Polkadot ecological gathering, first-line entrepreneurs talk about the future trend (www.blockcast.cc)

Text | Congee Overnight

Original title: Roundtable Forum: Towards the Polkadot Universe! Polkadot Ecological Collection | World Blockchain Conference Wuhan

On December 5th, 2020 World Blockchain Conference Wuhan officially opened at Wuhan International Convention and Exhibition Center. The conference was hosted by Babbitt and received strong support from Wuhan Municipal Government, Jianghan District Government, Wuhan Municipal Bureau of Economics and Information Technology, and China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. In the afternoon’s “Embrace Blockchain 3.0” sub-forum, a round table forum was held with the theme “Towards the Polkadot Universe! Polkadot Ecological Collection”. Polkadot is one of the most watched star projects this year. From the mainnet launch to the upcoming parachain slot auction, Polkadot has attracted enough market attention.

The guests in this roundtable are all first-line practitioners of Polkadot. They are Crust market leader Steve, Bandot founder Chen Feng, ChainX CMO Kristen, Litentry founder & CEO Cheng Hanwen, Zenlink China head Guo Tao, Darwinia CMO Bree, Time Stamp Capital CEO Li Zongcheng served as the chairperson of this roundtable.

Li Zongcheng: Hello, everyone. I am Li Zongcheng, the person in charge of Time Stamp Capital. I am very happy to host such a roundtable. We maintain a very high degree of attention to Polkadot. The Polkadot project team asked some questions, and I hope these questions can inspire you. Distinguished guests, please introduce their projects.

Steve : Hello, everyone. I’m Steve. We are mainly a decentralized storage project. As a parachain of Polkadot, we can directly incentivize IPFS distributed storage and use it directly. The project is currently in the stage of stimulating the testnet. As of yesterday, more than 500 nodes worldwide have joined our testnet. Thank you.

Chen Feng : Hello, everyone. I am Chen Feng and the founder of Bandot. Bandot is mainly Polkadot’s first unsecured lending system, and we have built a new liquidity management system. Bandot is mainly composed of three parts, one is unsecured lending, the other is Ethereum, and the third is our innovative virtual accounting system. These three constitute a complete system, and we have now completed the development of the stablecoin module, and the testnet will be launched approximately in January next year.

Kristen : Hello everyone, this is Kristen from ChainX. We, ChainX, is the earliest project in the Polkadot ecology. When it went online, everyone only knew Polkadot, but the popularity was not so great. We mainly do asset cross-chain. Next, with Polkadot’s big rhythm, we will connect to Polkadot. Card parachain and be an asset cross-chain gateway. This is the next thing. Thank you!

Cheng Hanwen : I’m Cheng Hanwen, the founder of Litentry. I used to be Parity’s domestic engineer. I am mainly responsible for Parity wallet and the person in charge of mobile products. Regarding Litentry, let me introduce this project. We are the identity in Web3.0. Aggregator, our team is mainly based in Germany. Recently, we have continuously promoted the market in China. Recently, we have also completed some financing. We will launch our testnet and mainnet in the next step. Thank you.

Guo Tao : Hello, everyone. I am Guo Tao of Zenlink. Zenlink serves all Polkadot parachain projects. This service is mainly two things. Parachains may have a demand in the future, that is, the needs of DEX. In fact, Zenlink hopes to give each parachain the ability to give them DEX in the future, which means that we will build a very general DEX infrastructure. Second, after they integrate this, we can let these parachains share liquidity from the protocol layer. This is what Zenlink will do.

Bree : Hello everyone! This is Bree from Darwinia. I am very happy to be able to participate in today’s round table. Darwin is a decentralized bridging chain developed based on Substrate. Simply put, it is the Jingmen Bridge in the cross-chain ecology. The tools and products developed by Darwin have also been written into their white paper by Polkadot as the official Polkadot Partner. At the recently concluded first conference, it was also selected by the founder of the conference as one of the most noteworthy Polkadot projects.

Polkadot vs Ethereum

Li Zongcheng: Here are some dry goods issues. Since Polkadot was launched, we compare Polkadot with Ethereum. Ethereum was originally positioned as a programmable digital contract platform, and Polkadot itself is positioned as a heterogeneous and variable system. I would like to ask everyone, can the projects on Polkadot pose a corresponding threat to Ethereum’s DeFi application? why?

Bree : What makes Polkadot different? First, the founder of Polkadot has mentioned in his new issue of the video that Polkadot has crossed the era of intelligence as the center and has become a platform in the platform. This relies on Polkadot providing everyone Convenient Substrate development framework, Substrate can free developers from the underlying technology of the blockchain, and send a chain in 15 minutes. In fact, in many roundtable sharing, many guests will talk about the first choice to choose Ethereum for development, but due to various resource constraints, they finally chose Polkadot. A development framework such as Substrate allows developers to develop a chain they want, and to make the best choice in terms of implemented applications. Another feature is the problem of heterogeneous cross-chain. The founder of Polkadot also said that the current cross-chain network is like a local area network in the 90s. Only after having a cross-chain messaging like Polkadot can it be truly connected. Together, the LAN will be developed into the Internet of blockchain networks.

Another point that is very sharp is that some people comment that Ethereum provides a good product and team to undeveloped developers. It is more like binding a team to use his underlying token to capture all the traffic brought by these teams. There will be no such token binding on Polkadot, and you can even use your Alipay and WeChat to make some payments in the future. This is where I look forward to the Polkadot project in the future, thank you.

Cheng Hanwen : The advantages of Substrate in technology have just been mentioned. I would like to emphasize that another feature of Polkadot is its on-chain governance. Before seeing Ethereum’s on-chain governance, it has to be solved through off-chain methods. Simple Introduce what can be done on Polkadot. For example, there are some voting functions, how many verification nodes Polkadot needs, such as increasing from 100 to 1000, it needs a referendum to achieve, everyone makes a vote on the chain The behavior of such a behavior will ultimately be determined according to the size of the ratio. Such a process determines the direction of blockchain development. In fact, how the blockchain will evolve in the future is determined by all digital capital holders.

The other is a treasury department of Polkadot. Participants in Polkadot can apply for funds from the treasury. The volume is very large, reaching the level of several million, and the application is discussed by members of the parliament to determine the final allocation of treasury finances.

Kristen : Between Polkadot and Ethereum, I think the core is the underlying update problem. When I shared it before, I always said that Polkadot is the next era of Ethereum. To take a very civilian example, Ethereum is equivalent to the Nokia we used before, and Polkadot is equivalent to the smart phone we use now. Whether the applications on Nokia can be used on smart phones, it is definitely possible. Can the application on the smart phone be used on the Nokia phone? Is impossible. Ethereum is the underlying problem, the speed is very slow, and one of the great influences of many DeFi developments is this. Polkadot has done a good job in this regard, and it will be much faster. In addition, it does not have any application fork problems. At present, 95% of the development of Ethereum is on Ethereum. Polkadot is so slow. At that time, Ethereum is willing to migrate to Polkadot. I have been puzzled for a long time. Later, I suddenly got a good answer based on the inspiration of mobile phones. When I used Nokia phones before, did I use all smart phones? No, smart phones attracted a group of new users, including Nokia users. . The application of Ethereum poses a threat to Polkadot users in terms of scale, but it is difficult for Ethereum to surpass.

Li Zongcheng: From the mouth of the three guests, we can feel that the governance of the Polkadot chain is leading, and these two aspects may pose a greater threat to Ethereum. The 1 to 100 expansion of the total amount of Polkadot tokens in August, the completion of this governance on the chain, and the smooth upgrade, still left a deep impression on people. I think it is a big lead for Polkadot. The next question is for Guo Tao, Chen Feng and steve. When you were developing your own projects, did you feel the tangible benefits of Polkadot in development and deployment? Polkadot has it, but Ethereum does not.

Guo Tao : First of all, they will have material funding for governance on the chain. Second, at the development level, everything they do is based on the framework. That’s why there is such an excellent framework as it is now. Update 2.0, which is particularly friendly to developers. The third is that Zenlink is also making products based on this concept. We want to make a very simple and universal module under Web3.0. We are also designing pluggable design and cross-chain protocol design for this module. We will put these things Abstract at the application layer to facilitate all future developers to call these things. In other words, Ethereum has been developing for many years at the development level, and there are many basic tools for developers to use. But Polkadot has a very rich library, from the bottom layer of Substrate to the application layer to the entire top. For example, there are now 200 parachain project parties. As long as the official believes that they are universal, they will adopt it, and then open it up, and other parachains or developers can use it directly. In addition, what you can’t feel on Ethereum is that you can do a particularly complex business chain, which cannot be completed on Ethereum, because Ethereum uses smart contracts to expand your logic, but it can be done on Polkadot. Constructing a more complex underlying logic is the biggest difference between Ethereum and Polkadot in terms of design concepts.

Chen Feng : After many years of development, Ethereum has very rich tools and libraries. I just heard the Polkadot ecology mentioned by Jia Yaoqi. In fact, whether it is plug-ins in Polkadot, or other libraries, it is gradually enriched. For the entire Polkadot, as the host said, the tokens were upgraded in a balanced way some time ago, and the entire system will also be upgraded smoothly for the entire developer, which is very good. Second, its governance model has been mentioned by previous guests. If our developers don’t want to spend energy setting up an economic model, we can directly adopt the official governance model provided by Polkadot. We are now operating with Polkadot’s official governance model. Third, some application library APIs will be proposed by different project parties, and later will be accepted in the form of parachains. If developers want to participate, but don’t want to develop the chain themselves, they can choose platforms proposed by other applications for development, and that’s good. So for Ethereum, there are some incomparable things, such as the smooth upgrade of the system and the cross-chain can not be compared, but Polkadot can do well. This is my opinion.

Steve : The host’s question is to ask about differences. I feel more about this question. I tried Ethereum in the early stage of development, but the problem of Ethereum’s gas fee and explosion is not friendly to the application-based supply chain, so I came into contact with Polkadot. At the same time, we discovered that through some tools, regardless of the speed, it is significantly better than Ethereum. At the same time, the internal cross-chain mechanism is for the communication between different parachains. We are both storage and digital identity, which can be seamless. Doing information communication is very conducive to ecological development. If you understand Polkadot, you will find that after Polkadot develops tools, it has a high degree of freedom. In other words, you are exposed to different smart contracts in Ethereum, and Polkadot gives you the freedom of the chain. I am given you a set of tools that can be used to achieve commercial purposes. This is the biggest difference from Ethereum. Many things on Ethereum are at the contract level, but the chain on Polkadot is at the business level and is aimed at a business. The above problem is an application-type chain. This phenomenon is currently seen on Polkadot.

The impact of slot auctions on Polkadot’s ecology

Li Zongcheng: Several guests answered very well. The next question is for all the guests. Now everyone is very concerned about when the next Parachain slot will start auctioning. At the same time, when the Parachain slot goes online, it may be What kind of influence the entire Polkadot has, please share your views.

Steve : If you pay attention to Polkadot, you can see the news from yesterday or the day before yesterday. The engineer said that the slot auction will be postponed to February next year. I originally hoped that the slot auction at the end of this year will not be seen in the short term, at least next year. In February. Now that the slot auction is postponed, we will also upgrade the chain testnet, and at the same time delay our testnet cycle. The original plan was 25 days, but now we plan to extend it to 50 days to smoothly transition to the auction slot and then on the main network. Thank you.

Feng Chen : Many of Polkadot’s Treasury are now basic application developers. If you have ideas, you can put these ideas on the Treasury to apply for funds for development. For slots, each product is essential for data cross-chain. It’s as if we will design the slot later. There are two categories. For developers, the slot is like a data cross-chain on Polkadot. For users, it can be said that all people participate. If users do not understand development, and there is no team to develop the entire project, they can participate in the voting of each project. Later slots will also release credit lines. We will test it in January. Participants will be given credit lines.

Kristen : My feeling for slot auctions is an early carnival. We do low-level applications mainly based on practical applications. The first batch of people in the slot auction is equivalent to the first batch of people who used the Internet in the earliest days of the Internet. There are certainly few people participating, but it is very expensive. As a relatively early project of our Polkadot ecology, we definitely want to seize this opportunity first and finally keep the price down for everyone. The Internet is the same. People use it a lot, and the price becomes cheaper. We at ChainX have two plans for the card slot auction. One is that Kusama slot will definitely be auctioned, and DOT will also be auctioned.

Cheng Hanwen : Our project is relatively early, and we have not yet entered the secondary market. The testnet and mainnet are in the process of close development. We hope to participate in the slot auction. I mainly talk about the impact of slot auctions on the project from an ecological perspective. Just now everyone said that there are many modules, which are needed by many project parties. Once there is a chain with specific functions, for example, we are doing identity or smart contract. After accessing the entire ecosystem, access to other slots Projects can use the functions of identity and smart contracts together. The advantage of this is that Polkadot’s own chain can ensure sharing and security to be more focused, and specific functions are delegated to the parachain, so that there is a focus on the entire ecology and the chain is more streamlined.

Guo Tao : Slot auction is the most important thing for Polkadot in the next year. This matter is a very big test for the entire Polkadot ecology and community. This test is mainly reflected in several pieces. First, this may be the first time that all those who follow Polkadot take their real money to participate. At the same time, he was able to experience the excellent on-chain governance function on Polkadot, which is to experience this incident by way of his own voting, something that he can’t even experience on other public chains. Second, because of the slot auction, there may be positive or negative factors affecting the entire system. These factors are also very important for Polkadot’s subsequent development, and even a very important milestone for Polkadot’s future development. Third, the issue of Parachain Slot Auction will be a qualitative leap forward for the Polkadot ecological project. Where is this leap? Previously, we talked about Ethereum’s DeFi, which is the composability of smart contracts. Next, you can see the composability of links on Polkadot. In this case, its composability may bring about a technological change or a wave of thought, which may have a profound impact.

Finally, I think the slot auction is also a test for investors. What kind of projects will you choose to participate in.

Bree : Everyone has been listening for so long, and there are many viewers who don’t understand what is Polkadot Slot Auction and why we want to shoot. To put it simply, we need to lock a lot of Kusama and DOT to shoot parachain slots. But everyone has also seen that the competition is so fierce, what should we do if Kusama and DOT project parties are not enough? Polkadot has launched a parachain crowdfunding mechanism, allowing our project to work together externally to get everyone’s support, which opens the door to investors , Let you support our parachain project. The second point that needs to be explained is that these Kusama and DOT are only locked and will not be sold. What we have sold is also the lease period of the parachain. After the lease period ends, DOT and Kusama will return it to everyone. The rewards you got may be shared by all the guests just now, and each project will give you token incentives to popularize this little knowledge.

What I want to share with you is what this parachain auction signifies. After our projects have obtained parachain slots, it is equivalent to the fact that the local area network can really pass Polkadot cross-chain messaging to establish a blockchain Internet, which means that Polkadot’s Web3.0 cross-chain vision has really begun to land. . What are the benefits for our project? Everyone is paying attention to which project can win the title and become the project that has opened up for Polkadot. Then it will have the highlight moment of Polkadot’s first parachain slot in a short time, which also tests the short-term community of each project. How much support can be obtained in the short-term with the ability to call on.

Possible directions for Polkadot ecological project to enter the top 50 market

Li Zongcheng: Next question, I would like to ask you all. Now we can see that after Polkadot’s mainnet launch this year, the entire token price of Polkadot and Kusama has performed very well. There are only two Polkadot projects in the top 50. In the future, what other Polkadot ecological projects will enter the top 50 or the top 20, I would like to ask the guests’ opinions, which are mainly optimistic about the subdivision of Polkadot ecology.

Bree : I don’t know if you have paid attention to Andre Cronje, the founder of YFI’s uncle. Some people say that he is the first brother of Amber. Some people say that he is Amber Li Jiaqi. Everyone is paying attention to his merger and acquisition. Many people go to his Twitter to see which project will be announced next, and the value of this project will immediately take off, such as the insurance project recently acquired. From the perspective of his mergers and acquisitions, there are insurance, options, and loans. I think DeFi is a very good direction that deserves your attention from the expansion of the empire. But everyone will also find that after you voted for LP, it is just boring waiting and the DeFi threshold is too high. What you need to pay attention to is the direction of the combination of game and DeFi, which is also very popular recently, including the way that AC has predicted GameFi before. , Can greatly reduce the threshold for newcomers to join, and can also increase the fun of liquidity mining. What is worth paying attention to in the future of Polkadot is the combination of gamification and DeFi, thank you.

Guo Tao : Poka’s top 50 or how many in the future can be considered from two perspectives. What Ethereum is among the top is nothing more than the solution inside, or it may be the bottom layer of assets. Will there be similar things on Polkadot? I feel that there is a high probability. There may not be any on the ether, but it will become the future world solution, or the popular trend of the blockchain. This is a more imaginative space. Now there are two aspects. In the cross-chain dimension, Polkadot can do several ways, heterogeneous cross-chain, such as various bridges, and the second is homogeneous cross-chain. Then what can be done on Polkadot and what can’t be done on Ethereum is more complex business chains, such as lower-level digital identities and other aspects. I think they are more imaginative things in the future because these are It has not been implemented on Ethereum.

Cheng Hanwen : I think the new hot projects in Polkadot’s ecology in the future may have a lot to do with its own chain and the characteristics of Polkadot. We know that the pre-ICO of Ethereum is the most popular application, so it has attracted a lot of funds, which has caused the most popular DeFi to be deployed on Ethereum. For Polkadot, a very important function of Polkadot is on-chain governance, which also includes the integration of applications between different parachains across the chain. We believe that the public chain that provides basic functions and infrastructure will generate greater value in the future.

Kristen : We have always been optimistic about Bitcoin and want to expand the Bitcoin business. Bitcoin is already ranked first, and its business will not be ranked behind. After waiting for the underlying technology to rise, our applications can be launched on it.

Chen Feng : Stablecoin projects have attracted much attention. On the other hand, everyone knows that storage, whether it is all projects or the current Internet, is a fundamental demand. As a blockchain project, decentralized storage is also a fundamental requirement.