V God, Juan Benet, and Dominic Williams focus on the path of public chain technology innovation

10 月 27 日，在万向区块链实验室主办的第七届区块链全球峰会活动上，举行了一场关于「公链的技术发展」  圆桌论坛，邀请到的分享嘉宾有：以太坊创始人Vitalik Buterin， Protocol Labs 创始人 Juan Benet 和 Dfinity 创始人Dominic Williams ，一起聚焦公链技术的创新之路。

此次圆桌论坛主持人为 HashKey Capital Singapore 首席执行官，HashKey Group 董事总经理兼投资负责人邓超。圆桌论坛文字回顾由现场速记整理，律动对其重新排版整理，以飨读者。文字回顾如下：

Deng Chao (host) :Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I also want to say good morning and good evening to all the guests online.

Hashkey is an investment institution in Singapore and Hong Kong. It is one of the largest and largest investment institutions in Asia and one of the most active investment institutions in the field of blockchain in the world. Now there are more than 200 invested enterprises around the world.

It is my great honor to be the host of this roundtable discussion on public chain technology. I'd like to welcome Vitalik Buterin, Dominic Williams, Juan Benet.

For reasons we all know, you can't be there in person, but you can be connected virtually, you can be connected online, and you can talk about blockchain with people from different parts of the world, from different continents.

I believe that there is no need to introduce any of the guests today. As far as I know, Vitalik has never been absent from Wanxiang Blockchain International Week. This is the seventh time for him, Dominic Williams is the third time, and Juan Benet is the second time.

This roundtable is a highly anticipated and highly anticipated event and a highlight of International Week, not least because today's roundtable guests are the founders of the most important infrastructure and ecosystem in the blockchain world. And because we're always looking forward to hearing your insights.

Today, as the host, I will ask questions related to blockchain technology, including the application of blockchain and the ecosystem.

Without further ado, let's begin today's roundtable discussion. The first question I'd like to ask all of you today,Since last year's Shanghai Blockchain International Week, what are the most exciting developments in the blockchain field that you have personally seen? Vitalik Buterin, Juan Benet and Dominic Williams.

Vitalik Buterin:First of all, from the point of view of the etheric lane community, over the past year saw the biggest progress as PoS and expansion of the progress, these things at the time of last year but only at the theoretical stage, only a few test network, but now has become a main officially launched, and they are making a lot of effort, It can be fused and merged with the current main chain, and will soon be in beta.

Even before that, PoS can run nodes on the chain and participate in the ecosystem. There have been some rollups in terms of capacity expansion, and they have been officially launched, and there are already some networks where you can participate, where you can deposit, where you can withdraw cash.

There's still a lot of work to be done, of course, but there's been a lot of progress in these areas, moving from theory to solid evidence that there are networks out there, and that networks are officially available to everyone.

In general, blockchain has made a lot of progress in zero-knowledge proofs, and this year's technology is always better than last year's. There are already discussions on zero-knowledge proofs for security proofs, for virtual machine verification, which is also an important progress of blockchain technology in the past year.

You see a lot of technological advances, a lot of different applications coming up on the ecosystem side, which is a good trend, but it also means that there needs to be technological advances to better meet the needs of the applications.

Deng Chao (host) :Thank you very much Vitalik Juan Benet.

Juan Benet:For us, the thing about Filecoin is that it's just a year old, it just celebrated the mainnet's first anniversary a year and a half ago, and now it's 12 AI bytes, which is a lot of data storage, more data storage than any Web3.0, and it's already comparable to the centralized storage, That's a big step, and it's also the overall scale of IPFS.

On top of that, the use of digital has come a long way, which is exciting. I agree with Vitalik about the emergence of zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic proofs, and cryptographic collaboration. In the last couple of years, we've seen protocol advances, technology advances, where the whole protocol can be completely private and verifiable, giving us a lot of tools, a lot of opportunities to really implement systems that the user can control.

The most interesting ones are general-purpose, verifiable, scalable computing and zero-knowledge proofs, which are the most important developments in programming languages, in technology, and I'm very happy to see that.

Finally, I want to point out that the emergence of NFT is very important, socially, economically and culturally, because it represents the emergence of large-scale Internet native property ownership. NFT was first born in the field of art, then extended to various fields, and has affected the real world assets, such as specific land and physical world real estate. This represents the beginning of the great flood. In the next decade, there will be tremendous development, and now you can see its evolution.

Dominic Williams:I quite agree with what Vitalik and Juan have just pointed out. The most exciting development for me is the completion of the creation phase of the Internet computer in May of this year, which is fundamental for blockchain because the Internet computer can realize the vision, mission, or "world computer". When it was first proposed about 6 or 7 years ago, blockchain can be a technology stack. Blockchain allows you to build anything that uses smart contracts to build all kinds of applications without having to rely on enterprise cloud applications, cloud services (like AWS) in the process.

Today, you can use Internet computers to build social media and service systems. The difference about Internet computers is that they are very fast, and very efficient, and the domain capacity can achieve linear expansion. As the number of nodes in the network increases, you can scale linearly, and you can theoretically build something like Facebook on Internet computers, but you're building it with smart contracts.

Internet computer has been pushing change and block chain is just part of the technology stack, in today's various Dapp can run on the cloud, let's say you have a centralized cloud service, private dedicated server can run, when you come across the Internet computer application, there will be some of the services provided by intelligent contracts website content. For example, there are some chat services in Internet computers, which would have been completely inconceivable just a few years ago, meaning that blockchain is going to be the technology stack of the future, and that's going to be a fundamental change.

Part of this comes from the development of cryptography itself. For example, the Dfinity Foundation has the world's largest group of cryptographers, Internet computer experts, who have studied secret technology in depth and put previously dormant cryptography to practical use. Build an Internet computer for professional use.

Deng Chao (host) :Thank you very much for your sharing and observations from a technical and application perspective.

I'd like to ask a few more questions about technology, and I'd like to start with Vitalik. I heard your keynote this morning, and there was a lot of discussion from a community perspective, and a lot of expectations for Ethereum 2.0. The community is talking about scalability, state size, tier 2 solutions for Ethereum, and you mentioned Rollup this morning, as well as other state-related solutions in the first half of the year.

I was wondering if you could share with us a little bit about the transition from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0.

Vitalik Buterin:, of course, no problem, we should not use the etheric lane 2.0 this term, because the beginning when we put forward the etheric lane 2.0 term we will be looking forward to it will represent the etheric fang 1.0 fundamentally change, equivalent to a transfer from one chain to another chain but it is the roadmap, is more gradual and incremental development, You'll see a number of different changes, but each change represents a change to one or more of them.

From the application perspective, we don't see much change. For example, the application doesn't need to do any migration, any additional deployment, to move its application from the PoW chain to the PoS chain, ethereum itself becomes the PoS chain, and all the applications will migrate directly to the PoS chain.

I don't think it represents a single series of upgrades, I think it's more about the transition to the PoS chain. There are two phases:

Phase 1:Launch the BEACON chain of PoS. The beacon chain was officially launched last year. Now the beacon chain has been running steadily for 11 months, and there will be the first hard fork of the beacon chain in a few days.

Stage 2:Merging. Merging represents taking the existing Ethereum ecosystem and all applications based on Ethereum off the PoS chain and onto the PoW chain. It's an automated process, but it just represents another form of hard forking.

This is actually the ultimate goal. There has been a lot of progress in merging over the last few months. There have been workshops where all the developers and researchers have come together to discuss exactly how to do the merging.

One important aspect of the so-called Ethereum 2.0 is sharding. Overall, the roadmap has separate community rollups that can be scaled up as a first step, for example by a factor of 10 for a single Rollup, and further rollups for more advanced data compression technologies.

In addition to that, there are data sharding for Ethereum. Data sharding is expected to come in 1-2 years. Data sharding can also be further scalable, which is in the early stages but there are teams working on it.

Deng Chao (host) : My next question goes to Dominic Williams. Dfinity built the Internet computer, which was just released. Can you share with us the difference between a supercomputer and a Web2 computer?

Dominic Williams:First of all, Internet computers are blockchains, on which services can be built and smart contracts can be used. Smart contracts are very new software, and they have their own advantages.

Smart contracts run on a decentralized network, they're all Internet software, and you create systems and services out of it, just like you create software, so smart contracts can be automated.

We believe that due to the natural advantages of smart contracts, all human social systems will be reconstructed through smart contracts and run on blockchain. When designing computers for the Internet, the architecture of blockchain is taken into account. Blockchain can be the whole technology stack.

It differs from traditional blockchain in that it can provide interactive web pages and content to users through Internet computer smart contracts, so as to meet customer needs more widely. You can get full decentralization on the web, for example, and also use tokenization strategies on the web.

We believe that blockchain is the new Internet, and Internet computers are designed to be combined with Web3.0 to better provide services and content with higher performance through blockchain and smart contracts.

You'll see how exciting it is when smart contracts are activated on Internet computers in the next few months.

Deng Chao (host) : It's mainly built for Web3 users. Let's ask Juan Benet.

Protocol Labs and IBFS are very advanced in distributed storage, attracting many developers and users. Of course, there are still barriers to entry, such as some costs if storage is required. What do you think you can do to help users and developers reduce barriers?

Juan Benet:Since the beginning of this year, you've been able to store it much more easily, at a very low cost, and in some cases you can store information and data entirely for free.

On the one hand, we should let people know its benefits. On the other hand, developers and users need to understand how to use such tools to make money, and there are many tools available to developers.

So in the last six months, we've seen a lot of developers start using tools, and a lot of NFT deployments on the chain.

Deng Chao (host) : You just mentioned NFT, and the next question is about applications. Knowing that DeFi and NFT have seen a lot of growth in the past year, how do you feel about the rise of DeFi and NFT, do you feel they are moving in the right direction? What advice would you give DeFi, NFT teams?

Juan Benet:I think NFT is great, it's a great example of how blockchain technology can be used across different communities, and that's why more and more people are paying attention to NFT.

You can use NFT to apply it to different scenarios, such as art exhibitions, museums and so on. It can also be deployed to larger Spaces and larger worlds. The only hope, I think, is to solve this problem, where people have NFT and want to be able to use NFT and interact better in the digital space. Many objects will be better aligned with NFT, resulting in a better metasexes, as well as providing us with decentralized applications.

This is about NFT digital phenomenon, I believe that in the future NFT will get more and more attention, for example, your house can also become NFT, can be bought and traded.

All property rights in the world can be traded in this way.

I know that there are some movies that are made with NFT structures, so you can see actors and crew working on NFT networks in the movies, and it's going to end up empowering a lot of really, really great blockchain ideas.

Dominic Williams:I agree with Juan Benet that NFT is a way of ensuring that data can be better traded.

One other thing about Internet computers, I believe there will be some great tokenization features coming out of Internet computers in the future. For example, chat accounts can be created with tokens. For example, you can file justice and get tokens.

On the other hand, there are "neural networks" of services that can be combined with dApps, where the user becomes the owner of the service, and the user becomes part of the social application team, updating it better, and iterating on it.

Deng Chao (host) : Vitalik, do you think NFT is moving in the right direction? What advice do you have for the team?

Vitalik Buterin:I want to give you a slight caveat that I don't think we should assume that NFT is financially sustainable in its current form, or at least that it should survive one or more crypto winters. Past encryption world development for a long time, some projects may have this field in the six months to a year looks good, a lot of money, but certainly one to two years time soon became precarious nameless, you have to be patient to wait for, let us to see and understand the real NFT and what should be a sustainable market for a long time.

Deng Chao (host) :These projects, thank you very much, do provide real value and can last for a long time if they are sustainable.

The next question, which I actually got inspired by Dominic's keynote this morning, is about applications. From an application point of view, when do you think the base point that can trigger large-scale application, or even bring tens or hundreds of millions of users into the blockchain will happen?

Dominic Williams:A lot of times technology gets ahead of application, and that's exactly what we're seeing here.

Banks, for example, tend to use Cube's relatively backward technology and hire programmers with years of experience to fix bugs.

The simplest smart contract and new software will be based on the applications and software built by the traditional IT technology stack. The new software and technology will have huge advantages. Blockchain will become a complete technology stack, and people will develop with smart contracts.

Of course, this vision won't happen overnight, and when I say blockchain base point I don't mean everything will be migrated to blockchain overnight, it will accelerate. Blockchain not only represents a new Internet, but also a new technology stack.

The key is that when you develop with smart contracts, you tend to get new capabilities, which means if you re-imagine these things as you develop.

When we're refactoring social media, when we're refactoring games, when we're refactoring enterprise applications, we're rethinking what's going to happen in each of those scenarios.

I think the trend is gradual, but it will accelerate in the coming years. Ten years from now, the world will look very different and no one will doubt that blockchain is not just the new Internet, but the new technology stack.

Deng Chao (host) : Thank you very much Dominic Williams, and I want to ask Juan Benet what do you think is the trigger for mass adoption?

Juan Benet:I think the blockchain system really makes a lot of new technologies possible and allows us to develop a lot of new applications. At the end of the day, human nature hasn't changed much, the same type of application, the same scenario, the same use case hasn't changed much.

I very much agree with Dominic Williams said, this is about the social aspects of the experience, such as game, the game itself is a social activity, and the game participants work rate is very high, there are many people who have many years of experience in the field of the game, so the game is of great social attributes and everyone very input field.

The emergence of things like Douyin and the rapid acquisition of a large number of users around the world is very fast. We will soon see blockchain-driven social media, social networks with billions of users worldwide, and games after that.

What's been most successful here, or what's been able to keep people around for a long time, is the structure of the metasomes, which means that people have a new understanding of digital selves, digital identities, digital assets, digital relationships. And these are supported by yuan universe, the universe to yuan thinking should not be the customs and think of you application, email, social media, computer, game is the same, such a thought is wrong, yuan universe represents the new computing environment, there will be a lot of applications in new environment, and yuan universe application can provide a lot of interaction, Immersive experiences, immersive environments, where you can have ownership of assets in a metaverse, and potentially programmable.

I think VR can also be combined with other AR technologies, all of which need to be strengthened. The meta-universe represents how you control space and how you interact with other people, so the three key words are game, social and meta-universe.

Deng Chao (host) : I want to ask Vitalik, what do you think is the trigger?

Vitalik Buterin:I think the things that Dominic Williams and Juan Benet talked about, like social media, social media with finance and blockchain is a huge opportunity, but I also think there's a huge opportunity in games, because of all the things that people are doing right now.

Deng Chao (host) : Thank you Vitalik, just one more question about apps. Some of you touched on the topic of decentralization this morning, and I'd like to hear your thoughts.

How do you feel about decentralization and centralization? Do you think there should be some kind of balance between the two? When we were developing the app, people were talking about the pros and cons of centralization and decentralization, which one is better, which one is worse.

Vitalik Buterin:I think the tradeoff depends on what layer of technology stack you're doing, if you're doing the base layer, it's really important for you to be decentralized, if you're doing the application layer, those applications are more user oriented, which means that the application only interacts directly with the user. Decentralization isn't really that important to you.

But I do think if you can be implemented without the high cost of decentralization, should you choose you should do, of course, there are many cases, even if is not completely realize the decentralized, reasonable principle is applied to various encryption technology, zero knowledge proof, etc, so that you can provide more powerful security of the application of guarantee, To provide a stronger guarantee of privacy.

Even in the blockchain space, there are a lot of examples, a lot of applications. For example, there are a lot of applications that do rely on centralized servers, but servers use zero-knowledge proof to convince users that they can be trusted relatively.

In addition, there is middleware, where the users of these applications are not end-users themselves, but rather the developers of other applications. Complete decentralization is important for middleware development, because in these cases you want not only security, but also activity. Security means your app won't cheat, which means no one will steal your money, and activity means the network will keep running.

Everything based on a single computer can be guaranteed for security, but there is no way to guarantee activity. If you do a completely decentralized system, it allows application developers to connect with applications once the system goes live. For the application users will be more confident, based on middleware development, relatively speaking, the application will last for a longer period of time.

As an application developer, I hope you can pay attention to encryption technology and realize the system's relatively untrusted properties. Thank you very much!

Deng Chao (host) : The next question is about the establishment of the ecosystem. The current blockchain hopes to introduce more and more stakeholders, such as investors, developers, users and so on. You can also see that there are some blockchain ecosystem funds.

What are the key elements for you to build a vibrant ecosystem?

Juan Benet:We are very focused on building a high-quality ecosystem that allows the community to grow, taking into account the applications and services it hosts.

When you think about the user experience, the user experience is very important, what the developer experience is when they build the app. I've seen a lot of different ecosystems and the problems that different companies and different teams have in building them. At the beginning, hackathon activities were carried out through many resources and documents to collect more projects. At the same time, I could learn more people in the system and establish contact with them.

Hopefully, hackathons are fun and engaging, which is really important for building a community.

We also want to help developers understand how to use technology to make their dreams come true. Hackathons are a great opportunity to bring a lot of great apps to the table and help us identify more projects and better services. Through these projects, we can better collaborate to build an ecosystem and attract people to help us achieve community goals and accelerate current progress.

In this way, ecosystem funds can be set up so that if someone wants to build an open source technology stack, they can get support from the ecosystem fund.

All in all, learn from each other through hackathons and discover great projects that can then be integrated into the ecology. Many applications are created based on this process, which is a great way to build a blockchain ecosystem. Because there are thousands of projects and many developers on blockchain.

Deng Chao (host) : Different stages implement different strategies to achieve different goals. Vitalik, what do you think? How to promote better ecological construction among stakeholders.

Vitalik Buterin:Juan Benet mentioned it very well. Ethereum will bring in some community people, actually working with the Ethereum community from the very beginning, and also supporting the progress of different projects through the Ethereum fund.

There are hackathons, which are organized through ethereum-related organizations and sometimes subsidize projects and communities.

Sure, foundations can do a lot, but ultimately what you need is a really great community that can bring a lot of ideas and really good ideas. For us, the Ethereum ecosystem has been a few years of ups and downs.

Now the expansion and Rollup teams are run by different people and different teams. The role of foundations in ecology is to encourage and encourage more and more projects, while subsidizing more and more projects. Not the center of the blockchain, but just the edge to give some support.

Dominic Williams:Juan Benet talked about the process of building an ecosystem, and we're doing something similar, with hackathons, with a lot of applications building on the platform.

Our approach is different from mainstream blockchains because there are many PoS blockchains that give a lot of subsidies, and hopefully developers can build fully decentralized dapps to build nervous systems, and all dapps will create microeconomies, and all dapps will be completely decentralized.

Deng Chao (host) : For the audience and relevant teams, you can know the support through the foundation. The next question from the investment point of view, there will be different views and disputes on traditional VC and crypto VC. In addition to financing, what is the role of VC in the blockchain?  

Vitalik Buterin:One example of VCS that I think is really important is that they will give money to different projects, which is better than other VCS, because a lot of VCS will choose to invest based on the project, get short-term returns and then walk away. It doesn't make sense for the ecosystem.

We've done a lot of research and found that a lot of projects are funded through VC, which is good for the Ethereum ecosystem, but I think in the future there will be a return to VC to launch different projects, so VC certainly has a very important role and significance.

I think the blockchain can not be without VC.

Dominic Williams:So dApps and other decentralized projects are funded in this way, and VCS typically step in early to help the team and get the project off the ground.

My concern is that there is still a bit too much centralization of investment, for example, and it's very difficult to find services that are very decentralized. In the future, VCS will come in early and invest in blockchain as they have in the past.

Juan Benet:Personally, I think VC is an important part of any technology ecosystem, and technology development needs financial support. I can recommend a book about the development and evolution of technology to you. Good investment can speed up the development of technology and shorten the development time. There are a lot of teams that are funded by VCS, and the best investors are the ones who are looking for something that has value and understand the value of the project and are willing to take the risk and be part of the project.

Often such investors may have past experience, but also understand the technology development cycle, so they have the vision and courage to invest in projects to help create the next generation of technology.

Not only refers to the investment, on the other hand is financing, progress is not very well, many financing model for us, the best platform for the public investment is Alpha (sound) strategy taken by the way, they will have the project management, they can predict what would happen in the future, it will also have a better understanding of the project progress, help project to realize the vision.

I believe that all financing will help blockchain develop better. For blockchain, the mechanism is different. There is no need for traditional company and entity mechanism to manage, but DAO can be owned. As long as the ecology needs, all financing channels are very meaningful. It's very important to create a blockchain space where investors can find really good projects to put their money into. Developers, for their part, want to invest in making their development programs available to the public.

Deng Chao (host) : VC plays a very important role in the blockchain ecosystem, but VC also needs to adapt to some changes in the blockchain ecosystem.

One last question, just to save time, if you look ahead, where do you see your focus going in the coming year?

Dominic Williams:There are two features coming in the next two to three months. One is The TernCare solution, which is for Dapp developers, who will have integrated tools to help them develop their apps better. It is now known that many projects are waiting for the release of features to make their projects more decentralized. So the focus remains on fully decentralized DApps.

Deng Chao (host) : Juan Benet, what about you? What are your priorities for the coming year?

Juan Benet:First, make the web more scalable, and make it easy to use, allowing developers to build their applications.

Second, there is a need for better computing and validation on the network, which is also related to smart contracts, through EVM and other networks, where the smart contracts above can be better applied through EVM. This layer is going to be computing, computing, linear scaling through data, and that's a very exciting change that we're going to embrace.

Deng Chao (host) :Vitalik you?

Vitalik Buterin:First of all, the PoS migration, sharding, merging, moving the current Ethereum onto the PoS chain, all of that hasn't happened yet, but it's something that we've been working on and focusing on, and the Ethereum network will be more secure and more efficient.

Further expansion will allow people to use blockchain without paying exorbitant transaction fees. All this is work to focus on, and will take some time to achieve. Applications can be made friendlier without sacrificing the benefits of blockchain.

Deng Chao (host) :The above is all the content of the Panel. Thank you very much for sharing the latest progress of the blockchain industry with us. Give you the warmest applause.

This article is from the roundtable forum site shorthand, does not represent the opinion of BlockBeats.

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