applications absolutely cannot accomplish one thing with 50,000 or 100,000 lines of code. A smart contract cannot be composed of 50,000 or 100,000 lines of code, only a few hundred or a few thousand lines of code. Although Uniswap is flawed, it can surpass a system supported by tens of thousands of lines of code and operated by thousands of people with just a few hundred or a few thousand lines of code. Such a successful case may indicate that blockchain-based applications should have the following characteristics:
First, provide applications through smart contracts, and all smart contracts only require thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code. The reason why Uniswap can replace such a centralized system with hundreds or thousands of lines of code is because the blockchain is the most thorough in integrating various technologies and sinking into infrastructure. The distributed networks, distributed databases, distributed storage, distributed computing, distributed ledgers, and distributed governance that I mentioned earlier have all become free infrastructures. For example, public chains do not require licenses and development costs, which greatly reduces the cost of young people. We have never heard of Uniswap going to raise funds. On the contrary, after it succeeded, capital began to chase it backwards. But in the Internet age, can you say that you can start a business without capital? For any application in the Internet age, don’t say let the Internet giant carry it on you, even if you carry it on it, it will have a lot of review and permission processes for you. But there is no such review and permission process on the public chain.
I saw a demo, Dfinity, which wrote a decentralized TikTok with 1000 lines of code. Of course, it is only a demo. I look forward to seeing a decentralized application using 1000 code to replace TikTok after the Dfinity mainnet is actually launched. If this matter can come true, it will confirm my ultimate conjecture of the blockchain application model: blockchain-based applications are smart contracts that only require hundreds or thousands of lines of code.
These two cases are very predictive, maybe this is the direction of blockchain application development. Blockchain becomes the application infrastructure, integrating storage, calculation, incentives, ledger, identity, account, address and other functions to form a commercial infrastructure with the following characteristics:
Feature 1: It must be open source. If it is not open source, it cannot be a trusted infrastructure.
Feature 2: Must be open. That is, without permission, entrepreneurs can do their own things without anyone’s approval.
Feature 3: Shared governance mechanism and shared benefit distribution. From Shareholder to Stakeholder, this is the change brought about by the blockchain. Stakeholder capitalism is a shared capitalist mechanism, not a centralized capitalist mechanism. At the same time, it should be distributed, decentralized, and self-organizing. Although blockchain is a public infrastructure, there is no longer a natural disadvantage of physical public infrastructure, that is, the “tragedy of the commons.”
I personally look forward to the completion of this year’s overall architecture, the blockchain such an infrastructure will continue to be optimized in the next two or three years, optimized to be able to undertake large-scale killer applications. What does this operation mean? It means that anyone who understands code can deploy their own applications on this platform with low threshold, low code, low capital, low operation, and freedom. This application may only have 1000 lines and 500 lines of code. What has become of this application? It has become a highly credible, highly reliable, highly secure, highly profitable, and highly dispersed application. Such applications cannot be brought by the Internet world, only the blockchain world can bring them.
Everyone imagine that on such an infrastructure of freely publishing applications, 10 million entrepreneurs in China can start their own businesses freely. I believe that there must be more great applications emerging than in the original Internet era with high thresholds, high codes, high capital investment, and high operations. On that Internet platform, only 200,000 people in China were eligible to start a business, because there were many conditions to start a business at that time. To find capital, manpower, establish a company, find a flow platform for the application, and operate the flow. Storage, computing, trust, etc. all need to be solved by themselves. But on the blockchain, these are all free and free public infrastructures, which lowers the threshold for entrepreneurship, and makes the number of qualified entrepreneurs from 200,000 to 10 million. The chance of a great application appearing among 10 million people is definitely much greater than that of 200,000 people.
In summary, the application of the Internet has liberated consumers, and the application of blockchain has liberated developers. To liberate developers is to liberate entrepreneurs. Therefore, it is only possible to realize “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” based on the blockchain. Blockchain is the best platform for “mass entrepreneurship and innovation”, thank you!
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