Gavin Wood: I have invested in less than five tokens

This article is an interview with Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot, by BlockBeats at the end of 2019. At that time, the Polkadot mainnet had not yet been launched, and the token DOT had not yet enabled the transfer function. Now Polkadot has launched the mainnet plan, DOT has been listed on many trading platforms, and its market value ranking has ranked sixth. Let's review Gavin Wood's views on Polkadot's outlook and the crypto market at that time.

If you ask a retail investor in the cryptocurrency circle: Which unlaunched blockchain project do you think is the most promising?

The answer will most likely mention Polkadot.

Polkado is a project that has gathered star halo before it goes online. The public likes to give it many titles - "Cross-chain King", "Ethereum's No. 1 Killer", "Web3 Pioneer"... Among these titles, some may be just right, and some may be flattering. So, how does Gavin Wood describe Polkadot? What are his expectations or plans for the Polkadot ecosystem?

For this reason, BlockBeats interviewed Gavin Wood (Chinese name Lin Jiawen), the founder of Polkadot and Web3 Foundation, and talked about those interesting things related to Polkadot.

In the interview, we abandoned the questions frequently mentioned by the media in the past, as well as the old-fashioned topics such as "How was Polkadot born?" and "Do Polkadot and Ethereum constitute competition?", hoping to give readers a more comprehensive understanding and broader thinking about Polkadot and Gavin Wood.

Key points:

1. The Polkadot team will provide resources to developers as much as possible, and will also maintain necessary technical exchanges and offline interactions.
2. IPO (Initial Parachain Offering) is more like voting, which can effectively restrain the current ICO fraud.
3. Disappointed with maximalists and fundamentalists, most industry participants are resisting these unhealthy industry ideas.
4. I like blockchain projects that conform to the open spirit of Web 3. TON is worth paying attention to.
5. Gavin Wood holds less than 10 types of tokens, and the investment strategy is left to the relevant funds.

BlockBeats:The date of the Polkadot mainnet launch is getting closer and closer. We all know that the Polkadot ecosystem team comes from all over the world. How do you achieve this distributed community collaboration?

Lin Jiawen:We have been doing our best to provide developers with as many resources as possible, but objectively speaking, Polkadot is not an all-encompassing team. It is impossible to provide targeted guidance and help to everyone who uses Substrate for development.

Usually, we don’t try to interact directly with developer teams, but we will make sure that these teams really exist at the beginning, and then keep in touch on some important issues. For example, development sponsorship, organizing meetups, etc. In most cases, we want to promote Polkadot as much as possible, so the basic resources that developers need are very important, such as Substrate workshops (BlockBeats Note: Technical Seminars) and large-scale presentations.

At the same time, we will also help provide various technical resources, such as a convenient chat room dedicated to communicating technical progress, where developers can communicate and discuss new code bases. We try to keep all information public as much as possible, including the open source of Substrate code and the regular disclosure of new project progress. These are some of the help we will provide to developers in the long run.

We hope that new forces can join, such as new developers who can join the Polkadot ecosystem through introduction and publicity to carry out development.

BlockBeats:Before and after Polkadot goes online, how many ecological projects may be launched simultaneously? Are there any relevant statistics?

Lin Jiawen:I don't have an exact understanding of this number, because you know, in our organization (BlockBeats Note: Web3 Foundation) there are people who are responsible for communicating with the developer team. This is just like I don't know how many people are using the Linux system. Haha, this is exactly the interesting thing about Substrate, it is completely open source! Many developers may be doing independent development, and we don't know it at all.

In the actual stage, I didn't focus on how many people are using Substrate. I was more concerned about how to make Substrate easier to use.

BlockBeats:Another point we are interested in is that Polkadot’s first IPO (initial parachian offering) is a brand-new way to launch a project. Who first came up with this idea?

Lin Jiawen:Well, it was the research team. This is not a simple design. I think it should be a model that was thought up by a dedicated team in the foundation. If I meet them, maybe I can convey your question to them.

BlockBeats:What do you think of the IPO financing method?

Lin Jiawen:This is a very detailed question. In fact, I am not sure whether this mechanism will be widely applicable, but from an economic point of view, this is a very interesting topic.

For DOT token holders, they do not need to spend DOT tokens to join a project, but can lend tokens to the project party for auction, so that the project parachain has the opportunity to obtain a slot, so in a way, this is more like a "vote".

I tend to think that this is an effective constraint on the current ICO mechanism that is prone to "fraud": in traditional ICOs, you cannot supervise what the project party does with your money, but in Polkadot's mechanism, the project party actually can't use the auction fees you lend, and these fees will eventually be returned to the borrower. This is the value of this mechanism, because the project party cannot profit simply through financing. They can't use the fees of the mortgage auction to do anything. I think this will attract more formal and reliable teams. At the beginning, the team may conduct private placement for institutions, and then conduct IPO for the public.

I speculate that the project parties participating in the parachain auction will also issue their own tokens, perhaps for some ecological needs. Because the IPO itself does not provide a token issuance price, independent parachain tokens must have their own reasonable economic mechanisms, rather than the past, through an ICO financing, the team only needs to maintain a high coin price to do whatever they want.

The key to IPO is to help us find truly reliable project parties.

BlockBeats: The next question is still about the ecosystem. The DAO project Aragon, which everyone is familiar with, will land on Polkadot, but they used to belong to the Ethereum ecosystem. There are many opposing voices in this process. Let's call them "public chain fundamentalists". They believe that "if you are born in a public chain, then you must belong to it forever". What do you think of this phenomenon?

Lin Jiawen: Uh... to be honest, this makes me a little sad (laughing). Because Ethereum was born based on Bitcoin financing, if you are a fundamentalist, then you should immediately stop using all tokens on Ethereum. This terrible tribalism is actually affecting the entire crypto world.

I want to live in a world without narrow protectionism, rather than a world based on greed and laziness, where vested interests monopolize dictatorship, enclose autonomy just for the price of the currency, and attack each other. But fortunately, I see that most of them are trying to prevent this from happening.

Many people use various rhetoric to package this abstract sense of territory, which is of course unreasonable. Some people use words such as "safer", "lower threshold", and "more decentralized" to maintain the orthodox authority of Ethereum, which is not unreasonable; but some people have sinister intentions. They will deliberately use false information to create panic and hold up the wrong banner to incite community sentiment.

There is a phenomenon that impressed me. At that time, I was still a member of the core development of Ethereum. At that time, most of the ecosystem developers focused on developing better technology. We didn’t have this kind of almost religious and fanatical desire to make the world ruled by a single global settlement currency. But now the sentiment seems to be that either you choose to accept the blessing of Ethereum or you will be exiled from the ecosystem. This is completely changed.

I don’t feel that there are many developers in the Ethereum ecosystem who have this mentality, but there is indeed a strong voice in the community that promotes similar theories. Such remarks are often difficult to identify easily. People talk loudly behind the screen, but some of the texts are not about wine.

What is certain is that this phenomenon does exist. I think we should jointly abandon ideas such as "maximalism" and "fundamentalism" that are not conducive to the health of the industry.

Rhythm BlockBeats:In addition, our readers are also interested in some new blockchain projects, such as Telegram Open Network. The media believes that this may be the only blockchain network in the future. What do you think?

Lin Jiawen:First of all, I don't think it will be a single network. If it is, then I am sure it will be one of the blockchain networks. We know that all these mainstream projects have disclosed their development results, at least part of them, such as Ethereum and Polkadot. Some projects' research and development processes are too closed, which is actually not in line with the development spirit of Web 3.

I mean, sometimes, in order to maintain the orthodoxy of the main network, the team may need to choose not to open source in stages. But I think that if even some of the research results in the development process are kept confidential, I can only say: This is very uncool.

But I admit that TON's main network is very interesting, which is also the consensus of everyone. They have many interesting ideas. But I heard that they will use "Fift" as the smart contract language. I'm not sure if this will be the case in the end, but "Fift" is indeed very difficult to understand (laughs).

Time will tell how TON will deal with the mainnet launch. Everyone knows that the TON network is very ambitious in terms of architecture, but what is certain is that their launch will not be done in one step. The implementation path of TON's global sharding system is not yet clear. This is not the first time they have developed a project with a delivery deadline, so I think they have relevant experience. TON is one of the projects I pay the most attention to.

Lythm BlockBeats: Excellent answer.

Lin Jiawen: The question just now is very good!

BlockBeats:Haha, let's move on to the next question, which is about your personal investment. We noticed that you are one of the co-founders of Blockchange Ventures. Can you talk about this topic?

Lin Jiawen: To be honest, my investment ability is terrible. I realized very early that I had no talent in the field of investment. I am good at creation, so I often buy coins and hold them.

And in Europe, we need to report taxes. If your cryptocurrency holdings are always changing, it will cause you great trouble. I am fed up with this. You need a tax lawyer to help you deal with pages of transaction details, especially when you use multiple exchanges, things will become extremely complicated. So as you know, I tend to hold for a long time until the project has a major breakthrough or is proven to be a scam.

I will not invest in projects that I don’t understand. I tend to invest in projects whose behind-the-scenes teams are familiar to me personally. Once the investment is completed, I will forget about it for a while and invest in other things.

Lymph BlockBeats: So these are financial investments, not investments based on clear strategies?

Lin Jiawen: I think so.

Lymph BlockBeats: Vitalik previously exposed his holdings on Twitter. Can you reveal your holdings?

Lin Jiawen: In fact, I have invested in less than five tokens.

BlockBeats:But we see that Blockchange Ventures' investment portfolio may have reached ten types. Are these all investment decisions made by your partners?

Lin Jiawen: Well... there should be less than ten, but it's not a big number anyway. In fact, I don't like to study how to invest in money-making projects, but I have invested in many ecological funds, which allows me to make money indirectly from many projects.

Of course, if I find a project that I think has high technical rationality, I will also invest in them through some funds. I am a partner in several funds. In general, everything about Polkadot is what I am most interested in, but in fact I also have my own life.

Rhythm BlockBeats: Thank you for your answer.

Lin Jiawen: A very refreshing interview!

Thanks to Darwinia.network and Web3Foundation for their support of this interview.